by Janny Wurts
Faces turned. First his bright hair, then his noble bearing marked him out in the press. Bad luck, that someone with over-sharp wits recognized his renowned profile.
‘Light’s own grace! That’s the s’Ilessid avatar!’
Which awe-struck outcry raised three other True Sect fanatics to screaming revilement for his apostasy. Other folk reverenced him on their knees in his path, whining pleas for healing or gainful employment, while a swaggering cluster of adventurers begged to sign on with the officer’s ranks. ‘Lead us into the fight against Shadow in Lanshire!’
Jostled by their eagerness, Daliana kicked shins and stepped on toes to defend her place at her liege’s side. When a matron with a squalling infant importuned him for the Light’s blessing, the smutted gleam of the tavern’s lamps exposed the sweat that sheened Lysaer’s brow. The desperate brilliance in his eyes stemmed from black pupils distended with strain. As he fought for the presence to distance himself from the crowding sycophants, Daliana confronted the pushy young mother and attacked like a shrew.
‘You idiot! Why do you daft people fall over yourselves, fawning over any blond stranger you meet? My cousin can’t bless the arse end of an ox!’ Amid laughter and outrage, she flaunted her groom’s cloak, and pealed, ‘We’re sick of the bother of starry-eyed fanatics. Do I wear shiny buttons and silk? Since when did anyone ever see Etarra’s Lord Mayor fare abroad without a lance escort and an aristocrat’s liveried retinue?’
Lysaer observed her histrionics, bemused, until the swell of raucous noise brought the flustered landlord to quell the disturbance.
‘We only stopped for a room and a meal,’ Daliana shrilled on in exasperation. ‘Who’s to blame if the outbreak of evil unrest has put folks in a froth to mob fair-haired travellers in the name of religion?’
‘Here, now, calm down. I want no trouble.’ The accosted innkeeper wiped moist red hands on his apron and nervously strove to accommodate. ‘Private quarters cost eight silvers a night. You can pay?’
Lysaer produced his purse, counted the coins, and added two silvers to cover their meal. Then he backed Daliana’s impatient lead and shoved ahead towards the battered, beam staircase.
The landlord tucked the fee into his scrip and bellowed to one of his wenches. ‘Show this pair to a room and serve them a tray with drink of their choice and hot supper!’
Behind a latched door, the chamber provided a sagged bed, a washstand with a chipped porcelain ewer, and creaky floor-boards gouged with fresh scars from the hobnailed boots of billeted officers. Lysaer stayed shod to avoid the splinters since his caged restlessness drove him to pace.
‘One more day should see us to the harbour at Narms,’ Daliana reminded in a lame effort to quench his impatience.
Lysaer’s distemper found no relief. ‘We’d be there by now if my strapped arm could withstand the jouncing ride on the night-coach.’ His flicked glare pleaded to be left alone.
But Daliana dared not serve him the faint-hearted kindness of solitude. Her bald-faced efforts to forestall dire trouble must not cater to his raw tension. When supper arrived, she made the inn servant cut up his meat, then sent the fork and knife back to the kitchen to limit the convenient weapons. Since the window was built to discourage thieves, too narrow to permit egress, she filched one of the blankets and settled herself for a guarded night, stretched across the room’s threshold. When he snarled over that stringent precaution, she blistered him for self-pity, then killed his argument with her demand to know about Talith’s ransom by the Master of Shadow.
‘One day,’ warned Lysaer, ‘you’ll get burned by such cheek.’
Daliana fixed him with her galling, gold eyes, unaware yet that the unbound mahogany hair she brushed out and rebraided triggered other personal memories for him. Ones just as provocative and woundingly powerful, which led her to gall him the worse as she underestimated her own impact. ‘The day you are freed of the curse, I’ll retire.’ Since his plea to snuff the wall sconce was too dangerous, she braced her back against the plank door and tucked the coarse blanket up to her chin. ‘You can’t imagine that I enjoy this.’
Lysaer perched on the fusty quilt thrown over the bed. He regarded the tremulous sparkle of rings that, thankfully, his gloves had kept masked in the tap-room. ‘Forgive me, that I do not thank you.’
