by Janny Wurts
Elaira shuddered, wrung in the crushed turbulence of his emotion as her beloved divested himself of his blades and stepped from the smoke-house in surrender. His own, or hers, the sense of suffocation and bleak foreboding? The hour felt lidded in darkness, each movement sealed in jet glass. Again blindfolded by Vivet’s possessive touch, Arithon resigned himself to the escort of four Ettinmen, three padding a wolf’s pack tread at his heels, with his bound wrists leashed to one in the lead. Their route skirted the nearby settlement, chased by snarling dogs and breezes sooted with woodsmoke from an open-air spit.
No offered meal assuaged Arithon’s hunger. Beyond water, no comfort had eased him. Tired, light-headed, discomposed, and ungroomed, he stumbled over a rootlet.
The cascade of connection wavered and broke. Dissipated, the thread of rapport frayed away in the thrash of the Storlain flux currents …
Elaira surfaced, enraged. Discipline shredded, she pounded the dusty ground with her fists. “Fight them!” she gasped. “Sweet man, for your own sake, and mine, lose your temper and damn that brazen hussy to the fruits of her own devices!”
Yet Arithon would not. Torbrand’s legacy bound him to wretched silence. Elaira bowed her head, overcome. “Don’t fall to the flaw that killed King Kamridian,” she pleaded, undone by enforced separation. Arithon would not hear: had in his past hour of desperate peril cut off his recall of her steadfast partnership. Lost at this terrible crux, the counterbalance that once shielded him from the inborn flaws of his character.
Elaira plumbed the bleak pain that stifled his innate perception. She knew, oh, she knew! the ache was sourced in the agony of her absence. Heart and spirit, she raged at her helplessness. For female instinct screamed warning that the hidden cost might impact far more than a child survivor and a vain woman’s dishonour.
That same night in the deeps of Halwythwood, the clan seeress retired, worn after three days spent in trance. Her arduous effort had unearthed no meaningful insight to suggest Prince Arithon’s whereabouts. Talented resource stayed stymied, while blood-letting change whetted the Canon doctrine for death, and choked Etarra with dedicate troops.
The danger of inaction chafed tempers, with the Earl of the North and Iyat-thos Tarens faced off like male wyverns, scales bristled in territorial challenge.
Big men, too well matched to cross steel without the risk of crippling injury, they hammered out their contention with practice sticks, each bout fought to a ferocious draw. Both were left wincing and mottled with bruises. Yet Cosach’s imperative question was satisfied, that Jieret’s skilled legacy left Tarens no weakness in training at arms. Measured through Jieret’s perspective, in turn, the realm’s current caithdein lacked the ruthless years of survival under persecution. Battered to welts, Tarens allowed the brute strength of the man’s constitution was not deficient.
Other arenas stayed open to challenge. The scouts’ dismissive regard for all town-born sparked the latest: a test of the upstart guest’s mettle through a knock-down contest at drink. Cosach pranced over his wife’s objections. To blindside his impressionable heir, and side-step her complaint that the boisterous noise would aggravate their teething infant, he sited the affray on the grassy knoll carved out by the meandering Willowbrook. There, where the summer crowns of the oaks wore tiaras of constellations, Rathain’s caithdein and his fettlesome rival took opposite seats at a massive table, hewn from a fallen tree ancient enough to be known by Name to the lost centaur guardians.
Between chieftain and guest, clumped like rain-sprouted fungus, spread the hoarded stash turned out of bunks, chests, and blanket rolls. In casks, corked bottles, and heirloom flasks, a liquid banquet for inebriation: beer, cider, honey mead, and cherry brandy, and worse, the evil, colourless poison that generations of hung-over misery had dubbed Dharkaron’s Redress. The raucous scouts crowded the stream-bank as witnesses. They tousled Tarens’s cropped hair while the merry fellow appointed as arbiter presented two ram’s horn flagons.
The antique rims were embossed with silver. Ornamental knobs at the pointed ends spurned the practicality of a flat base. The curved vessels might be rested upside down, but only if they were emptied.
