Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Ath wept! Not again!’ Daliana howled through gritted teeth. She would not strand herself on the road in a flea-bitten groom’s noxious clothing.

  Engrossed in her struggle, she failed to hear the crack of the rein ends Lysaer used to whip on the indolent roan at her back. His sheer determination belaboured the beast through a prodigious dash to overtake her.

  ‘Damnfool woman,’ he yelled. Arrogant, he leaned out to intercept her at risk of imbalance with his strapped arm. The deft cut of his knife when he sliced her stirrup strap dropped her head over heels in a crusted snow-drift.

  Dazed, scraped and bleeding, Daliana picked herself up and kicked off the entangled iron. ‘Ungallant scum!’ Helplessly furious, she shouted after him. ‘Why’d you do that?’ Chilled by the trickle of ice down her neck, and stung by more than contusions, she did not expect a civil response. Tears of frustration blurred her view as both horses pounded headlong down the open highway without her.

  ‘This isn’t over, you jumped-up rooster!’ Daliana spat gravel through a split lip. She turned her back. Refused to watch as the bright, blurred fleck of Lysaer’s red doublet diminished amid the mottled browns of the drab landscape.

  His choice to return found her walking, forlorn, soaked shoes splashing through the puddled wheel-ruts. She did not lift her head or beg for help. In fact, she presumed the approach belonged to an indifferent, wayfaring stranger. Lysaer’s presence went unrecognized until he jogged up beside her, settled astride the fettlesome bay with the slab-sided roan hauled behind, hitched in tow by a lead rein. His hat was gone. Tousled by wind, his artless hair gleamed ingot gold amid the bleak morning.

  ‘Such a grim lack of faith,’ he observed in dry sarcasm when she failed to speak or acknowledge him.

  In fact, speechless with astonishment, she accepted the uglier horse from his hand. As he wrestled the restive bay to a halt, she surveyed his demeanour with critical interest. The glacial pallor she presumed was high fury in fact was caused by the pain of his injury. Forced to switch mounts, he now handled the more fractious horse, unassisted.

  Therefore he braced for her temper, amused.

  Her damnfool pluck stole his breath nonetheless when she failed to reward him for gallantry.

  ‘You’d be wanting the faster mount to escape me at your convenience?’

  ‘No.’ Lysaer’s smile faded as the angsty bay hauled at the bit and grated his broken collar-bone. ‘Had the jumped-up rooster in question not slashed your stirrup, you’d have been dragged until you broke your neck. I haven’t changed horses to put you in your place. The roan’s better suited to your inexperience.’ His turn, to glower at her in assessment. ‘Are you fit to ride on?’

  Past choice on the matter, Daliana set her jaw and scrambled into the mare’s empty saddle. Game enough not to whine over bruises, she answered with spirited lack of apology, ‘Crow instead to those travellers you nearly trampled. No pleas for credit where none is due. You saved nothing. I didn’t fall off.’

  But she did not demand back the outrider’s horse. The pokey roan suffered her inept equitation until it relented to her vigorous heels and reluctantly trotted.

  The next hour passed in stilted silence, pocked by the suck and splash of the horses’ hooves through the thawed mud. Daliana’s various aches stiffened into a persistent chorus. Sunk in isolate misery, she noticed the veiled glances Lysaer threw askance at her once her bashed eye stopped tearing up. She ventured no comment, wise enough to outlast him.

  And at length, he accosted her out of pique. ‘Did you actually think me callous enough to abandon you by the roadside?’

  She hurt just enough not to soften her answer. ‘In your right mind? Perhaps not. But the footing for trust has worn thin, don’t you think, since you threw Dakar and me to the mercy of that pack of fanatics.’

  The flinch behind his brief pause derived from the accusation that impinged on his honour, she presumed, until he admitted with blistered reluctance: ‘You call my most unforgivable mistakes home to roost. Forgive me if I don’t care to risk putting your name on the offensive list.’

