Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  Tarens’s reflex barely salvaged the catch before the gurgling flask tucked inside struck the brick floor and shattered. ‘We’ve survived very well without any help from busybodies, religion, or charity,’ he retorted, still on the muscle.

  The browbeaten outsider wisely chose retreat and backed onto the threshold.

  ‘Don’t come again unless Kerelie invites you!’ Tarens thumped the spurned gift against Grismard’s jacket, shoved him out, then banged the door shut in his suet face.

  No one spoke. The gloomy chill left in the kitchen hung on, even after the carriage wheels ground from the yard, and the fancy harness jingled away down the lane and dwindled, turned townward.

  Kerelie huddled in uncle’s stuffed chair, restored to the head of the trestle. Her chapped hands gripped the tea she had brewed after all, to soothe her rattled composure. Along with Tarens, she regarded the dark, bent head of the vagabond, who perched on the left-hand bench. The naked slenderness draped in her borrowed blanket did not belong to a displaced labourer. The unsettled quiet forced both siblings to acknowledge: the thoughtless dexterity of those slender fingers was too well practised at plying the needle and thread just filched from Kerelie’s mending basket. Nor were the intricate stitches that retailored the trousers to size part or parcel of any field-hand’s experience.

  At length, through unease that failed to dispel, Tarens mused, ‘Where have I seen work like that done before?’

  Kerelie’s glum spirits dissolved at the question like storm-clouds chased off by fair weather. ‘Did you think I burned those vile rags with my eyes shut?’ Her devoted enthusiasm for sewing gave answer. ‘The tentmaker locks each stitch the same way when he fashions the seams in his canvas awnings.’ Her shy smile flashed, surprisingly sweet, on the side not creased by her scar. ‘Don’t imagine that I haven’t chewed over the subject until I remembered. The chap said he learned his craft from a ship’s mate who once mended sail on a lugger.’

  Tarens sighed, his loose hands as browned as the soil the plough had ground under his nails. ‘We are a very long way from the coast.’

  ‘Well, don’t pretend Grismard won’t keep his vile promise.’ Her scowl resettled, Kerelie rapped a flaked chip of glaze from her tea-mug. ‘How long do we have, do you think, before he brings your stray guest to the notice of the Light’s diviners?’

  ‘I don’t care a hoot.’ Tarens stood up. His crusted boots tracked muddy prints without reprimand as he banged open the wood box and laid a split log to build up the fire. His blond hair shone against the stirred coals, crowned suddenly in bloodied light by the sparks wafted up the stone chimney. ‘I’ll never cringe from the threats of a toady,’ he cracked as he straightened. ‘Or bow one inch to the pious demands of some whey-faced temple examiner! Such sheep may preen in their white robes and pontificate. But I say human beings have purposeful brains beyond acting like flocks of scared pigeons.’

  Yet as the wood caught and blazed at his back, the sudden, fierce heat lent the unpleasant reminder that brush-fires seldom burned without smoke.

  Autumn 5922

  Borrowed Time

  Elaira braced for the next frontal attack launched against her by the Prime Matriarch. The Sorcerer’s warning, that Fellowship powers granted Arithon’s plight no further protection, woke the urgent need to unwind the riddle posed by the Biedar tribes’ intercession. Key to that answer lay three hundred leagues distant, amid the torrid black sands of Sanpashir. Already a renegade Koriani initiate, now determined to treat with the order’s most ancient arch enemy, Elaira expected the sisterhood must actively move to defend their close interests. Every hell-bent resource they owned could be unleashed to forestall her safe passage.

  Therefore, she guarded her tracks and took flight through the spine of the Storlain Mountains. Travellers avoided those rugged wilds, far southward of the ancient pass at Lithmarin and well off the established route that linked land-bound trade with the deepwater harbour at Redburn. The hardy clanborn who trapped in the deep vales never ventured the high country alone. Few beyond the Fellowship Sorcerers braved the fault-line that bisected the continent where the collision of tectonic forces wrestled with titanic violence.

  From the gouged channel of Instrell Bay, and against the primordial vistas of lava that bubbled the steam pots that bordered Scarpdale, the buckled strata of bed-rock ramped upwards. Towering white pinnacles scraped the sky’s roof, until the wracked terrain subsumed again and plunged into the reef-riddled fissure of South Strait. Where such mighty pressures shocked the earth’s bones, explosive shifts whiplashed the flux lines. Quakes tumbled the weathered scarps into slides, and spurts of destabilized electromagnetics erupted as howling gales.