“All right, listen up, hear the rules!” The gleeful speaker addressed the contestants. “The contest opens with beer. You’ll match drinks with your rival, flagon for flagon. Once you get sodden and can’t hold your piss, first penalty switches your refill to honey mead. The second time you void your bladder, you’ll step up to brandy. White spirits, third round, if you haven’t puked. Whoever heaves up his guts first or falls senseless becomes the loser.” Enthusiastic, he walloped the townsman’s back. “Accepted, Iyat-thos? Then cross wrists in a double handshake with Earl Cosach to seal your sober agreement.”
“Might we have an arbiter who’s not staggering soused?” To hooted laughter, Tarens shared a farmer’s ham-handed grip with the caithdein’s nutcracker fists. He hefted the cavernous flagon pressed on him, surrounded by ribald advice and reproof. A petite female scout wearing an acorn strung on a hoop earring tapped the selected cask, to the chink of coin placed on last-minute wagers.
“You’re all barking mad,” Tarens mused, while a prankster poured beer till the head foamed over his wrist. “This is how a rag-sop caithdein steers the kingdom’s affairs during royalty’s absence?”
But upright duty cut no bait with Cosach. “Case in point, swear that your unnatural memory doesn’t play devil’s advocate. In his time, Earl Jieret dumped the realm’s woes on his captain, Sidir. This occurred more than once, even while the clans were beset. Claim my ancestor didn’t chase Arithon’s shirttails and drag his Grace by the scruff out of fatal trouble.”
“Your cantankerous forebear succeeded,” said Tarens, and licked off his dripping fingers. “By his proven experience, I’m better equipped to shake your prince back to his senses.”
Provided, forbye, that anyone could. The impasse that dead-locked the quarrel was that nobody knew where to look. The search for a desperately hunted man, damned to fire and sword by the Canon, could not light off for the hinterlands without direction. Given the seeress had scried herself blank, theory argued his Grace had holed up in the most forbidding terrain on the continent.
“If Prince Arithon’s gone to ground in the Storlains, he won’t be found till he shows himself.” Cosach flourished his brimming horn. “Dharkaron avenge and Sithaer take the hindmost!” Flint eyes level, he blew off a splatter of froth, then chugged down the contents. “Jieret,” he declared as he clapped the drained cup bottoms up on the trestle, “never tested his skills in that benighted country.” A back-handed swipe of his soaked moustache bared the gleam of pearl teeth. “The place is a botched mess of radical currents. Our talent hunters can’t track wounded game through the griped flux in those ranges.”
“That may well be,” Tarens allowed, and drained his own vessel as smartly. Knowledge derived from the past chieftain’s identity validated Cosach’s objection. “Yet I say you’ve never brangled with Rathain’s royal blood-line in person. Kiss yon rabbit’s foot on the hilt of your eating knife. If you wear that for luck, you’re going to need it.”
Cosach belched behind a clamped fist. “The fuzzy token’s a gift from my sister. I wear the toy because she’s a shrew. Apt to notch the man’s ears who tries to dine with a war blade at her table. And did I hear you wrong? You’ve dared suggest I’m no match for a runt who stands barely chest high to a stripling?”
“Yes,” Tarens said, straight-faced.
“Then you’re mushy as pudding!” Cosach waved to hasten the refill, while to Iyat-thos, he demurred, “Caught in a scrap with his Grace, I’d whack his sovereign head with a stick and drag him senseless by the heels. Which question begs asking. Why didn’t you?”
“Because,” Tarens snapped, “just like you’re doing now, I stopped my ears with the bone-brained notion I knew better than Jieret’s instincts. You won’t blindside his Grace by brute force. He’ll foul your plan while you go for your club an
d be elsewhere before you can swing.”
As the side-lines chorus devolved to a chant for more drink, and a grizzled brute with a badger-pelt jerkin moved to oblige, Tarens stabbed back, “Who’s grown soft, besides? Under Jieret’s hard wisdom, you should burn down your lodge. Do away with the comfort of cabins, before the Light’s campaign to scour Halwythwood makes your people a sitting target.”
“Dismantle the outpost?” Cosach pounded the boards. “Only after I’m senseless! Defeat me, and by rights, you might pitch that besotted idea to our council. I’d have to be laid out unconscious, first. Else while you’re flensed for the barbaric sentiment, Jalienne would eviscerate me.”
“Fall quick, then,” quipped Tarens. “I don’t fear your wife.”
“Merciful Ath! The more fool you, fellow.” Cosach beckoned the cup-bearer on, while a mirthful companion, gleaming with knives, hefted the beer cask and poured.