  ‘How long do you think you can bury the cankers?’ Daliana attacked without sympathy. ‘I’m here as Sulfin Evend’s picked heir to help you resist Desh-thiere’s curse. Since I’m not going to quit to salve your prideful conscience, you can guard my blind side by sharing your confidence.’

  The winter’s lingering chill cut less deep than the frost fallen on Lysaer’s reticence. The crisp line of his profile might have been marble, except where the raw weather nipped his nose pink. Such an armour of magisterial dignity deflated guildsmen and diplomats but failed to swerve Daliana. She shouldered her mount alongside and peered upwards to measure the steel in the taciturn stare he fixed straight ahead.

  No obvious cue upset her blood instincts. Neither had she been the Sorcerer’s choice for female timidity. ‘Say what you’re thinking!’ she snapped into his teeth. ‘Tell me now. Before I’m obliged to throw my small knife into your strapped shoulder to drop you!’

  That snapped his head around to confront her. The cruel spark in his eyes glittered, beyond frightening. A creature not human might rake her that way, except that his rigid, gloved grip on the reins trembled visibly as he corrected her. ‘Somewhere, I can say with precision, a little, dark man wields the power of Shadow to hide himself from his enemies. Cross me at all, you might well be killed!’

  ‘By your hand, yes, I know,’ Daliana dismissed. ‘Tell me, is that how your Talith met her demise?’

  He sucked a stiff breath, singed to offence, though in fact her spiteful strike had succeeded: momentarily the hounding force of the geas seemed shaken into retreat.

  ‘What’s to lose?’ Wind-flushed in the groom’s tatty clothes, Daliana looked as disreputably fierce. ‘You might as well serve me the truth as fair warning.’

  Lysaer’s gemstone blue eyes acquired a differently dangerous edge.

  ‘You’re not better off should you fall to the curse,’ Daliana pressured him, adamant. She snatched the near-side rein of his horse, bold as brass, before he resorted to spurs and outstripped her. ‘Speak to me for your sanity’s sake, liege. Draw strength from your pain. Or else throw away your natural mind over bullheaded masculine pride.’

  ‘This is a ruthless assault, and no kindness,’ Lysaer protested, incensed by the ignominious flaw in his moral integrity. ‘Since you ask, Talith died. I did not kill her. She perished of a crossbolt shot by an assassin, the murder arranged by self-serving political factions. They viewed her upcoming charge of state treason as a stain on my name as the Light’s declared avatar.’

  ‘You cherished her beyond measure,’ Daliana surmised.

  ‘Fate wept!’ Lysaer let her drag his head-shaking bay to a precipitous halt in the roadway. ‘She was the first woman I took to wife. Like a demonic plague on my spirit, you have the same tawny eyes. Since your naive presumptions dig for the viscera, you should know how bitterly she betrayed me.’

  ‘Tell me the worst.’ Made aware by his sudden grey pallor that the restively circling horses sawed his strapped shoulder past mercy, Daliana yanked the bay’s reins from his grip. ‘Dismount. Now. We are both going to walk. Then you will start speaking without reservation. I do not plan to let you fall to ruin without a fight. Since you won’t abandon this rash trip to Tysan, your hag-ridden wounds are my best weapon to bind you to your better nature. Give me that willing sacrifice, liege. Or else forfeit clear sight to the twisted impulses ruled by the Mistwraith’s design.’

  ‘Sulfin Evend had the more tender heart!’ snapped Lysaer, at a loss for the conscionable argument that would let him cling to his regal reserve.

  ‘I don’t have his brute fists,’ Daliana corrected. ‘Or was it his patent touch, hurling chain-mail?’

  Lysaer failed to choke down a spontaneous outburst of laughter. ‘Who told you those choice bits of history?’ he asked in capitulation as he dismounted.

  ‘He left a written memoir for his descenda
nts,’ she said, chilled breathless as she joined him, ankle deep in the rutted slush. ‘The journal mentions your wedding to Ellaine. But none of the pages described Talith.’

