The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  Her torch spat sparks like thrown sequins. The rain laced a damascened fall off the drenched ends of her hair, her plain cuffs, and the layered hems of cloak and skirt. Her insistent rapping took a moment to be noticed. More seconds passed as voices declaimed inside, before a chair scraped and somebody moved to raise the latch. The portal creaked inward and faces peered out, sallow in the glow of cheap tallow dips, or brosy with drink and primed to proffer lewd comment.

  Elaira spoke first, her voice a steel ribbon through the background clamour of banging tin flagons and a buffeting roar of conversation. ‘Fetch your master.’

  Movement heaved through packed bodies. Arithon appeared, dishevelled from the press, his attentiveness masked behind inquiry.

  There’s been an accident to a fisherman!’ Elaira shouted through the scream of the gust that flagged her torch flame. ‘You’re needed.’

  Shadowed in the swoop of the draught, Arithon pulled in a careful breath. ‘You’re mistaken if you think I can help.’

  Behind the arm he held braced against the door jamb, two burly craftsmen elbowed each other and exchanged ribald leers. Hampered by the total lack of privacy, Arithon stepped into the rain and let the storm slam the door shut behind him. He said nothing more. The hard wind flogged his black hair into tangles, before the wet slashed the strands and bared his expression to the fickle rags of torch light.

  Presented with a wall, Elaira bent on him every power of observation she could wring from her Koriani arts. The gusts lagged for an instant. The recovered leap of the cresset showed him unmoving in the beat of the downpour; except the light dashed and flared across the abalone beads that weighted the ties of his shirt. His breathing was fast and unsteady. Through his hard-leashed control, the enchantress found no foothold to determine why he might meet her request for help with falsehood, or what hidden circumstance should fracture his mood in distress.

  As always when his reticence thwarted her, she met him head-on with plain honesty. ‘The boy who just married caught his wrist in a line during an attempt to strike sail. The damage is extensive. Broken bones, torn flesh and dislocation. Without arcane help, he’ll stay crippled. The union you just helped to celebrate in such joy will come to be dissolved.’

  Recoiled to astonishment, Arithon burst out, ‘But why?’

  ‘Local custom,’ Elaira said, disgusted. Despite his sympathy, she dared not give in to her urgency and grasp his arm to hasten him away from the chart shack. ‘Your masterbard’s training at law can’t cover every regional backwater. With regard to marriage, some places keep stubborn traditions. Shepherds’ enclaves in Vastmark shun women for lack of fertility. Settlements above Waterfork in Lithmere demand a tax to be paid before nuptials. For Merior, a bride’s father holds the right to nullify her contract at any time before her first childbirth if the match is ruled unfavourable. The law was first written to curb wife beating. Its practice has extended to include cases where a husband loses his livelihood. What chance does this boy have? And you saw the girl. She adores him.’

  Arithon s’Ffalenn stood a second longer, his features veiled in the drowning thunder of rainfall. Then he said, ‘Wait. I shall come.’ He pushed back inside, to return a minute later with the leather-wrapped bundle of his lyranthe.

  ‘Ath’s mercy!’ Elaira exclaimed, her patience torn through by his obstinacy. ‘It’s your mage-sight that boy requires, not any comfort drawn from music!’

  ‘For that, I’m sorry, rare lady.’ Arithon tucked her sodden fingers through his elbow and drew her into the darkness. ‘But since the battle on the banks of Tal Quorin, my bard’s gift is all I can offer.’

  ‘Can’t? Or won’t?’ Distraught and furious to believe he might obstruct her through some tangle of guilt-induced conscience, Elaira raised the flittering torch and let the light fall full on his face.

  His contact with her hand jerked away as he twisted, muscle meshed to bone in an anger not quite savage enough to mask a grief of immeasurable proportion. Through the thrash of storm wind and water, amid harried black puddles that seemed utterly to swallow the tormented flame above her fist, Elaira felt Koriani talent and intuitive instinct noose disparate memories into painful focus: Dakar, haranguing a man he believed to be vulnerable; then like hammered echo, the unnerving study Arithon had once subjected to a growing stalk of wild nightshade.

  More than blood had been sacrificed to Desh-thiere’s curse in the massacre at Tal Quorin, Elaira perceived in horrified discovery. Arithon s’Ffalenn had lost touch with his mage-bom talent. Transfixed by shared pity, she wrenched to a stop in her tracks.

