Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Put that down,’ he suggested. ‘Leave me in peace. If you won’t back off, don’t brain me for the mess when I throw up on your ankles.’

  Not threatened one bit, Daliana reached down and grappled his wrist, then tugged until he sat upright. ‘What’s just happened?’

  Dakar swallowed back nausea. Hunched in wait for his jolted senses to settle, he became aware of a yelling disturbance outside. The cause, spelled out in shrill screams and hysteria, inspired a vengeful, smug grin. ‘Listen. You’ll hear.’

  Daliana dropped the broom-handle. ‘Ath’s glory! Don’t tell me. A dragon has lit on the tavern roof?’

  Dakar coughed, apprehensive. ‘Oh, yes.’ Uncertain just how his dispatched marker had managed to draw such stupendous notice, he chewed his lip and queasily welcomed the outrageous turn of events. ‘We should make our break now while the innkeeper’s louts are too terrified to give chase.’

  Yet the opportune chance fell into eclipse. Opposite the besieged stairway, the barred planks of the root-cellar’s outside door rippled like sheet-cloth and vanished. An aggressive form strode through the astonishing breach. Etched against the blinding influx of daylight, the tall male figure had wind-tousled reddish grey locks, tumbled over trim shoulders. His jet-black cloak glittered with thread-silver embroidery that flickered like discharged static. Then the opaque wooden door reappeared and quenched his arrival in gloom.

  Quick footsteps approached through the cellar’s cached junk, surely graced by a Sorcerer’s faculties. Attentive as a raptor besides, the stranger spoke quickly to disarm Daliana’s stupefied panic.

  ‘Dragons can dream past material boundaries. The trait is unsafe, and volatile to any expressive emotion. Take my fair warning and curb your dismay.’

  Dakar shivered, wrung to trepidation by the bold visitation’s identity. ‘Davien! Motherless chaos and Dharkaron’s bollocks! What ruinous misplay brings you here?’

  ‘Seshkrozchiel was famished,’ the Sorcerer declared without guile.

  From outside, a sudden, shattering crunch! suggested a roof-beam mightily crushed to flinders. The king-post likely suffered such damage as well, since a hundredweight fall of slate shingles clattered like flung knives into the root-cellar stairwell.

  Dakar said, alarmed, ‘That racket would be the dragon, shredding the innkeeper’s property in search of fresh meat?’

  Davien laughed. ‘Didn’t Sethvir hear you swear aloud that you wished this tavern razed flat? I did my part with the pointed suggestion that two relief draught teams for the coach route to Narms are sure to be stabled on the premises.’

  ‘Ath wept!’ Dakar seized a double handful of his ginger beard and tugged in distraught trepidation. ‘I hope you can stem the rip tide of disaster.’

  ‘Bid the free will of an ancient drake?’ Davien’s insouciant shrug was a whisper of velvet and wool in the darkness. ‘Might as well strive to leash the wild lightning, and your soured opinion does not even signify. Seshkrozchiel’s taken a dislike to this inn. Since it reeks of imprisonment, she’s inclined to burn the place to the ground. Need I add that we haven’t much time?’

  Dakar said, thinly stretched, ‘We were coping without interference on quite this order of magnitude.’

  The gleam through the knot-hole lit Davien’s raised brows. ‘Sethvir thought as much, also, until he cast strands and found the worst probabilities already convergent. I came to inform you. Lysaer’s case is hopeless.’

  ‘You can’t mean he’s predestined to fail!’ Daliana cried out in anguish.

  The Sorcerer’s night-shade black eyes pinned her under his nerveless survey, from the brown hair wisped from her neglected braid to the dust smears that marred her smooth cheek. ‘The unflinching truth? My dear, your s’Ilessid liege is accursed by the Mistwraith. Against the best of his noble intentions, his natural will is impaired. He cannot do other than crumple once the speed of events overtakes him.’

  Dakar broke in more gently, ‘The pressure of the geas is cumulative. Each time Lysaer’s half brother invokes Shadow, the redoubled effect plays against him.’

  Davien quashed the outside hope of reprieve. ‘On a battle-field fashioned as a baited trap, Arithon shall be relentlessly driven to wield his born talent just to survive. Lysaer’s been pressured into pursuit. Reason won’t turn him, it’s useless to try. He’ll destroy whatever obstructs him.’