  ‘That’s because—’ Lysaer paused. A dozen squelching steps passed, filled by wind and the startled flit of small birds set to flight from the brush by the roadside. The breaking clouds let in patches of blue, less brooding than the distanced reflection behind the torment in his eyes.

  Daliana gathered the reins of both horses and flanked his unsanguine pace without comment.

  Lysaer shivered as though someone’s offensive tread had trampled his grave-site, then broke his defended silence. ‘Talith was a vicious bitch of an embarrassment, and a beauty fit to blind any man to the grace of his purpose. I lost my heart to her. She became the cause to rifle the treasury of a kingdom, then to drive a war host to horrific ruin. Unblinded by the light of religion, history would not be remiss to claim that my infatuation with her cost the lives of thirty-five thousand good men.’

  Whatever Daliana expected, nothing touched the unvarnished scope of this confession. Afraid that the Mistwraith’s poisonous havoc might undermine character with poisonous self-condemnation, she drew a deep breath, brittle with the scent of the glaciers swept off the snow-capped peaks. As dispassionately cruel, she attacked, ‘How many times in the dark of the night have you damned yourself for the indulgent weakness that once, you loved beyond all restraint?’

  ‘But I did overstep,’ Lysaer said, bald-faced. The admission still haunted. ‘You have no idea how close I came to destroying the regency only for her sake.’ His jaw flexed in response to his extreme discomfort, that he bared his heart’s core before anyone.

  Daliana sensed the force of his helpless despair. Even worse, the excoriating depths of his shame: the vulnerable secrets of a man born to rule should never become aired in public. Desh-thiere’s curse compelled the breach of a privacy he might have gone to the grave before sharing.

  The sunlight that lit the early green shoots poked up through the crust at the verges seemed a world removed to the gentleman stalked by his unseen peril. Lysaer checked between steps, his skin streamed to sweat on a sudden, tormented breath.

  Daliana’s heart wrenched for the ugly necessity: without asking, she knew her liege battled in recoil, hooked by the activity of the nemesis in Shadow-bent flight across Scarpdale.

  Yet this pass, ahead of her desperate prompt, Lysaer engaged the unflinching choice, well aware her brutal tactic provided the best weapon to anchor his sanity.

  Daliana listened, while he laid himself open. The story emerged in broken, terse phrasing, an astonishment from a statesman renowned for his eloquence under pressure. The ferocious emotion masked beneath such relentless reserve stayed undimmed, though the woman who left such tempestuous memories had passed Fate’s Wheel over two centuries ago.

  Lysaer described his early years in Etarra, when hot-blooded packs of pedigree suitors had goaded each other to feats of mad gallantry vying for his beloved’s favour. ‘Their idiot capers earned her contempt. She toyed with the fools who persisted.’

  ‘You must have felt the same way as a prince,’ Daliana surmised. ‘Always beleaguered by fawning courtiers who saw only your jewels, your power, or the blinding display of suave manners and royal charisma.’

  He stared, astonished. ‘You have no idea.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ Daliana grinned. ‘I recall the political jungle I crossed to get close enough for a word with you. Nobody sees you for what you are through the brilliance of your notoriety. Perhaps you were the only one who respected your lady enough not to fall at her feet.’

  Lysaer shrugged. But the colour arisen beneath his fair skin undermined his quiet denouncement. ‘Talith had piquant spirit and wit, and the brass to wreck a man’s natural complacency.’ He faltered, caught unaware as his boot splashed calf deep in a flooded pot-hole. Then he finished, ‘She challenged weakness in such a way that admirers broke themselves trying to impress her. But her deep affection came without reserve. She had no defense for sincerity. I have burned with regret since the hour I had to relinquish her.’