  Arithon paused also, aggrieved enough to have laid flat all his defences. ‘Ei ciard’huinn,’ he said in lyric Paravian, which translated, I am exposed. ‘I could wish that Morriel shouldn’t know.’

  Appalled to concede just what she had forced him to betray, Elaira swallowed. Words failed. Apologies were useless. Numbed and uncaring if the sluiced wet on her cheeks held some droplets that fell hotly salted, she ached, sieved through by mute misery.

  His eyes brilliant green, his manner recaptured into calm that deferred all blame, Arithon pried the torch from her. He resettled the lyranthe’s strap across his shoulder, reached again, and recovered her chilled hand. ‘Rare lady, the grief is not yours. It’s hardly worth the lad’s future happiness.’

  His touch soothed back the drowned mass of her sleeve, found her wrist, then warmly closed and drew her onward. Through a stumbling succession of steps, she was forced from shocked stupor to react.

  ‘The gift of s’Ffalenn compassion will kill you,’ she snapped. ‘That’s not worth any lad’s happiness!’

  Through the dark, limned in demonic, snatched shadows by the claw of wild wind through the cresset, Arithon s’Ffalenn shook his head. ‘I’m not made up of divided parts, but a whole being flawed by Desh-thiere’s curse. What use to mourn? The trained gifts I abused to spare clansmen have enforced their own measure of protection.’

  Through their sodden, paired walk across the village, Elaira found nothing else to say.

  Forced to hard practicality at last, she broached the necessary question as she reached for her door latch. ‘Jinesse told me your bardic inspiration dissolved longstanding hatreds at Innish. But this healing will demand a weave far more powerful. I should never attempt it by myself. How good are you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Still as cut shadow against the stormrinsed shakes of her cottage, Arithon added, ‘Halliron died soon after I won through to my mastery. If my limits have yet to be sounded, at least, after Jaelot, we can expect there are true strengths to draw on.’

  ‘Tactfully put!’ In a less worried moment, Elaira might have laughed. ‘Though, Dharkaron’s Spear and Chariot, if I’m to risk losing my walls to a whirlwind of unmanaged powers, I could wish the night was a mild one.’

  She bashed open the door. Inside, under a draught-caught flutter of wax candles, the injured boy lay stretched on her worktable, clad still in his workaday oilskins. The floorboards beneath were streaked with rainwater and blood, the sandy prints of fishermen’s boots not yet lent time to dry. A weather-worn woman huddled on a stool alongside, her greying hair pinned up with basket straws. Fingers chapped red by a lifetime gutting fish for the salt barrels lay clasped in sleeves bedecked in an iridescent glimmer of shed cod scales.

  Elaira doused her torch in a bucket by the step, tossed off her drenched cloak and excused the relation directly. ‘You were kind to wait. I’ll send word the minute we have news.’

  The woman arose, pulled her knot-worked shawl over tired shoulders and asked in diffidence, ‘With your leave?’ At Elaira’s swift nod, she bent and kissed the boy on the cheek.

  A scraped breath of pain escaped him at even so tender a touch. ‘Go, Mother,’ he gasped through locked teeth. ‘Sit with my Elie and comfort her.’

  His lyranthe set aside, Arithon crossed to steady the woman as she stumbled, weeping, toward the threshold. He saw her safely out, latched the door, then peeled
off his shirt in a flicked scatter of droplets.

  ‘Use the towel on the hook by the basin.’ Elaira clasped the boy’s sound wrist to measure his pulse. Her clinical study took in his face, pallid as ambergris, then timed the thin rasp of his breathing.

  A half-second later, Arithon arrived, the towel slung over his bare shoulder.

  ‘I dare not dose him with soporifics,’ Elaira explained, her speech in Paravian to spare the boy from disheartenment. Too dangerous, with the body thrown this deep in shock.’

  Despite her involvement she could not escape the awareness of Arithon’s presence; of the warmth that radiated off his skin and his rock-steady calm. He moved after a moment. Warm hands gathered up her wet hair and blotted its drenched coils in the towel. Then, collected and firm, his fingers raked through and divided the wet strands, then plaited the rich mass into her usual neat braid.