Tarens held no illusions. Something uncanny bothered his instincts: unease prickled his skin as he raised the next round. Whether for an unknown threat to his liege, or if the boisterous horse-play at hand masked untoward animosity, Jieret’s heritage as a Sight-sensitive talent lent no edge in the present arena. The legendary past chieftain had not been a hard drinker. No secret, apparently, since the on-going odds stacked fast in Cosach’s favour. Tarens prayed for his brother Efflin’s bone head, while dread worm-holed his gut at the unlucky prospect of failure.
To best his rival before he succumbed, he would cheat for bald-faced necessity.
The raptor’s gleam in Cosach’s eyes suggested he angled to muscle the victory, himself. Surrounded by wolves, Tarens needled, “The fatal flaw lies with the inbred drive of Rathain’s crown lineage.” He demolished his portion and banged down his horn. “Your prince can’t escape his compassionate empathy.”
Cosach belted off his share in turn. “That’s your lame excuse for the fact he shed your escort straight off?”
“Acknowledge the weakness,” Tarens attacked. “If not, you leave his Grace’s back exposed to his enemies.”
The grin Cosach returned showed contempt. “I’d correct your limited grasp of royal history. In this very glen, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn once built a gentle stay for his woman that required Fellowship might to unravel. He’ll protect his own interests if he has a mind.”
Tarens bucked the High Earl’s opinion in earnest, while the flagons were topped for the third time. “Before Arithon regains his full memory and recoups the informed mastery to raise such a warding, someone’s human frailty will flush him from cover.”
“That’s why we’re drinking,” Cosach declaimed. Yet the breath he drew for rejoinder stalled as he fumbled his grasp on his cup.
Splattered by spilled beer, Tarens gained only that instant of warning before vertigo up-ended his balance also. His awareness unravelled: no dizzy rush from inebriation. The surrounding forest appeared etched in light just before the night split under what felt like the shock of a thunderbolt. He sensed fear in the bystanders’ dumbfounded shouts. Then the stretched cloth of his cognizance burst. He plunged, wheeling, into the throes of tranced Sight, envisioned through Arithon’s experience …
… in a closed space heated by a cedar fire, rough hands snatched off the blindfold. Blinking, annoyed, he stood amid expectant quiet in a round log building. Facing him, a row of inimical elders perched like mushrooms on squat hide hassocks. Men and old women, each wore a ceremonial mantle stitched with feathers. Greased hair dangled from conical hats, the felt brims pinned with wheat cockades. A wizened shaman at the centre presided. Thin and unkempt as knotted string, his shaved head wore a crust of dun-coloured clay. Bird-black eyes glared from rims of eldritch red paint, and his shoulders were draped with a cape that stylized a mountain raptor.
Magic coiled here, uncanny and sere as an icicle shot through a hot spring.
Trapped in an amber-tinged moment of dream, Tarens felt Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn draw in a wary, taxed breath. Leashed rage burned as, before those uncanny witnesses, he swore a binding oath that seared his spirit to inward revolt …
… Sighted unconsciousness rippled. Tarens resurfaced to open air, seized in shocked silence. Flat on damp earth, bathed in sweat and trembling, he breathed in the musk scent of Halwythwood’s summer oaks and strove to steady his senses. Sobered faces bent over him. No longer ribald, the sturdy scout who had shouldered the cask knelt in shaken concern.
“Are you with us, Iyat-thos?”
“What happened?” Tarens demanded, confused. “That wasn’t the after-effects of strong drink.”
“An event woke the mysteries and tore through the veil,” murmured someone in tremulous awe.
Before explanation, a bullish intrusion elbowed the stunned onlookers aside.
“You received a tranced vision?” Earl Cosach accosted. “What did you see?”
Propped up by earnest hands, Tarens came back to his wits before the chieftain’s glowering presence. “Why did his Grace raise the wardings over this glen?” When no one answered, he pressed, “Earl Jieret was mage-bound to our liege. Whatever just happened, if the ripple twisting the flux cast an echo, I need to know the connection!”
Cosach folded his arms and reluctantly qualified. “Here, long ago, his Grace was said to lie with his beloved. The union begun was the first, and not consummate. Yet legend and our historical record confirm the couple’s twined passion awakened the mysteries. The linked spirits of the crown prince and his mate excited the land’s electromagnetics and unleashed a grand confluence. The upshift in resonance retuned the octaves this side of the veil. All reactive connections since then are more volatile. Possibly the event you experienced was provoked by a harmonic connection.”