  A lone woman afoot was an insectile speck, tramping these trackless wilds. Overshadowed by clouds, or choked under the mist snagged on the vertical buttresses, Elaira journeyed where ice-falls and split rock keened to the savage winds. She laboured against the white-out blizzards that flayed her exposed skin like shot needles. Yet the same brutal elements also granted her a back-handed measure of safety. Storm and avalanche, and the roaring cataracts that tunnelled through crevasse and glacier produced the violent energy needed to confound the subtle venues of arcane surveillance. Enough to thwart even a circle of Senior seeresses, at least until she mastered the change imposed on her by Arithon’s current predicament: the fragile defense that hinged upon the kept secret of his anonymity. He carried no recall of her existence. But she, who safeguarded the trust of remembrance, still endured the empathic channel that linked her with his intimate being. Infallibly, Prime Selidie’s malice would seek to exploit that subtle connection.

  If Elaira failed to seal off her unruly emotions before she left the Kingdom of Havish, all stakes would be lost. Packed light for speed, her cerecloth bedroll held only jerked meat. The spare shirt and a tin panniken in her satchel wrapped no more than basic healer’s supplies. She slept in the open. A steel-shod staff tested her steps on the ice-fields, and the knife at her belt that shaved wood for kindling also skinned her snared game and dug tubers. One night, she bedded down in a cramped cave, steamed by the malodorous seep of a hot spring. Another found her camped on an ice shelf, bridged over a tumbling freshet. Always, she sought running water, or places where the tumultuous elements swirled with turbulence. She dared even those sites where the sprites, known as iyats, gathered to feed upon chaos. If their fiendish pranks broke her rest, the same interference thwarted the sisterhood’s scryers.

  The burning jab of their probes never ceased. Elaira lost count of the times she plunged naked into deep snow. Such acute discomfort broke off the assaults, which struck always when she was most vulnerable. Anytime her alert focus drifted, the Prime’s spies thrust to rifle her mind. Over the course of two and a half centuries, such relentless pursuit had stalked her for an oath breaker’s punishment. But since their coveted male quarry’s escape, the old cat-and-mouse stalemate had broken. The prize became Arithon’s tenuous freedom, with herself the game-piece to expose him.

  Elaira rammed her spiked stave into the glare ice scabbed over a tumbling streamlet. She assayed the next precarious step, her breath plumed in the bitter air. As she edged down the jagged scar of a ravine scoured bare by a recent rockfall, the lethal endangerment posed by the terrain became a pittance beside the love that made her a target. The day must never dawn that the Prime’s balked ambition should seize on the chance to use her again.

  Once betrayed at such cost the true heart shrank to contemplate, Arithon had consigned that power of choice into Elaira’s steadfast hands. For both of their sakes, her strength must shield him through his harrowing hour of weakness. Exhausted in the fallen silence of twilight, her feet sore down to the bone, she sheltered amid a stand of stunt firs, cragged roots anchored like a miser’s clenched fists into the cracks in sheer rock. Possessed of the same tenacious endurance, Elaira huddled by a frugal fire, sinews limp as unravelled knit. Stars blazed above the snow-blasted summits, foil-stamped against gat
hering darkness. Here, no saving disturbance existed to upset the reach of a crystal transmission. Selidie’s scryers might snatch that advantage to break her resistance. Elaira hoarded a store of dry wood. She would shove her hand into live coals if need be to deny the Prime Circle’s intrusion.

  Yet nightfall deepened without undue threat. Only brutal cold and astringent breezes whispered and moaned through the lopsided evergreens.

  Elaira pressed her fraught hands to her face. Discipline never had tamed her inner bond with Prince Arithon. The instinctive alignment of magnetic rapport burned in her each moment, made urgent as breath by her solitude. Worse, Arithon’s acute danger drastically heightened the already volatile interface. His emotions flared hers into flash-point gestalt without warning: vividly intimate as he brought in fresh game, and the homely croft woman who sheltered him attached him with a nickname not even a dog would have answered.

  Worse, the flat twang of her town accent offended his musician’s ear, coarse as ground glass to the lyric awareness once titled as Athera’s Masterbard.

