The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  Caolle had not sent reinforcements. The clansmen Arithon recognized were Steiven’s division and they battled to a purpose that was anything other than haphazard. For their wives, their children, for their sons sadly slaughtered by the riverside, they were vengeance-bent on killing headhunters.

  Though it cost them their last breathing clansmen, Pesquil’s league would not live to leave Strakewood to cash in their loved ones’ scalps for bounties.

  Waste upon waste, Arithon thought, brought to sharp focus by anger. As Rathain’s sworn sovereign, he would stop them, separate them, ensure that Jieret had a legacy left to grow for.

  Careful only not to tread on fallen bodies, Arithon launched himself into the skirmish that ringed the trees, knotting and twisting through undergrowth and hummock, the lightning flicker of swordstroke and mail like thrown silver against falling gloom. He engaged the first headhunter to rush him, inspired beyond weariness by necessity. He fought, parried, killed in rhythmic reflex, all the while searching the mêlée for sight of just one of Steiven’s officers. Given assistance, he held half-formed plans of using magecraft to stage some diversion that locked combatants might be separated. He would control the berserk clansmen, bully them, or fell them wholesale with sleep-spells if he must. Though as his stressed muscles stung with the force of a parry, he recognized the last was pure folly. His earlier unbinding had left damage, and he was lucky to stay on his feet.

  ‘Arithon! My liege!’

  The call came from his right, toward the downslope that devolved toward the grottos. The Master of Shadow beat off an attacker and spun. The patter and hiss of sporadic bowfire creased the air and snatched through veilings of low foliage. Through a drift of cut leaves and air dusky with steep shafts of sunlight, Arithon searched but never found who had shouted.

  His gaze caught instead on a clustered squad of headhunters led by a pockscarred man in muddy mail; then another, tall, straight, of elegant carriage in a ripped blue surcoat, gold-blazoned and bright as his hair.

  Lysaer.

  They saw each other the same instant.

  Arithon felt the breath leave his chest as if impelled by a blow. Then Desh-thiere’s curse eclipsed reason. He was running, the air at his neck prickling his raised hair like the charge of an incoming storm. Sword upheld, lips peeled back in atavistic hatred, he closed to take his half-brother without heed for what lay between.

  A baleful flash brightened the trees. Lysaer, as curse-bound as he, had called on his given gift of light.

  Arithon expelled a ragged laugh. They were matched. No bolt, no fire, no conflagration lay past reach of his shadows to curb. Strakewood could burn, or be frozen sere as barren waste, and supporters and armies would be winnowed like chaff in the holocaust. The end would pair Lysaer and himself across the bared length of steel blades, with no living man to intervene.

  Lysaer raised his right hand and the headhunters around him fanned out.

  Savouring eagerness, Arithon slowed. He felt someone grasp at his shoulder, heard shouting like noise in his ears. Owned by the curse, he shook off restraint, then backhanded whoever had interfered.

  When the light-bolt cracked from Lysaer’s fist, he let it come, a snapping whip of lightning that parted the wood like a scream. Through its glare, Arithon saw the men around Lysaer kneel and raise white-limned weapons to their shoulders. Crossbows, he realized in undimmed exultation.

  Arithon toyed with them, used mage-schooled finesse to twist shadow with a subtlety his enemy could never match. The headhunters who aimed were struck blind to a degree that negated they had ever walked sighted.

  Some screamed and threw down their weapons. The rest fired a barrage of wild shots. Quarrels whined through a rising bloom of incandescence.

  Arithon laughed and let the fire of Lysaer’s own making char the bolts to oblivion. Then he cancelled the force ranged against him with a veil of neat shadow, even as he once had deflected the fires of a Khadrim’s fell attack. He barely cared that he trembled in a backlash of overstressed nerves, but revelled in his powers to smother all light to oblivion.

  The earth shook to a thunderous report. Throughout, straight-shouldered and animated by the geas that enslaved him, Arithon withheld any countermeasure. His quickest satisfaction lay with steel, and holding Alithiel poised, he waited untouched at the apex of a singed swath of carbon.

  ‘Will you fight?’ he called to Lysaer, derisive. ‘Or will you stand out of reach and play at fireworks just to waste time and show off?’