  ‘Then you’ve come to bestow the short list of bad options?’ Beyond testy, Dakar winced to acknowledge the full price of his bitter mistake. No Sorcerer’s power under charter law could rout the True Sect’s invasion. Asandir’s oath of nonintervention bound Fellowship hands for as long as Prince Arithon’s presence incited the Lanshire campaign.

  ‘Does the irony sting?’ Davien goaded, clipped to restlessness as the spellbinder’s lagged reason slogged through the trajectory of current events. ‘That’s why the battle-line to defend Havish must be drawn farther south.’

  ‘At the verge of the free wilds of Carithwyr?’ Dakar grasped the appalling dilemma at last. ‘Then this is not about Arithon’s fate, but concern that the Fellowship might have to take Lysaer’s life to salvage the compact?’

  ‘A triumph for the Koriathain,’ Davien agreed, snide enough to derail the backlash of histrionic dismay. ‘Seshkrozchiel’s bound on to Scarpdale to answer her gratitude to Asandir. She will burn this tavern and feed upon any scorched carcasses snagged in the rubble. You can flee now and risk the stacked odds of recapture. Or you could take the more perilous dare and step into the dragon’s true dreaming.’

  Dakar gaped, shocked beyond speech.

  ‘She will absorb your being,’ the Sorcerer warned. Without pause to describe the dread scope of that peril, he qualified, ‘But replete with six horses, Seshkrozchiel will drowse. A filled belly often quiets the speed of her faculties.’

  This time, pure panic spurred Dakar’s conclusion. ‘You gamble with fate, that we’d emerge aligned to the destiny nearest to our true desire?’

  ‘Chance favours that outcome,’ Davien agreed. ‘But, of course, my conjecture holds no guarantee.’

  Dakar’s nape bristled. He drew breath to refuse.

  Except Daliana chose first. ‘I’ll go.’ She pushed past the spellbinder’s prudent restraint, ignorant that this Sorcerer’s sly provocations were not to be trusted. ‘No way else can I reach Lysaer’s side in time to make any difference.’

  Perhaps Davien regretted her brash courage since he added a strict admonishment. ‘How well can you hold your intent in clear focus?’

  ‘Don’t let him cozen you!’ Dakar shouted. Savage anger raised his gorge and near choked him, that once such feckless wiles had inveigled Arithon s’Ffalenn to attempt a near-ruinous ploy against a cult of black necromancers.

  ‘I believe in myself,’ Daliana corrected, stubbornly deaf to sound counsel. ‘What have I to lose? As things stand, I’m most likely to get charred to a crisp. Done by Lysaer’s hand, the outcome might scar him enough to check Desh-thiere’s curse through remorse. But a death on the scaffold to sate True Sect fanatics would make my whole life an act of futility.’

  By then any further debate became moot. Seshkrozchiel’s roar of challenge hammered the air. A swipe of her armoured tail peeled away what remained of the tavern roof, timber splintered from stone like tossed jackstraws. As her baleful fire sheared into the rubble upstairs, the floor-boards overhead smouldered and smoked. The whoosh of live cinders forced in on the downdraught threatened the stacks of dry ale casks.

  ‘I did caution you against excessive emotion,’ Davien chided. His sardonic amusement struck too suave a note as tongues of bright flame licked the length of the beams, and a clay jar of lamp oil exploded above them. ‘Take my hands,’ he invited, ‘or burn where you stand.’

  Dakar suspected the ruthless crux stemmed from a wily plot engineered from the outset. ‘Don’t imagine that goading me into a corner can haze me to stand to Prince Arithon’s defense!’ Death itself could not make him shoulder that
dreaded confrontation.

  The Sorcerer also renowned for betrayal laughed in the teeth of the spellbinder’s cowardice. ‘On that count, you might buy a desperate reprieve. Unless you prefer the Fatemaster’s applause past the Wheel for bullheaded stubbornness?’

  Yet where Daliana accepted Davien’s offered clasp without blinking, Dakar dug in his heels.

  His shirt and jerkin were starting to singe before he bowed to necessity and unfolded his arms to take Davien’s poisoned offer. Both mage-trained and Sighted, the spellbinder perceived the moment through split awareness as his destined fate parted from Daliana’s. She placed herself under Davien’s purview, then buckled at the knees, dropped unconscious into the trickster Sorcerer’s embrace; while in doubled vision, at the same moment, Dakar also grasped the Sorcerer’s empty, lean fingers, extended only for him. Reluctant, he clamped hold with sweaty palms and gave over his human survival.