  Through his eyes, Elaira captured his sly effort to thwart the irksome presumption. His laughter laid siege to the sternest resolve each time he deplored the address by turning his backside in clownish rebuff.

  The by-play lightened the enchantress’s spirits until his yearning, bewildered desire – to be as he was – sought relief from the desolate pain of his alienation. Quietly, Arithon flagged the fair-haired brother’s more sympathetic attention. Then, with a bit of flaked charcoal, he started to write out his preference on the slate hearthstone. The first of his sketched characters wrung Tarens pale.

  With the sister too preoccupied to take notice, the crofter’s shocked hiss quashed that first earnest effort to establish a personal trust. The dropped charcoal, stamped beneath a rough boot, obliterated the crude writing. Tarens whispered, frantic, ‘Light save us! If anyone realized you knew the old tongue? We’d be ruined, my friend, and you’d meet your death. Condemned as clanborn or else burned alive, executed for renegade sorcery.’

  Alone in the brutal alpine cold, Elaira suffered the blow as a silenced witness, while fear and distrust quenched the tentative spark of her beloved’s stifled identity. Buffeted by the cruel gusts off the glaciers, she gasped as the tears blurred her eyes. Her heart could break for the lifetime’s trove of experience that lay sundered from Arithon’s grasp. Without power to comfort, she ached for his outsider’s misery as he leaned forlorn on the largesse of strangers, pretending to drowse while his trapper’s fare simmered in the kettle slung over the flames…

  * * *

  …too anxious for subtlety, Kerelie kept nattering as though her subject were deaf, or born nerveless. ‘Suppose the fellow knows witchery, Tarens?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ The brother reseated himself at the trestle. Too poor for a lamp, forced to squint in the glow of a spluttering tallow dip, he resumed stitching a mend in the torn harness strap, broken after the folly that led him to tie the ox up by the reins. Rattled himself, and unskilled at pretence, he kept his head bent to his work.

  ‘Well,’ Kerelie temporized, her usual piece of fanciful sewing draped over her knee, ‘you can’t pretend that the oddities don’t cling to the man like jumping fleas. He’s gotten that scrawny hen to start scratching. You’ll see she’s recovered the gloss of good health. The grouchy bird follows him like a tame pet. Tell me you don’t notice? The animals thrive something more than they should when he helps with the chores in the barn.’

  Tarens shrugged. A fallen lock of fair hair veiled his face as he ducked her direct regard.

  ‘You know that our ox dislikes strangers,’ Kerelie pressured. ‘If the brute doesn’t tread on their feet or balk outright, it sidles them into a post. Yet your vagabond leads that beast hither and yon without the least roll of an eyeball.’

  Tarens grunted, the plink of his hammer against the awl made the ready excuse to duck conversation.

  Kerelie out-waited his reluctant stand and picked up once the hole had been punched. ‘Someone taught that man knowledge of herbals, and not in a kitchen patch, either.’

  ‘He’s not my vagabond,’ Tarens replied. ‘What makes you think I have answers?’

  By fretful habit, Kerelie scraped a knuckle along her scarred cheek. ‘I say he could be an uncanny creature dropped into our midst.’

  ‘He appreciates things,’ Tarens amended. ‘You feel that quality with his attention. Dumb beasts respond by giving their trust. Where’s the mystery in that? He understands language, and if he’s a mute, he doesn’t need speech to make himself understood.’

  Kerelie poked her embroidery needle through a fold in her loose sleeve. Overlarge for the delicacy of her stitches, her prim hands rummaged into her basket for the emerald floss to embellish a rosebud. She was not a mean spirit. Only frightened, and worried past peace for the brother who stubbornly languished in sick-bed. ‘Koriathain prefer to take on mutes and half-wits. You don’t think our stray served their interests?’

  ‘If he did,’ Tarens argued with rock-bottom certainty, ‘the order would have done away with him. He picks up connections and details too fast. That’s not a safe quality to keep in the presence of dark arcane secrets.’

  The pause hung, sweetened with the fragrance of birch coals and the burbling of the meat stew. Kerelie knotted her hands and glowered at her brother until at last he was forced to look up from the harness.