She coughed behind her wrist, sculpted with delicate bone and lean muscle where Talith’s had flashed, adorned with exquisite jewellery. ‘Humility wouldn’t suit you,’ she said.
‘I was thoroughly taught, very young, to eschew any form of abasement.’ Lysaer shifted his legs and leaned against the slat head-board, boots crossed at the ankle and his good arm folded behind the tousled hair licked over his fitted collar. ‘The quality might signal weakness in a prince.’
Beneath heavy lids, his eyes blazed too frenetic. Stacked against the merciless wear of exhaustion, Daliana had one sharpened weapon. ‘Speak instead as the more fallible man, and reclaim your right to forgiveness.’
Lysaer’s features twisted with vicious bitterness. ‘You are nothing if not youthfully naive. Let the truth destroy your footing for tenderness.’ He proceeded with the excoriating clarity to outline the blow he had suffered at Ostermere: when the Master of Shadow had ransomed his wife and returned her chastely untouched, but with her steadfast faith in his s’Ilessid integrity debased beyond hope of reconciliation.
Cankered yet by the wounds of a love that once seized such a frightening power over him, Lysaer recounted the campaign waged at Vastmark: a madman’s advance into hostile terrain, forced into the teeth of delay and brought to ruin by trickery and betrayal, then clouted into ignominious defeat by the pressures of the winter season.
‘I was hot-bloodedly proud, and too cock-sure to handle the fact a bold play by my adversary had undermined everything.’ Lysaer’s unfocused gaze was not blank with distance, but fixed wide-lashed upon horrors no other perceived. ‘I charged the troops forward, over the massacre caused by a shale slide, surely wishing I would die in the carnage. To go home without victory was to admit that the wreck of my marriage had left my life meaningless.’
A long pause ensued, while the candle-flame flickered, and Lysaer stared sightless at the frayed cobweb that streamed from the rafters. ‘What words did I have to console thirty-five thousand widows whose husbands’ lives had been squandered?’
Daliana watched him swallow and stir, fretted pale as he jostled his injured collar-bone. His recitation ground on, rough with condemnation as he finished with candid sorrow, ‘As Tysan’s head of state, I could not run or hide. There was no grace for anonymity. The curse offered my only refuge. I became its willing accomplice when I styled myself as the avatar of the Light to dodge the infamy of the unadorned public record.’
Daliana felt her breath unreel and stop, then restart to the well of her tears. Whatever she expected, nothing prepared her for a confession as cutting as this one. To the man who just threw her the knife to twist in the bleeding heart of his self-laceration, she had nothing to give but the steady presence of her acceptance. ‘You are not the same person who was broken in the cold rain on the field after Vastmark. The future’s still yours. Sulfin Evend helped you finish the siege of Alestron without a repeat of the horrific debacle. When we set sail for Tysan, I’ll be at your side to back every choice and right action.’
Lysaer regarded her with what appeared to be a burning contempt. ‘Women are so readily blinded. I should respect you more if you could admit that you hated me.’
Daliana regarded him, splendid in beauty and complex enough to confound a straightforward analysis. Granted a wisdom beyond her tender years, she ventured, carefully quiet, ‘You don’t trust any of us. If I had to guess, I’d suggest that your faith in the fair sex was undone far and long before Talith first dared to broach the fact you were curse-haunted. Sulfin Evend succeeded because he was male. I am alive now only thanks to the debt of honour you bear his memory.’
Lysaer sucked a harsh breath. Yet before
he lashed back in injured defense, she trampled him roughshod.
‘Don’t speak! We have been fighting a last-ditch defense, not each other! The pressure of the geas has calmed somewhat, hasn’t it?’
He shivered violently from head to toe, then guardedly nodded. ‘A few minutes ago. I’m not anything near fit to sleep.’
‘I know.’ Daliana struck to keep his anxiety defused, before he buried the subject. ‘If you have to wallow in your nettled pain, I’d like to know how you plan to reverse the Sunwheel advance into Havish alone.’
His movement disclosed his suppressed disquiet as he stood up, made his way to the ewer and one-handedly splashed his flushed face. Muffled by the towel, he barked a short laugh, then delivered the last of the day’s exhaustively brutal admissions. ‘I haven’t designed any elaborate tactic. But surely if I raise my Light and start burning Tysan’s high temples in public, the priests should be forced to recall their forces from the battle-line to confront me.’