“I dreaded as much.” Tarens covered his face, his anguish muffled through tensioned fingers. “But the fragmented view I received hasn’t disclosed the meaningful impact.”
“What did you observe?” Cosach repeated more gently. “I sensed that his Grace was held in duress. But the impression arose without context.”
Tarens shuddered and bared his flushed features. “If I saw true, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn has just willingly sworn a binding oath under an arcane power.” Burdened with grief, the crofter described the outlandish scene in detail.
Mention of the shaman in black scalded Cosach to swearing alarm. “Ath preserve, those wily creatures are Ettinmen! A tribal culture tucked up in the Storlains, ferocious as rabid weasels and inbred to the verge of stark madness. Their sentries use buzzards for scout’s eyes, did you know? Besides the unsavoury fact that they murder strangers on sight, they serve their retribution by ritual butchery. They could be holding our prince for a barbaric rite of execution!”
“No,” Tarens assured. “I gathered our liege is not under threat.” Muddled with drink and fretful unease, he sought the comfort of back-handed assets. “If the Ettin society is defensively insular, they’re unlikely to sell his Grace out to enemies, or welcome a dedicate invasion sent into their midst by the True Sect priests.”
“They’d skewer our peaceful emissary as readily.” Cosach fingered the dagger struck through his belt. “Don’t think you’d fare any better as town-born. Those savages desecrate their human kills. String the flayed carcasses over the cliffs for their pet vultures to feed on the carrion.”
Tarens offered a hand to the Halwythwood chieftain, grateful this once for the aggressive strength that steadied him onto his feet. “Then we have little choice but to fashion a plan to draw Arithon away.”
Legs braced to offset the surfeit of beer, Cosach shut his eyes in morose forbearance. “I would sooner dig my own grave with bare hands! But in fact, we need help from that gormless worm of a traitor.”
“Dakar?” quipped one of the by-standing scouts. “You want the raunch wastrel shaken down?”
Cosach grimaced. “First we have to find him. Much as the prospect pains me, that spellbinder’s the only spirit we have who might know what caused tonight’s rip in the veil.
More, if we have to twist his fat arms and spit him over a bonfire, he’ll serve us with the arcane tricks to blindside the hexed birds that keep watch for the Ettinmen.”
In cold-sober fact, the Mad Prophet would fight tooth and nail before crossing his path with Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn. Although a slow death by roasting seemed preferable did not mean fate granted him a blind eye. Always, his fickle penchant for augury upset his bone-deep cowardice. Where other seers lost their faculties in the static clouding the Storlain flux stream, the discredited master spellbinder sprawled in the gutter, naked and helplessly wrestling to stifle the torrent of unwanted vision.
Ratted out by a doxie, brow-beaten with threats, he cringed at the feet of a furious pimp outside the whore-house in Backwater. “Be off!” The ignoramus tossed Dakar’s shucked clothing after him. “I won’t peddle my girls to dark-mongering devils! Or risk them to the horrors of death rituals and evil practice!”
The spellbinder rolled clear of a puddle of horse-piss. Draped in flung cloth like a ragman, and pinked by the gravel paving, he cradled his splitting headache and winced. Since the region as yet had no temple faction frothing to burn suspect talent, he gave injured tongue in retort. “Crazy jape! Look past the ripe nuggets plucked out of your arse! I have nothing to do with black arts or necromancy.”
“Eternal Light burn your spirit, I’ll hear no more lies!” The bawdy-house rooster slammed his door with a boom that cracked echoes down the lake-front alley. In final retort from a top-storey window, the dainty hands lately prised off Dakar’s pleased flesh jettisoned his orphaned boots. The scuffed footwear plummeted, streaming the tongues of his hose, and thwacked into his hunched shoulders.
Which abuse failed to stem his Sighted view of the disaster unfolding in the high Storlains. Dakar cursed the spiteful doxie with a venom she scarcely deserved. She had not disparaged his prowess in bed, at least until his outburst in actualized Paravian ignited the mattress beneath them. The shocking disruption had done little good: his barrage of Sighted talent continued apace. Better the footwear had knocked him unconscious than to bear further witness to Arithon’s straits.