Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  A thump in the ribs, dealt by Tarens, broke the strangle-hold grip of regret. Dakar surfaced to find King Gestry’s inquiry deferred to his cousin, the princess, who pursued in gentle remonstrance, ‘…could his Grace of Rathain not also tap the same arcane forces in Elkforest on his own?’

  ‘No.’ Dakar regretfully quashed that false hope. ‘Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn cannot reweave such wardings again, even if he contrived to cross over the river alive. At Selkwood, he owned the full memory of his initiate mastery. The peace of the moment let him engage his masterbard’s art without hindrance. He succeeded, yes. But the subsequent onset of over-extension left him incapacitated. An attendant liegeman pulled him clear of the marker stone’s range before he succumbed to dissolution. The late triumph in Taerlin did not incur such a back-lash because he was guided. There Arithon reinforced the existing trace remnant of a greater past working, when Asandir raised the con­sciousness of Caithwood’s trees for a prior defense.’

  The gravel baritone of the war-captain broached the self-evident fact with reluctance. ‘Rathain’s prince is close-pressed by the enemy. He may not have the stamina to reach Elkforest, far less shoulder the subtleties of arcane talent. Though we broke horses and sent word to the woodland clans, he could be run to earth before their scouts find him.’

  The Caithdein of Havish rejected the case, as she must, sworn to service as shadow behind the throne. ‘Our king’s line of defense will be overfaced! You know what will happen if that stay fails, stressed under a rear-guard retreat.’

  ‘Yes.’ Dakar sighed. ‘The compact will be threatened in force, and perhaps break apart altogether.’

  ‘Dharkaron’s immortal bollocks!’ the realm’s war-captain swore in disgust. ‘What strategic retreat? You will see an end to that fight in red slaughter hard on the Lithwater’s bank. If Elkforest’s glades become fired by Sunwheel fanatics, the covenant made to protect the Paravians falls in the breach.’

  The Mad Prophet flung down that gauntlet himself to quench the next flare of objection. ‘Yes, if the worst happened, the Fellowship would be compelled to step in for redress!’ That horror engendered a thunder-clap silence. Every counselor present grasped the dread impact of chain-lightning consequence. Under their binding tie to the drakes, the Seven would be obliged to wreak Mankind’s downfall before the loss of the planet’s deep mysteries. If not by their own hand, to sorrow past requite, Atheran humanity would see massacre by the terrible might of Seshkrozchiel.

  Dakar hammered home his unpleasant warning. ‘I lived to behold the slagged stone and ash when Avenor was leveled by drakefire in Year 5671. Don’t ever rest under the gross misconception that the will of a dragon might take pause to compromise.’

  The Mad Prophet quaked under the burden of certainty: his recent scryings had shown him Luhaine, locked in the delicate knife-edged peril of argument with Seshkrozchiel. Engaged as spokesman in Davien’s behalf, the Sorcerer’s desperate, convolute debate strove day and night, without resolution. The dragon still snorted curled smoke in amusement. Such towering strength, quick to anger and supremely arrogant, deemed all other things to be figments, kindled to substance only through the power of her kind’s omnipotent dreaming. Seshkrozchiel lacked the referent experience to conceive that such ludicrous two-legged beings were not toys, but intelligent entities animate and alive in their own right.

  ‘The Warden of Althain well may have foreseen this terrible pass.’ Dakar surveyed the poised authorities in place to determine the uncertain future: Halika, braced in her storm crow’s black, her white knuckles laced on the trestle; Princess Ceftwinn, tautly perched as a jade-tinted porcelain, her eyes liquid and wide, and lines furrowed across her gold-dusted forehead. Chilled by the mute fury of the war-captain, behind, Dakar laid his final appeal before the sovereign will of the King’s Grace. ‘I may be the loop-hole Asandir created, with my disgrace prearranged to unravel the cascade of a misplayed future. I don’t know for certain. Perhaps I am wrong. But Havish’s resources are yours to spend. All choice on the outcome rests on your shoulders.’

  Gestry broke the unbearable pause. ‘If Asandir’s last assessment was flawed by constraint, past question the compact that supports the Paravians claims precedence. The armed strength of Havish must take the field. I’ll ride at the forefront, and wield the crown’s attuned power against Lysaer’s curse-driven assault.’