  ‘You’ll need to see what you’re doing,’ he murmured in a musical, deep tone that stroked over wrought nerves like a tonic. He fished out a tie string from his cast-off cuff and knotted his work, then tossed the soaked towel on the stool.

  Elaira quivered through a long, wretched spasm and discovered the space to unbend screaming tension and relax.

  To the boy lying white-faced and bleeding, Arithon said, ‘Lad, I shall need to hear your name.’

  ‘The wedding,’ the boy gasped. ‘You played for me.’

  Attentive to the ruined limb lying cradled in its slit shreds of sleeve, a mangled mess of wrecked meat and bone beyond help of splint or compress, Arithon replied, ‘So I did. But knowing what you’re called is scarcely the same as the way you would say it yourself.’

  The boy heaved in another taxed breath and whispered his agonized answer. Arithon said something back in a murmur of syllables, too softly for Elaira to understand. Then he moved off a step, caught up his instrument and untied its storm-drenched wrapping.

  In Paravian, he added, ‘That’s a very ugly injury. The bones are too shattered to set. I presume you plan to draw his spirit from his body and knit the torn sinews by surgery?’

  ‘Surgery won’t be enough,’ Elaira gave terse reply. ‘I’ll have to set up a power field and sigils, to force a regeneration. The spells by their nature are cross-grained and difficult. We very well might lose him.’

  ‘Don’t even think that.’ Arithon reappropriated the stool and couched his shining instrument on his knee.

  A harmonic pealed through the rattle of freshened rain on the shingles. The wind’s sour moan wove in ragged refrain, then a spill of notes like dropped crystal, sliced by a tingling play of chords. One by one, fourteen fine strings were adjusted to stinging, true pitch.

  Then Arithon tested the mettle of his instrument as Elaira had never before heard him.

  The whining complaint of the gale seemed immediately diminished into distance. Braced by a framework of ringing, clear measures, Elaira fetched kindling and lit the brazier. With hands that shook less, she set clean water to boil. From her hampers she selected her stoppered flasks of tinctures, then patterned a ritual blessing to enhance the virtues of a chosen mix of restoratives: wild thyme and tansy to ward against infection; golden-rod and black bryony for poultice; betony and devil’s bit to speed healing; groundsel to slow bleeding and dittany to ease fever. In an unremarked moment between ordinary tasks, the trial flow of melodies reached a consummate perfection, then slid through a figured change of key.

  Heightened to preternatural focus by the sound, Elaira had no space to question the nature of the change that flowed through her. On a square of bleached linen, she shaped the sigils to deaden pain. Against the white cloth, in ordinary candlelight, the silver-weave mesh of the foundation spells took shape under her hands. The spiralled configuration of renewal grew in painstaking steps like linked chain. Each subsequent ward traced its own signature of energy, fine-drawn as silk from her fingertips. Where her own skills left off, the spell weave became snatched and quickened into resonance by the emergent, cascading harmonies that reeled from Arithon’s strings.

  Keyed by pure sound to primal potency, rune meshed to rune, the pale, phosphor glimmer of the set-seal at last joined complete and burned active in a fired surge of light. Through vision left fractured by welling, sudden tears, Elaira gasped, touched to awe. In perfected beauty to wound the imperfect mind, she saw the delicate interstice of her sigils bend into balance with the lyranthe chords, then lock against themselves and spark into flares of raised power.

  Channelled into depth by bardic talent, the refigured mystery of wards she had handled half her life spiralled into coils of contained force. The very air seemed to vibrate, its essence shaved thin, as if chiselled by frost or high altitude. The life-force that flowed through her veins and her bones felt recast to silk and white diamond.

  The impact on breathing flesh was too wild to sustain. Like a stress tear in tissue, her concentration wavered.

  Elaira cried out to warn that her art had slipped her grasp. Her hold on tuned energies buckled. The next instant would see her share in the work crumple in a roaring flashburn of backlash.

  Arithon murmured a Paravian encouragement. His limpid flow of music changed pitch.

  A soaring progression of chords razed the dross from her mind, firmed her courage, then whirled her to rarefied clarity. Resteadied in a step, then launched still further, into resharpened vision akin to the scope of a tienelle trance, Elaira clamped aching fingers to her temples. Scarcely able to breathe, she battled to ground the intensified nexus of awareness cast into her hands by a channel carved out of clean sound. Whirled into trance, inspired to join the musician’s lightning dance and pair her energies to a limitless flight of skeined song, she let go and rode the wave of her instincts.