  A mounted courier passed at a gallop, to a pelted barrage of flung mud clods. The afternoon coach to Narms ground by with its liveried outriders and blaring horn, then an ox-wain with wool-bales and a laden brewer’s cart. Lysaer’s costly calf-leather boots soaked through. His fine mantle wore the same spatters as any other commonplace foot traveller’s, except when the return of fair sky and sun burnished his uncovered head. Then his fair coloring shone like gold leaf amid the drab hills and the leaden patches of snow that tarnished the gulches.

  Daliana watched drivers and grooms turn to stare, and the female faces admiring him through the lozenged glass of their carriage windows. Even in anonymity, his elegant bearing drew notice. The unconscious majesty behind his charm became an irresistible force when he focused his undivided attention. The perfection of such extreme good looks all too readily eclipsed the innate flaws of his humanity.

  Which quandary had plagued him ever since birth, magnified by the social walls raised by his ruling caste isolation.

  Throughout his torn recitation, Daliana sensed the harsh, sweating intervals when he battled the draw of the curse. She watched him buy two sacks of dried jerky and nuts, his unselfish goodwill aimed to lighten a matron’s basket. He set her sulky toddler back upright, then hoisted the balky mite onto his shoulders to the detriment of his injury. Eventually, the tired mother and child found a seat in a passing wagon. The day wore endlessly through afternoon. The westering light exposed the relentless strain stamped into his features. Daliana measured the frown that accompanied his agonized speech. Her perception exposed the straight-laced young prince who had not shared the gift of true friendship.

  Today’s man wore his pride like the preening falcon leashed to the block. He knew service, not freedom. Iron will, but not the playful thrill of unconstrained spontaneity. Between the buried pain of lost love and the insatiable shackle of Desh-thiere’s geas, Daliana cracked the cold mask of formality. She sensed the benighted emptiness no one had broached, perhaps since the time of her forebear Sulfin Evend.

  Sunset painted the western sky in tints of mauve and citrine, then faded. The first stars burned against a cobalt zenith, and the puddles wore crimped panes of ice. The hour grew late when the stable lamps of the next post-station inn glimmered distantly through the gloaming. Lysaer stopped to massage his temples, then offered Daliana a leg up into the saddle. ‘You’ve blistered your heels for some time,’ he apologized, then tucked her toe in the near-side stirrup before she could phrase an objection.

  She surveyed the gaunt line of his cheek, brushed by the faint afterglow that bronzed the iced peaks of the Mathorns, due northward. ‘How many assaults have you weathered today?’

  ‘I didn’t know they came separately,’ he said, which effectively crushed conversation.

  He mounted, his usual fluid style astride marred by the wear of his injury. They made their way after that side by side, while night deepened, and the wind’s bite reversed into winter. By the time they pulled up in the torch-lit inn-yard, Daliana had received Lysaer’s first hand account of the founding of his former capital, rebuilt on the Paravian foundations of old Avenor. He described the court dances held in Sunwheel Square, the laughter and the gaiety enjoyed before Talith’s untimely death. Then the decades of grief, with the site unbearably haunted by her memory until the assault by the dragon had leveled the golden brick of the regent’s palace and slagged both wings of the domed hall of state.

  ‘Who else recalls that place filled with beauty, lit candles and life? The ruin’s choked under a tangle of vines, except where the monument to the slain is still maintained by the priests,’ Lysaer reminisced as he paid the stableman for the horses. ‘Once they burned a lamp in perpetual memory. But I have not been back there to know whether the shrine is maintained.’ His tossed penny eased the baggage boy’s disappointment that he chose to should
er his saddle pack without assistance despite his strapped arm.

  Inside, the stewed noise in the over-packed tap-room beat against his raw nerves. He wore the pinched look that suggested a headache. Muffled into his cloak despite the close heat, he threaded his way past the contests at darts and the circles of drunken singers. He side-stepped the argumentative cart-drivers, the loose women, and the idlers talking of war. A tighter pack crowded two abutted trestles, where a gaudy troupe of traveling players staged a madcap juggling act. Their ringleader tossed a playful bean-bag and knocked the mantle off Lysaer’s head.

  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?’