  ‘Defiler!’ Lysaer screamed back. His handsome face twisted. Cuts and bruises made his expression seem deranged. ‘Weaver of darkness and despoiler of children, your crimes have renounced claim to honour!’

  Unsmiling, Arithon took a step. As the distance narrowed and panicked headhunters scrambled from his path, he noted that Lysaer looked peaked. The left arm beneath its muddied velvets was bandaged and strapped as though injured. A wolfish thrill shot through him, that the enemy before him was disadvantaged. Arithon said, ‘That’s your blade? Did you really think reverse runes could charm my death?’ He flourished Alithiel, inviting, ‘Find out. Come fight.’

  ‘Why cross blades with a bastard?’ Contempt in his bearing, a mirrored obsession in his eyes, Lysaer shot his hand aloft again.

  Sensitized to air that flowed over his skin, Arithon felt the ingathering of force Lysaer drew to call light. This effort would be more than a killing bolt, as devastating as any formerly pitched to carve the Mistwraith into submission. Shadow could still shield him, but the broad trees of Strakewood would burn. Clansmen and game would crisp in a burst of wildfire, and earth itself would char to slag.

  Mage-taught instincts clamoured in warning and alarm, but against the overpowering ascendance of Desh-thiere’s curse, any stir of uneasiness lost voice. Arithon advanced. His whole being resonated hatred, his oath to Rathain just meaningless words, the rasp of dry wind and dead intent. So long as Lysaer was before him, he had eyes only for his enemy. Like a puppet pulled on wires he would close with the blond nemesis leagued against him. Over parched ground or quick, their swords would cross until one of them died, and whatever impediments were swept aside beforehand became simple sacrifice to ensure this.

  The air seemed to sing in its stillness. The chasing on Alithiel’s dark blade appeared bodilessly inscribed on the gloom. Since the sword was now pointed with the grain of ill geas and enmity, its Paravian star-spell stayed mute. More nerve worn than the curse would permit him to acknowledge, Arithon slipped without volition into mage sight. His vision recorded the interlocked litanies of leaves, of branches, of men partnered in useless struggle on the fringes, embodied even while killing in the light-dance that founded all life. The soil beneath his step shimmered with the mysteries of rebirth, and even these lost their power to redeem him.

  The drive of Desh-thiere’s curse overwhelmed all.

  At the palm of Lysaer’s raised hand, light burned and then glared, and then erupted to a core of hot brilliance. The nexus swelled, fountained, raged into coruscation that ravaged the forest with backdrafts. Lysaer by now stood isolate, his headhunter allies driven back by the gathering fury of his assault.

  Opposite him, a wind-whipped silhouette with a hand lightly gripped to a sword’s hilt, Arithon faced him in challenge. Unarmoured, clad in the same spattered deerhides as any of Steiven’s scouts, he seemed a figure diminished; until, half-seen through lashed tangles of black hair, an expression bent his lips that held no regret but only derisive impatience.

  The flaring brilliance lit the s’Ffalenn features to inescapable clarity. The detached assurance, the sheer nerveless arrogance on that face slapped back remembrance of the manipulation that had undone Amroth’s king and councilmen. Swept by a countersurge of antipathy, Lysaer shrieked his ultimatum. ‘By Ath, you unprincipled bastard, your wiles shall cause no more damage. This time, not counting for cost, the justice of my people will be served!’

  If such justice was wholly subverted by the workings of
Desh-thiere’s curse, Lysaer endorsed usage with consent. He screamed and surrendered to his passion, and something inside him snapped. That instant he hurled his bolt.

  Arithon surged to meet the attack. Gripped by queer exultation, still wakened to mage-sight, he perceived with a lucidity that damned that the curse had overmastered his half-brother. Lysaer’s offensive had erased the bounds of sanity and self-preservation. As at Mearth, when a crossing through a world-gate had been snatched beyond grasp by adversity, the s’Ilessid prince now channelled the whole of his being through the destructive aspects of his gift.

  The light of his own making would martyr him. Strakewood with its armies and its clansmen would be immolated at a stroke. Whether Arithon could shield himself in shadow became a point most gloriously moot. Desh-thiere’s purpose would be served.

  At least one of the half-brothers that comprised its bane would be expunged from the face of Athera.

  Arithon howled at the irony. Swept to madness by the wraiths’ savage triumph, he flung wide his arms, taunting the light to come take him, to lock with his shadows and let his enemy be destroyed in one fiery burst of self sacrifice.