  She came back to herself on her knees, chalk in hand.

  Where each patterning had started and finished, she held no clear memory. Yet the figured circles now blazed complete under her hands: of watch and protection, each safeguard to cradle a spirit drawn out of the flesh.

  The alien, vital splendour of her handiwork and Arithon’s shimmered in joined vibration, to etch weary sight and half-blind her.

  Shaking, Elaira recouped scattered wits and arose. She lit beeswax candles to mark the major points of the compass. Peril stalked her. The cottage was a vessel aflood in roused power. Sharp currents nicked over her skin and jagged sparks from the lyranthe’s silver strings. The four walls enclosed a space etched in vibrant, poised arrows of dire force. Now she dared not suffer misstep. The parameters she trod were unforgiving. Arithon also must not fail to be aware that his slightest slipped note might strike a dissonant tangent and lash up a lawless burst of ruin.

  The gale outside seemed faded to insignificance, the drumroll of wind-driven downpour made deadened as if swathed under a caul. Lapped in thick shadow, the musician bent over his lyranthe, arched fingers a flying, deft dance over frets nicked gold in tepid flame light. Drawn on by his knife-edged harmonics, teased by rolling roulades of bright chords, the forces that gouged the wild limits of chaos were coaxed stable, then teased into balance.

  Then the bard raised his head and locked eyes with the enchantress whose gifts interleaved with his music.

  The contact set off a small shock, a prick like a needle through fire. Elaira sensed in advance the precise instant when Arithon flattened his hand and silenced the ringing call of his strings; melded in wordless awareness, she felt every barrier and bulwark of the mind shred between them.

  No wall remained.

  The art that his masterbard’s skill had seized into resonance had been her own, made malleable like metal in a crucible, then recast to intensified vibration. The drawing force of the music had fused their two spirits into a single current.

  Afraid to move, hurled beyond the tears that ached to be shed, Elaira stood transfixed, his touch softly still in her mind. The unveiled compassion in the contact stopped her breath; would through sheer force have felled her, had the lyranthe not spoken again.


  The measures woven now shaped a clear affirmation, notes layered into patterns that invoked Name. Compounded through remembered strictures from his mage training, and the deepest gift of bardic empathy, Arithon recaptured in song the essence of the boy’s self-perception.

  This he framed into a mirror turned inward against itself.

  To theme, he added slow, tolling chords to lull the mind. Coaxed past reach of worldly pain, the injured boy on the table eased into sleep. The lyranthe cajoled, then beckoned, each progression of chords netted into beguiling illusion that lured the tranced spirit and enfolded it in a clarion blanket of ecstasy.

  Led to stunned awe by the sensitivity of Arithon’s perception, shown wonders through the vision of trance state, Elaira saw tight-laced bundles of notes strike and winnow the uncertain air. The forged lines of power called forth from bare elements unreeled into ribbons of refined light. Blind to his own gifts, the bard perceived none of the form wrought by his genius. He played on by instinct to fashion a spell as unerring as any construct brought to focus by a master of magecraft.

  Arms hugged to her chest, Elaira endured the precise, tearing force as vibrations pealed out like fine wire to halter the boy’s stunned consciousness. She watched the musician draw, like thorns from bleeding flesh, the life essence out of breathing tissue.

  A snap cracked the room.

  Her spell circle flared like wind-fanned coals. Each painstaking sigil blazed and closed fast, to contain the unmoored spirit of the boy.

  The bard’s line of melody trod one last measure, then dwindled away into silence. A fearful weight of leashed force charged the cottage. All that tied the boy to the vacant housing of his body was a filament spanned over oblivion, less tangible than a spun thread of thought.

  ‘Merciful Ath,’ Elaira cried on a scraped whisper.

  She had witnessed spells cast by senior enchantresses, through crystal resonance and amplified alignment; she had studied under healers in the greatest hospice in Athera, but nothing in her grasp of the mysteries prepared her for the frightful turn of mastery Arithon had shaped and then strung to binding ties through an intuitive rendition of pure melody.