  Before immolation by fire boiled the blood in his veins, the rainbow shimmer of the dragon’s dream drew all that he was, and ever would be, into terrifying dissolution. He drifted without substance. Then nameless forces beyond his control hooked the mote of his being into a gyre. He tumbled, spinning, then plummeted through a golden, slit eye that blazed like the core of the sun.

  He burned then, thought and spirit torched into a flash-point explosion that seared with the endless cold of primordial night.

  Starless dark became a stallion’s jet coat, sweat-caked and salted with the pulverized bone that remained of a drake skull. Swept into the storm of Seshkrozchiel’s dreaming, the unmoored fleck of selfhood that bore the Name Dakar exulted to the wild, whiplash crackle as the dragon’s auric field flared into a scintillant blaze of azure flame. He knew the thunder of wind in her wings and the ecstatic roar that shook earth and sky at the glory of her last mating. He sensed time wrenched still and thrilled to the unknowable song of infinite creation. Then in the wracked flesh of the dying, black horse, he became a heart-beat that stopped, paused, then resumed, hurled into explosive rebirth as the warp thread of the stallion’s true being laced through the bright weft of Seshkrozchiel’s making. In the diamantine dust that marked a past grimward, the stud did not breathe his last, but raised its proud crest, shook out its mane, extended strong forelegs, and stood.

  No longer the same animal, foaled out of a drifter’s best mare, by a sire with a silver, ghost eye: the refigured equine that snorted with joyous life wore the stamped likeness of his distant forebear, Isfarenn. Restored by drake magic, that also had forged seven human men into the mages who comprised the Fellowship, what rose and galloped on four legs in Scarpdale was a fit Sorcerer’s mount, flesh and blood, but no longer mortal.

  Then the drum-roll of the horse’s hooves faded. Nothing became something with a dizzying rush that wrung every jangled nerve end. Dakar came back to himself and struck solid ground with a painful thump. Retching, he beheld the focal pattern of a great circle, still ablaze with the fountained sparks of an activated, dawn flux tide.

  Without breakfast, his wracked gut contained nothing to heave.

  But his upended senses still captured the distanced mockery of Davien’s last words. ‘Your cold fury, as usual, is badly misplaced. For this trump, try blaming Sethvir.’

  Once Dakar recouped his scrambled faculties, he recognized the eerie, patterned spirals salted into the pillars of upright marble that marked the four cardinal points at Fiaduwynne. The Paravian site lay on the north bank of the river that flowed westward out of Lithmarin at the northern verge of Carithwyr. Apparently his adamant avoidance of Arithon’s plight had delivered the chance to defuse Desh-thiere’s curse at the front line of the High King of Havish’s defense.

  Early Spring 5923

  Derogation

  Abed and dosed on valerian to sleep through the ache of his broken collar-bone, Lysaer s’Ilessid missed the commotion arisen downstairs in the wayside inn’s common-room when the forward young woman tramped in from the road before dawn. Arrived unkempt and cold, and apparently starving, she carried no coin. Since she had no possessions worth selling, she issued a challenge to the loud-mouthed detractors who jeered at her claim to respectability.

  The greasy, spaniel-faced man at the beer tap was disinclined to bestow charity. ‘Don’t know your way whoring, fat Rosie upstairs might let you wrestle her for a mattress!’

  ‘I’d pay to see that!’ a coarse fellow in a driver’s cape roared, to interested hoots from the roisterers on the side-lines.

  ‘Eight silvers on Rosie, pot winner tups all!’ someone ventured, to sniggers and laughter.

  Through the catcalls, the obscene gestures, and noisy encouragement, the young woman marched straight on through the randy crowd. She jabbed anyone who snatched for a pinch with sharp elbows, then cracked her gloved palm flat on the bar top and confronted the sly winks and the leers, quite fearless. ‘My stakes, at darts. The high point winner names the prize of choice.’

  ‘For your tiger’s eyes on me? Anything, sweet!’ A beefy road master swaggered to the forefront, eager to seize the advantage. ‘Darts it is, girl, and we’ll see in a trice which pretty target gets pricked!’ Amid rowdy applause, he bowed to the men, then invited their salacious bets. ‘Let’s lay coin on how fast I’ll claim the chit’s favour between the blankets!’