  Halika stood with such force that her chair overset with a bang. ‘What if the Mad Prophet’s assessment is faulty? By law, as caithdein, I can forbid this! A king may be deposed. Past question, the weal of the realm is at risk if the direct charge of a Sorcerer can be revoked without founded evidence.’

  ‘Then let me broach the debt that the Crown of Havish owes to my liege of Rathain.’ The calm voice thrust into the stand-off was Tarens’s. Arisen in courageous appeal and unabashed by welled tears, he told of the ruse, fashioned amid hunted pursuit, that had spared from the torch a locked barn jammed with terrified women and children. ‘You would have no survivors from Torwent’s debacle. Not an innocent family would live, but for the foolishly brave intervention of Arithon s’Ffalenn.’

  King Gestry stood. He bowed before Tarens, the traditional gesture a sovereign awarded to confirm royal service to a feal liegeman. Bent on one knee, the unbroken fall of the torch-light underscored the humanity of the young man selected to bear Havish’s sovereignty: from the fey gleam in his distanced eyes, to the anguished stamp of the caring ruler, to an exhaustion beyond the reach of what human flesh had been born to withstand. Yet with graven majesty, his self-honest respect and humility lifted his stature to greatness. ‘I will go,’ he affirmed. ‘Let us hope that the striving of men will suffice to spare your liege from the net.’ Against his caithdein’s aghast disapproval, he challenged, ‘On your head be the ruin, Lady Halika, if you should twist your powers of office in selfish action to stop me.’

  Spring 5923

  Flash-points

  Between the whirlwind strike-down of tents and the tumultuous muster that sets the High King’s war band on the march, Dakar discovers the clan brats confined to his quarters have scarpered; which minor disaster is shouldered by Tarens, who offers, ‘Two of the young pests are Jieret’s descendants; who better to track them? If their foxy tricks can be fathomed, I’m out-bound for Halwythwood anyway…’

  Stymied at last in his grueling effort to nitpick a reprieve from a dragon’s fix­ation, Luhaine plays his final, heroic card to stave off defeat, ‘Since Seshkrozchiel deigns not to release my colleague from his ruinous bargain, I propose that Davien and I should change places, since as a shade, the indefinite span of drakish hibernation will not pose me a fatal inconvenience…’

  Informed that the High King of Havish forsakes Fellowship orders to secure the realm’s protections from Fiaduwynne in favour of marching headlong to meet the Lysaer’s invasion by force of arms, Prime Selidie crows with exhilar­ation, ‘Sisters, we’ve just been handed the demise of the compact, along with the downfall of Arithon s’Ffalenn…!’

  Spring 5923

  XIV. Conflagration

  The cloud cover broke as the sun crossed the zenith. A ray of spun gold sliced downwards through pine boughs and dissolved a whisper-thin thread of Shadow, which in turn snapped a small stay of binding. Arithon stirred. Aroused from the formless depths of sealed trance, he opened his eyes. A brief surge of dizziness lifted his mazed senses clear of the turpentine flow of spring sap.

  Then terror resurged with a graphic jolt and shredded the unnatural languor that shielded his warm-blooded orientation. He no longer knew the quietude of deep roots, or danced to the whispered song of jade needles, combed through by capricious wind. Awareness returned as a human fugitive, at present lodged forty feet above ground, lashed by the wrist to the trunk of an evergreen somewhere northwest of Scarpdale.

  The chase that drove him to that perilous refuge would not have slackened while he was immersed.

  A parched mouth and the cruel pinch to his belly su
ggested his torpor had lasted for days. How many? By the cyclical reckoning of the tree, Arithon counted three nights. Separated to analytical recall, he also recalled that the tap-roots beneath thrummed to no invasive animate vibration; nor had, for some time. Yet if armed searchers did not beat the immediate bushes to flush him, a watchful patrol might lurk in deep cover, poised in wait for the moment he stirred.

  That anxiety chafed Arithon less than the loss, torn past conscious reach by the rifts in his memory. The close threat of pursuit did not blind his heart. Yearning blazed up for her, whoever she was: his agonized passion stayed nameless. Arithon quenched his reckless urge to use tienelle to smoke out her elusive identity. If he tried, starved desire might blaze past his control, careless of all costs in consequence. As the irresistible lure, her very existence endangered his freedom. Yet to suppress the vital core of his attachment raised an ache that near strangled his heart-beat.