  In that moment of consumed self-control, that ecstatic certainty of victory, Arithon felt his sword arm caught and his hip blunder into something moving. Enraged, shoved off balance, he squinted through a blooming flare of incandescence. Whoever had meddled would die for it.

  ‘Your Grace of Rathain, we are oathsworn!’ cried a boy in shrill-voiced terror. ‘I came back as you asked, to keep you apart from your half-brother.’

  A blood oath bound and sworn by a mage set its ties to the living spirit.

  ‘Sithaer, Jieret!’ Arithon shouted, his cry split from him as the exultation of Desh-thiere’s vengeance became flawed by his pact with Steiven’s son. The unholy pleasures of the instant transformed to torment as enslaved consciousness and true will became torn between opposite masters. Then the irony, of crippling proportion: that any shadow spun to save the boy must also spare the s’Ilessid prince from the forge-fires of the curse’s conniving.

  Anguished between personal care and the lure of the curse’s directive, tainted by the seductive truth, that to forswear s’Ffalenn conscience and leave Jieret betrayed would buy Lysaer’s death and final freedom, Arithon wrenched his will into alignment against Desh-thiere’s geas.

  For ill or for folly, the paradox would be permitted to renew itself; Lysaer had no training to understand or control how Desh-thiere’s meddling had twisted him. Assured of his righteousness, avowed to bring justice, he would use his survival to labour until this day’s atrocities were repeated. That colossal futility made a mockery of will, that perhaps reprieve came too late. One victim’s lamed effort at compassion might buy only failure at the end.

  A split second shy of annihilation, Arithon jerked Jieret inside the arc of a sword-blade dropped sidewards to guard.

  The ache of exhaustion, the sucking drain against resources long overstrained seemed to founder his mind and his reflexes. Obdurate, Arithon fought. He called, commanded and savaged from his gift demands that edged the impossible. The curse pulled and hampered him. He wrestled its treacherous crosscurrents while his shadows flared and snapped. Darkness arose like a howling gale, unleashed to run rampant across torrents of unchained light. The air itself seemed to scream in white agony as the gifts of two half-brothers collided.

  Men-at-arms wailed and fell prone, their weapons discarded as they locked shaking arms to shield their heads. Trees tossed and rattled, wrenched into splinters by snaking trails of wildfire. Still trapped in mage-sight, Arithon heard the shriek of natural energies battered and tortured out of true. He felt the frosts of his own conjury flash freeze living greens to glassine hardness that shattered in the pound of the winds. Intermixed were cries that were human. He groaned, wept, plundered intuition and training to force his reserves without mercy for the power he required to compensate. With his fists pressed to Jieret’s back, his eyes blind and his senses spinning, Arithon widened his defences.

  And as he had once done at Etarra, his conjury cloaked Strakewood in darkness.

  He could not see to know fate’s joke was actualized; that Lysaer had collapsed from blood-loss and stress and that Pesquil and a dedicated lieutenant now laboured to draw him clear of the conflict. Arithon could not breathe the air for the smells of dead earth and burning. He could barely stand upright, for the voracious demands of weaving shadow.

  Jieret said something. The words faded in and out unintelligibly. Then hands caught at Arithon’s arms and shoulders, lifting, cajoling, supporting his legs that would not any longer bear weight.

  A touch that had to be Jieret’s peeled his fingers away from his sword, then clasped his hand in steady warmth.

  ‘Ath,’ said a scout, appalled. ‘You sure he isn’t hurt?’

  ‘Leave him be,’ snapped another, maybe Caolle. ‘If he loses his hold on these shadows, every clansman in these woods will be doomed.’

  Arithon held on. He clung to consciousness and craft with a determination that bled and then racked him. Spinning impressions whirled through him, of burning trees, and falls of water, and bodies blacked and crisped on sere ground. That made him cry out.

  Such visions must be lent him by mage-sight; he prayed and he begged this was so. When he could sort out no distinction, he punished drowned senses for reassurance, that a dark deep as felt, starless, lightless, battened Strakewood in defences that could smother any outburst of reiving flame.

  An indeterminate time later, he shivered and snatched a breath of air. ‘Are they safe yet?’

  ‘Soon,’ answered Jieret, or maybe Caolle. The word flurried without echo through the wails of eight thousand dead.