  He lost instead, a fat purse of coin far beyond the night price of a trollop. When the minx took a seat with her crafty gains, she ordered a hot meal. The injured demand for a rematch earned the plaintiff an eating fork, snatched from the trestle and thrown past his ear. The prongs skewered the target behind him dead centre.

  ‘Did you think my prowess was an accident, then?’ the woman demanded between ravenous bites. All but overmatched by the yells from the pack of sour losers, she understood when to stage a hurried retreat. That quickly, she claimed an outrider’s horse to clinch her ill-gotten take from the deflated road master. His loose change bought the second-best cloak and spare clothing from one of the stableman’s moping boy grooms. Then the chit retired upstairs straightaway, which left her avid admirers in the tap-room abandoned to grumbling boredom.

  By the hour past daybreak the fleeced road master left, along with his raucous cronies and most of the dispatch couriers. Rosie’s wenches retired. The innkeeper’s goodwife took over the beer tap, backed by her huge arm and a massive iron skillet. She had her drudges scrubbing the trestles and the mullioned casements cracked open to air when Lysaer at last rose and clumsily dressed himself. While he sat down to a tray of crisp bacon and warm buttered bread, and tackled his breakfast one-handed, the female sensation upstairs spent three more coppers for a hot bath, a bone comb, and a boot-lace to tie her wet braid. She slipped out the back way through the servants’ door. Therefore when his Lordship of Etarra emerged, brisk, and accosted the stableman for a post-horse to resume his urgent ride southward, he failed to recognize the pert fellow who steadied his nag’s bridle to help him astride. Not until that sensible person announced the intent to stay on as his volunteer retinue.

  His irritable rejection met with rebuff. ‘Who will fetch and carry for you on the road? And tend to your mount since you’re injured?’

  The rough cloak did not obscure the fact that the form underneath was no boy’s. ‘I know you,’ warned Lysaer, prelude to a lecture fit to curl toes for the gall of unwanted female presumption.

  ‘You don’t,’ Daliana contradicted. Over the grind of coach-wheels and the chatter of the red-cheeked boys dispatched to harness the draught team, she added, ‘You knew someone called Talith. Not me.’ Face upturned, her rushed breath a puffed cloud in the chill air between them, she stood her ground upon cobbles slurried with early-spring mud. ‘The moment we’re private, I’ll ask why Dakar invoked that name to unbalance you.’

  The bustle as the morning passengers debarked in the yard magnified Lysaer’s stark embarrassment. He withstood the shock, beyond astonished, though as ever his suave statesman’s reflex masked the visceral depth of his upset. ‘You don’
t know the half of this!’

  Beneath the tatty hood of the groom’s cloak, Daliana’s pink lips curled into a piquant smile. ‘Then tell me the rest.’

  Lysaer’s manner hardened. ‘Now, you trespass. My answer’s not free for the asking.’ Whiplashed to anger, he set his caked boot-sole into Daliana’s laced hands and transferred his weight without mercy. Once in the saddle, he gathered his reins left-handed and dug in his spurs with a vengeance. His roan mare clattered across the crowded yard, with barn cats and grooms and luggage boys scattered helter-skelter to avoid being mown down.

  Daliana scrambled onto the commandeered outrider’s horse and gave chase. The fit animal exploded forward before she thought to adjust the tack’s leathers to suit her feminine frame. No horsewoman, she grabbed a fistful of mane, one awkward leg barely hooked over the saddle-bow. As the fresh animal thundered down the road at a reckless gallop, she held on with a death grip, swearing.

  The fettlesome horse overtook Lysaer’s lead. Daliana’s snatched glimpse of his fair, reddened face verified his stormy suspicion: that her back-handed bribe on the sly to the stableman had assigned him a pig-lazy mare. That request had been met with earnest propriety, since the gentleman whose high fettle needed to be curbed carried one arm in a sling. Though hard-pressed by his spurs, the roan flattened her mulish ears, shook her head, and refused to extend her lumbering stride. The outrider’s bay proved her ferocious opposite. It seized the bit, quickened pace, and snaked past a trundling wagon. The swerve shot Daliana’s foot through the stirrup. The dangling iron wedged fast on her ankle.

  ‘Dharkaron Avenger’s Black Nuisance!’ she cursed, sliding another precarious notch towards disaster. She clung, white-knuckled. If she fell, Lysaer would seize the unfair advantage. She had not bested the louts in the tap-room only to get ditched off a horse by her fumbling ineptitude. The worse for her hair-rising predicament, the brute tried a buck to dislodge her unseated weight.