‘Count me in.’ Daliana tucked into her blanket to seek what rest she could snatch before dawn-light. ‘At least fire serves them a taste of the pyres they’ve torched in pursuit of their unholy purges.’
Early Spring 5923
Rift
The head-hunter trackers’ trained pack of hounds pursued the three young clanborn travellers through five brutal days on the run before Siantra’s wiles threw them off the hot trail. Foot-sore and gaunt with exhaustion, they had to rest, whether or not they had outdistanced the range of the temple diviner. Khadrien finished the first watch after nightfall. No overt danger threatened. The narrow glade that sheltered his sleeping companions lay still, a spangled carpet of frost and felt shadow drenched in preternatural silence. Disgruntled and cold, he shook Esfand awake. Then he waited shivering, while his rousted friend shook off the numb oblivion of sleep and recovered his wits.
‘Midnight’s come, or fresh trouble?’ Esfand rubbed gritted eyes and sat up, alert to the current of stifled concern that wracked his impetuous companion. ‘Khadrien?’
The tight shrug returned was a rustle of movement amid the wool murk of the darkness. ‘You sense something, too?’
Esfand gathered his blanket, winced over the outraged twinge of sore muscles, and stiffly shoved to his feet. ‘Maybe.’
The site where they sheltered was much too exposed, a hollow beneath a ragged crack of sky, choked by ancient beeches and oak. The cabled boles were shagged with hoary moss, repeatedly scarred by seasonal storms, with split trunks assaulted by centuries of lightning. The encroachment of the battered forest felt the more ominous as a scud of cloud tarnished the moon. Dimmed stars gleamed through, reduced to fuzzed haloes, while a moist, restless gust creaked the ingrown boughs and clattered the naked, crabbed twigs. Trunks as massive as siege towers plunged the clearing into oppressive, deep gloom. Such king trees likely had been aged with years when Athera’s Paravians walked a land yet untouched by mankind’s Third Age grant of settlement.
The lore-keepers revered the magnificent patriarchs that had seeded the free-wilds forest of Halwythwood. But this grove made every other seem tame. The cobweb veil of lost history lurked here, not unlike the haunted awareness that permeated the forsaken stones of Paravian ruins.
‘This place gives me the creeps.’ Prickled to wary gooseflesh, Khadrien folded his arms, sharp chin jutted as he glanced sidewards. ‘Do you believe the Paravians might have come here to abandon Athera?’
‘Siantra says not.’ On historical facts, she was probably right. At least she had not joined the rambunctious truants and slipped off to hunt game when the bards’ circle sang their long-winded traditional sagas. Esfand checked the hang of his weapons and nervously blew on numbed hands. ‘Perhaps the lane’s tidal shift has upset you. The strong currents here are quite likely to flow the more vividly.’
But logic failed to quell the jangling swell of unease. Unlike the quickened glens on their home ground, this remote hollow wore no settled aura of peace. As if these progenitor trees streamed the forces of their primordial origins, their contorted roots and crabbed crowns defied the mind’s instinctive search for comfort and symmetry.
‘We might’ve been driven too close to Athili,’ Khadrien ventured. ‘Did you notice? The west-facing branches have changed into summer foliage.’
Esfand’s stifled laughter emerged as a snort. ‘That’s rich!’
‘Listen up!’ Khadrien threw a punch in offensive distress. ‘See for yourself. I’m not joking!’
Esfand ducked the jab, startled, prepared to retort that short rations surely encouraged the delusional fancy. Yet if his cousin had dreamed the impossible, the problem became shared between them. The thick scent of living greenery filled his nostrils, sweetened by the exotic fragrance of flowering vines. When the moon overhead sliced out of the clouds, the white flood of light stamped the glimpse of an understory, dense with matured leaves and brambles.
Except towards the east, where the brooding wood stayed in accord with the natural season. Twig and branch and grooved bark gleamed as nakedly grey as any other wood before equinox. The frosty air breathed winter’s mix of wood rot and mouldering fungus, and also, uncannily, the elusive ambrosial sweetness of wild beehives, dripping with honey.