  At some point after that, the last shred of awareness slid away from Arithon’s control. The dark and the shadows he conjured seeped through his frayed concentration, and then he knew nothing more.

  Arithon reawakened on his back, to stars set like jewels between a black lattice of oak leaves. A soft cry burst from him as nightmare and reason collided, and he thought at first that he looked upon a dead landscape formed of carbon and char.

  Then his nostrils filled with the sweet scent of sap, the resins of pine not far off. At his side, someone said kindly, ‘Strakewood is green, still. Your shadows preserved. There are clanborn survivors.’

  Arithon lacked voice for his bitterness, that what lives had been saved must be few, with none of them a woman or a child. For a long time he could do nothing except shut his eyes and silently, fiercely weep.

  The tears cleared his mind; no mercy. Raw as he was and helplessly unable to barrier himself in detachment, he was forced to take full stock.

  ‘Jieret?’ he asked first, the word a bare rasp of breath.

  ‘At your side,’ came the answer, reassuring. ‘He sleeps. Except for singed hair, he’s unharmed.’

  Arithon released a pent sigh. ‘Steiven fell. Where?’

  ‘Does that matter?’ The voice held an edge now, and a movement in darkness marked out the form of a clan scout, seated crosslegged a short distance off.

  Stubborn and silent, Arithon waited.

  ‘All right,’ the scout relented. ‘Caolle said make you rest, but if you’re going to be difficult, I’ll tell you.’

  A sceptical quirk turned Arithon’s lips. ‘Caolle said nothing of the sort.’

  The stillness grew expansive with surprise. ‘All right.’ The scout sighed. ‘Caolle cursed you. Jieret insisted you needed rest.’

  The boy, now earl of Deshir, caithdein of a kingdom, thrust into inheritance of Rathain’s stewardship an orphan scarcely twelve years of age. The facts were given quickly after that, starting with Steiven’s response to Arithon’s first warning of disaster; orders that his war captain had begged on his knees to be released from: to gather and withdraw from the fighting by force if need be three hundred hand-picked young men. Steiven s’Valerient had then led the rest into ill-fated vengeance at the grottos.
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  ‘He was among the first to fall,’ the scout said, his tone flat and tired, and his hands wrung with tension around his knees. ‘A crossbow quarrel caught him before we cleared the marshes, which was well. He never saw the scars of the burning, or what happened to his lady in the dell.’

  ‘I know how she died,’ Arithon grated. ‘Caolle broke orders, didn’t he?’

  Snapped past the memory of the brutalities beside the Tal Quorin, the scout shrugged a shoulder and resumed. ‘The three hundred circled wide and approached the mêlée from upstream. As well they did. Jieret and two wounded scouts could hardly have pulled you out alone.’

  Quiet, Arithon absorbed this. If he had done nothing else, his final intervention with shadows had spared most of those clansmen Steiven had selected to survive. After an interval, he prodded, ‘And now?’

  ‘The headhunters’ league are mostly destroyed and Lysaer’s Etarrans in retreat. We expect they’ll regroup outside Strakewood. The ones not nerve-broken or wounded will probably stay on and poison springs to destroy the game and starve us out.’ A breeze wafted through the trees, edged with the acrid tang of ash. The scout drew a dagger and tested the edge with a thumb, over and over seeking flaws. ‘Caolle won’t give them satisfaction. His plan is to abandon Strakewood and join up with earl Marl’s band in Fallowmere.’

  Somewhere a wakeful mockingbird loosed a melodic spill of notes. A hunting owl cried mournfully. Jieret stirred in the depths of some dream, and the scout cut a stick in thick silence and nicked off a rattling fall of chips.

  Arithon lay still and noticed other things: that his body was clothed still in blood-tainted leathers, though somebody thoughtful had bound his cuts. In fits and starts of mage-sight he recognized the neat work as Caolle’s. By the odd flares of light that scoured the edge of his vision, and by his current inability to keep focused on the physical aspects of reality, he knew he still suffered the effects of overplayed nerves. His twisted misuse of spellcraft had caused damage beyond distress to the body. His thoughts had an odd start and hitch to them, as if pulled to the border of delirium. The curse of itself had left ravages. His opposition by shadows had plundered also, when he had wrenched that thundering torrent of enslavement aside to reclaim his free will.