  Arithon shivered and expelled a wrung breath. Alert and rebalanced, he risked careful movement and unbuckled the belt, lashed in place to prevent an untoward fall. The effort tugged at the scabbed gash in his thigh, price of an archer’s blind shot through the dark just before the black stallion bore him beyond range. The wound hurt, but without the fever of infection, given the caustic sap from the pine smeared at need on his makeshift dressing.

  Arithon delved into his satchel, extracted a dry shred of willow bark, and chewed on the raw, bitter remedy. While the juice numbed the edge off his pain and eased the complaint of stiff muscles, he filtered the reach of initiate senses back into the pith of the tree. Not to sleep this time, but to tap into the flux and sound after the rushed counter-measures left engaged in his stop-gap effort to mislead the hunt.

  The first trick utilized the snatched floss from a pod, stripped on the run from a dried stalk of milkweed. A dab of his blood on the seeds had been fixed with the signal flare of his private affection, looped and amplified by a rune. The bits of fluffed down had sailed forth, simple constructs blown hither and yon by the wind. Such pig-simple spellwork – who had taught him to craft such? – had not fooled the skills of the temple’s talent diviner. But the brutal conjury that drove The Hatchet’s quartz construct whirled into conflicted circles, skewed awry by divergent attraction.

  Arithon’s cursory check found that his tinker’s ruse no longer functioned at strength: the grounding douse of a rain-shower had almost rinsed out the ephemeral markers. Nonetheless, the shrill ripples of martial frustration trammelled the ambient flux stream. Arguments and confusion divided his trackers, well to the south of his perch. Which meant The Hatchet’s lancers had split up in their rabid excitement and overshot the tree-top haven snatched here to foil the trackers’ dogs.

  The east-flank companies had not circled back. Surely only because he had left a clipped lock of his hair plaited into the stallion’s mane. That trick would divert the intrepid diviner, at least until a more active, true presence overwhelmed the falsified signal. Cautiously, the pine borrowed this time as a shield, Arithon eased his probe outward. Soon enough, he encountered his precision conjury laid down in actualized Paravian. Blessedly, still, that power yet knitted his dilute veil of Shadow about the loose animal: a cloaking dense enough to cause fear and mask that it no longer carried a rider. Canny spirit, the horse eluded the chase with the same manic glee that had lathered the war camp’s skilled grooms to annoyance.

  Arithon trembled with gratitude. Past question, the spirited stallion had spared him. Granted his respite to bid for escape, he slid off the branch and climbed downwards. Memory tickled: he had done this before. But the wooded knoll that hosted these evergreens lay matted with pungent, shed needles: not the snow blanket on gravel suggested in flickered recall, bounded by a choked winter stream. Here the warm earth wore the musk of new spring, though the turf underfoot had been just as viciously trampled by enemy destriers.

  Arithon stifled the flare of his yearning. Too risky, to seek out his prior experience since any spontaneous burst of high feeling might flag the vigilant diviner. His flight for survival hounded his nerves with an unpleasant sense of familiarity. Surely he had suffered such desperate straits through a man-hunt determined as this one. Stealth ruled his urgency as he crept to the verge of the trees and surveyed his limited prospects.

  Beyond the spindly fringe of stunt saplings, the flat landscape unrolled a mottled span of burlap brush. Gusts hissed through hummocks of briar and gorse, and tossed the clusters of scrub willows, stitched like yellow fringe at the seams of meandering, melt-swollen gulches. Small game could be snared there, and water offered the clearest of conduits to sound the surrounding flux currents. Arithon ventured downwind, tensed for signs of pursuit as he ducked between pockets of scanty cover.

  He laid traps for sustenance and tended his wound. Jumpy as a wild animal, he relied on initiate sensitivity to gauge the dedicates’ frenetic activity, then wrung his fickle, ancestral foresight to cast the bent of their movements into the future. The shifting shadows of probability showed his choices cut off on three sides, with the eastward course his best option.