‘This is all wrong,’ Esfand whispered, afraid. Danger arrested his reach for his knife, counter to reflexive instinct. Even the mere thought of edged steel drawn here lifted the hair at his nape.
A dozen strides distant, tall grass in the glade rustled with bearded seed-heads and snowy, lace clumps of asters. Crickets sang, there. Yet the ground near at hand remained rumpled from the recent snow-melt, the flattened brown mat of killed vegetation littered with a bone-yard wrack of fallen sticks.
‘We’ve probably strayed too close to the rim,’ Khadrien fretted.
‘Hush!’ Esfand snapped. ‘Let me think.’
For the terrible fear was not groundless. The old glades here were known to be steeped in the vestigial shimmer of divine fire. Mighty beyond any mortal’s imagining, the direct touch of Ath Creator at Athili had seeded the world with the three Paravian races. The gifted glory of their sacred presence had been sent to heal the afflictions unleashed by the Age of Dragons. But those mysteries were never fashioned for Mankind’s mantle of plain flesh and bone.
No mortal survived, who crossed Athili’s rim. To venture too near was to risk being ripped apart by its titanic forces and surreal visions.
Esfand’s voice shook as he weighed up priorities. ‘Did Siantra engage her hunter’s instincts?’ Common sense should have prompted the need for a sounding ward against the recurrent threat posed by the hounds. When protection mattered, hers was the most sensitive talent among them.
‘No.’ Scared beyond subterfuge, Khadrien plucked his snagged jacket cuff clear of his quilloned dagger. ‘I couldn’t even bear to suggest, she was run that far beyond tired.’
Esfand forgave no such soft scruple. ‘Get her up.’
‘You waken her, friend.’ The flash of Khadrien’s teeth in rife challenge disappeared, as a soot drift of cloud dimmed the moon. ‘Last time I got her fist in my jaw, and a kick that just missed my bollocks.’
The caithdein’s heir designate snorted without sympathy and crouched by Siantra, furled as if dead in her blanket. ‘Idiot sneak,’ he sniped at his male peer. ‘What did you grope when you shook her?’
No more compliant for him, the feminine form in the bedroll recoiled beyond easy reach. ‘The goat knows enough to have called me by name,’ Siantra accused, wide-awake and brisk-tempered. ‘What else is amiss? I thought we’d shaken the diviner’s brutes off.’
Esfand dared her bite with an offered hand. ‘Your hunter’s gift’s needed to scry a safe course. The dogs pose the least of our danger.’
Siantra rebuffed his presumption with a fond clip on the cheek, dealt by the hem of her blanket. ‘We’re moving already?’ She shivered. ‘My braid’s a damned rat’s nest.’
With no complaint for the puffed ankle t
wisted yesterday in a ditch, Siantra hobbled erect. She started to stow her bedroll at speed, until a fallen stick hooked a tear in the wool and unstrung her stoic silence. ‘Dharkaron Avenge! I’m fed up with charging through hostile country. Must we risk threading the trackers’ gamut, again?’
Khadrien explained, anxious to restore himself to her better graces. ‘Both of us think we’ve strayed too close to Athili.’
‘We didn’t.’ Siantra glanced sharply up from knotting hide laces. ‘Not being a fool, I shared your concern! But I checked this campsite for safety at sunset. I’m not deaf to the current that’s set you on edge. The flux here is alive and crackling. If that means what I think, the rim’s moved. Athili’s vortex has encroached on us, not the other way round.’
That unsettling concept hastened their need to leave. Since everything but the essential supplies had been jettisoned under pursuit, departure involved a swift check to secure weapons, then a moment to lash their tied blanket rolls onto a cross-belt. The black sword Alithiel rode in a scabbard slung across Esfand’s back. Since no one lit fires at Athili’s verge, and errant smoke could flag the enemy, the campsite had no live embers to douse.
The oppressive quiet quashed Khadrien’s prankster comments and pressured Siantra’s sober outlook to acidity. No one discussed the eerie fact that the leafed boughs now harboured the dotted yellow flash of fire-flies. The fitful wind had turned wayward as well, from breezes that veered summer-warm from the south to icy blasts that gusted northerly. The fickle moonlight resurged to brilliance and doused to the flit of frayed clouds.