  ‘You were never thick-headed,’ she scolded. Then added, persistently honest, ‘Are you willing to risk our livelihood? More, would you gamble that vagabond’s life on the chance that you could be misled? By tomorrow, we could face a temple diviner sent to probe for heretical practice. Do you truly believe the Light’s faith rests its cases on anyone’s heart-felt conjecture?’

  ‘Those herbals are all that’s kept Efflin alive!’ Tarens snapped, riled by his innate sense of loyalty. ‘Are you saying we should act upon groundless fear, disown kindness, and throw the man out?’ Engrossed by his sister’s well-founded challenge, and not least, by a shared anxiety, the big crofter also forgot the tucked figure, miserably stilled in the shadow behind the filled wood bin…

  But the distant enchantress cried out, locked in empathy and unable to bear Arithon’s quick stab of agony from her vantage in the Storlain Mountains. Loss of memory had not dimmed the acuity of his gifted talent. The bitter argument between brother and sister smashed his frail poise at a stroke.

  As initiate master, his extreme sensitivity tracked every nuance of subtle distress. The captive centuries spent under forced threat, healing the crazed terror of free wraiths, had laid his heightened awareness wide open. As the blunt blast of blame and raw stress battered into his unshielded nerves, the shock hit like a punch to the viscera.

  Dizzy nausea shot him to his feet. The notion his presence might cause someone harm woke the echoes of forgotten horror. The drive to avert catastrophic misfortune lashed him to instinctive flight. He was gone, out the door in one silent move, both dinner and comfort abandoned. The latch fell. Only a chill swirl of draught marked the wake of his frantic departure.

  While Tarens whirled, stunned past words of regret for the hurt bestowed by his carelessness, the distant enchantress encamped in the mountains shed furious tears. She raged at her fate, that the mate she cherished as her own flesh and blood should become so bereft! The prodigious, bright talent whose labours had dispelled the worldwide invasion by Marak’s hordes of hostile entities should never have been abandoned to languish alone in such bitter ignorance.

  Which quandary baited Prime Selidie’s trap: Elaira dared not give way under pressure, no matter how vicious the consequence. She sucked a cold breath to rebalance her rocked poise. The signet ring of Rathain on her hand bequeathed her its burden of secrets. She was the defender of all that it held, and by Arithon’s placed faith, must sustain the harsh crux with her eyes opened. Or else become broken by sheer despair and take her heart’s beloved down with her.

&nbs
p; Amid desolate rocks, by the glimmer of starlight, she shouldered the watch through another bleak night.

  Yet this pass, far worse than a scryer’s assault rattled her shaken defenses. As Arithon’s headlong flight through the wood distanced him from the cozy croft cottage, he gave rein to his natural instincts. Elaira shared his acute stress and confusion. She also shuddered as his inner senses exploded. The same terrible onset raked through her like fire as the rogue gift of far-sight his straits had made him forget smashed across his rifted perception.

  He whimpered, beset, while vision upon vision of what soon must be hammered into his shattered awareness. Overset, stumbled onto his hands and knees in chill leaves, he panted in traumatized panic while the incomprehensible blaze of his wild talent seized the posited threads of the future and unfolded them into simultaneous multiplicity. Drowned in that welter of colour and noise, he floundered, bewildered. The rushed assault of overlayered images flickered onwards like a meaningless storm. He found no bearing: until one view captured his focused attention and fused into a clarity sharp as cut glass…

  By tomorrow’s dawn, an official mounted in ceremonial panoply would invade the croft with a cavalcade. The yard would be cluttered by gold-and-white banners, while shod hooves chopped the neatly mulched garden. While the armed outriders circled the cottage, their glittering captain would crash his mailed fist on the door, under temple authority. Doctrine confirmed his lawful right to arrest anyone who resisted. A search by his men would toss through every room. Despite the genuine strain of dire illness, Efflin would be hauled from his blankets. The bed where he lay became stripped to the frame. Men with drawn swords would hack mattress and ticking to shreds. Yet the Light’s avid talent would find naught to incriminate. None of the closets held any trace of the herbalist reported by an upright citizen’s complaint.

  ‘He’s not here,’ Kerelie insisted, past tears. She wiped her scarred cheek, undone with relief that Tarens was off to haul fire-wood and not underfoot with his ready fists. ‘Since no one knows where the odd fellow’s gone, your questions cannot be answered.’