  The breeze from that quarter wafted a sulphurous taint off the rugged waste of Scarpdale. The bubbling mud pots that riddled the volcanic seam at the Storlain foothills edged an unstable terrain, fraught with poisonous, opaline mineral pools and blow-holes that vented the steaming plumes of the geysers. A man on foot in that country could perish, scalded by the explosive seethe of the natural elements. But such hazards offered a back-handed advantage. Hounds scented poorly across heated ground tainted by brimstone and lava smoke. Danger also heightened uncertainty, pressure enough to exhaust oathsworn faith. Deprived of shelter and solace, the enemy war host could outreach its line of supply. If their quarry ran far enough to lure them astray, he might fray their endurance, perhaps even fracture their faith-based commitment.

  But the sudden bray of a horn crushed such opportune hope. Launched to instantaneous flight, Arithon bolted flat out across the desolate terrain. He ran, unaware how his passage had always been dogged, each twist and turn of the Sunwheel campaign played against him on puppet strings by his most dangerous enemy.

  Amid a trade caravan encamped alongside the dusty road north of Sanpashir, Elaira shut her eyes through a sudden onslaught of dizziness. Her white-knuckled grip scarcely salvaged her perch on the tail-board of a tinker’s wagon. As her jolted senses upended, the care-free squeals of the pot-mender’s raggedy children faded, overrun by the fierce awareness: of a wrenching, unbearable outcry for love lost, and passion that pierced with the quicksilver spurt of Arithon’s ungovernable longing…

  …alone in the desolation of Scarpdale, the Teir’s’Ffalenn gasped aloud. Either his exhaustive vigilance had slipped; or his unseen captors barraged him afresh. The strong jolts of desire that wrecked his control were spell-driven seekings unleashed by an enemy’s crystal aligned to run him to earth. Whoever she had been, dead or alive, her remembrance posed him a fatal liability.

  Arithon smothered his ruthless need and still failed to curb his raced heart-beat. Hard-pressed not to weep, too aware his position was compromised, he snatched up a willing, rough pebble and sequestered the blaze of his private emotion into its mineral matrix. Then he ran, desperate, until his lungs burned. The first ditch he found with a muddy streamlet dropped him onto his knees. He tossed the stone into the water. Prayed the sluggish current could clear the vivid imprint quickly enough to erase the damning, bright signature that his outburst of passion blazed into the flux.

  He moved on, pushed himself past exhaustion to distance the site since his fixated foes would be drawn like a magnet until the last trace ripple of his anguish faded…

  …the rip tide of the errant vision shattered, dispelled by the touch of someone’s warm hand. Elaira blinked, restored with a wrench to her proper orientation. Little time had elapsed. The tinker’s vivacious youngest, age two, charged on stumpy legs and sat down on the contested ball, a wad fashioned out of wound string. Her gleeful antic
fouled the game played with sticks by her elder brothers. Their whoops enlivened the day’s last sunlit hour, barraged by yipped barks as the camp dog tore free of two more rosy girls, who chased, squealing, into the rumpus.

  The gaunt father, who mended a broken tin lamp by the fire, kept whistling, long since deafened by their youthful exuberance. But his generous, black-eyed matron never missed anything. Her next oldest daughter stirred the forsaken supper pot while she attended the peaked distress of her female passenger. ‘Has our noise caused a headache? Might want to lie down. I’ll brew a tisane to ease you.’

  Elaira patched together her shredded poise. ‘No, thank you kindly. I’ll take care of myself.’ Before the good woman shouted to restrain her exuberant brood, the enchantress pushed off the wagon and stood. ‘Let the little ones play. A brisk walk ought to set me to rights.’

  The matron’s searching glance remained dubious. ‘I’ve marked your bouts of pallor for days. Might not be caused by the heat. You’re not bearing, dearie, are you?’

  Elaira laughed. ‘No. Beyond question.’ But a truthful note of aggrieved regret spiked through her casual humour.

  ‘Ah, well, you’re young yet,’ the matron sympathized. ‘You’ve got plenty of time in the world. There’s a little stream a short hop through the wood with a peaceful spot on the bank. Take my small copper kettle from the family chest. I’ll send one of my brats with a striker and kindling.’

  ‘My own pannikin will boil tea well enough.’ Elaira shouldered her satchel, anxious to duck the matron’s nosy solicitude. ‘Please don’t put your child to the trouble.’ She forced her unsteady knees to bear weight, then threaded her way past the raucous ball game and lost herself into the gaudy sprawl of parked wagons and picketed draught animals.