The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Rare lady,’ he answered in response to shocked thought. ‘Have you not guessed? Your vision itself was my sounding board.’

  Through a ripped hitch of breath, meaning reached her: his mind was with her still, a bright, steely line sheathed deep inside her awareness. Hand in glove with that presence, she saw beyond the veil, past the privacy he kept before every man living.

  Shattered in reaction, then answered warp through weft by response like a peal of wild harmony, Elaira felt the tuned chord inside her arise to accept its perfect match.

  She understood unequivocally and finally, that the conduit forming the bridge to the man was emotion: affection of equal depth and breadth to the regard she already held for him. She saw the love he had systematically, even ruthlessly stifled before the damning assumption that her interest was no more than a ploy arranged by Morriel Prime to track his personal affairs.

  Elaira had no chance to savour the exultation of their mutual rapport.

  All wonderment became reft from the moment by need: the injured boy’s condition was too critical to suffer even the smallest delay.

  Years in the healers’ wards had shown how the diurnal shift in the mysteries could blur all boundaries. The bindings between spirit and flesh lay the weakest while the balance between dark and dawn hung poised on the axial turn of the earth. Through the nadir of night, the mortally ill were most wont to strike fleshly ties and pass beneath Daelion’s Wheel.

  If the boy on her table was to survive, her work must be prompt and precise.

  Elaira bludgeoned stunned wits back to sharpness. With her spell crystal cupped between her damp palms, she bent once again to her invalid. The damage looked all the more daunting for the boy’s scarce-breathing flesh. From Arithon she borrowed the courage to ignore the clamour of better sense, that for prudence and safety, such a mass of mangled tissue should be dressed out for a clean amputation.

  Nothing if not stubborn, whipped on by the cry of her heart for the waste of a life at the threshold of uselessness, Elaira hurled her will through the core of her crystal’s white focus. For whatever end, she shouldered the supreme risk and began the arduous course to align sigils with seals, then pair their arcane forces with the properties of herbs to rebuild the boy’s mangled wrist.

  Bone, blood, muscle and cartilage, each required separate sets of spells. The delicate flux of forces brought to bear must align to match the body’s own magnetism.

  Elaira scarcely marked the moment when music first partnered her efforts.

  But when her hand trembled in closing a difficult sigil, a chord rang out to steady her. If her heart sped in fear, if strain threatened to crack her for the complex flux she must guide by trance through her spell crystal, reassurance pealed back and enfolded her in a shower of calming notes. Again and again her disciplined suspension was annealed through the focus of Arithon’s playing.

  The miracle shimmered through air and through flesh. As slivered bits of bone were slotted one into another like puzzle pieces, then stapled in place with fine magic, perfection ruled every move. Like a construct of engineered geometry, Elaira held her grasp on the multi-layered balance of spells. The bard’s gift sustained her hands and her mind as she reconstructed ripped cartilage and restored the ligaments to rebind each disarranged wrist bone. Her sight did not blur through meticulous removal of flayed bits of rope fibre, any one of which might seed a lethal infection.

  Then each vein and capillary had to be refigured; riven sinew repaved in light-tracks to reconnect the ends of sheared nerves. Tendons must be sewn whole, and frayed muscles drawn together in painstaking rows of gut stitches. Elaira toiled on in agonized concentration. Sweat dewed her temples and rolled down her jaw. Yet the needle in her fingers did not slip that a dancing, merry measure did not shepherd her back to dexterity.

  Sweet melody braced her still as she slathered the closed wounds in poultice paste and bound on splints and clean bandages.

  The candles by then had burned low. In shadows that flickered to each breath of draught, Elaira pushed herself unsteadily erect. She snuffed the wax lights on the spell circles. Tired beyond grace, strained past clear thought, she fumbled and found her reed broom and dusted away the grand axis that sealed the power in the ritual chalk lines.

  Still tranced through the lattice of her spell crystal, her consciousness moved in mage-sight. As pent forces and stay-spells gave way, a sound like rent fabric sheared across the throb of blood in her ears. The wards burst asunder and the spirit bound captive reeled free.

  Seconds passed, measured in uncertain terror, that flesh might cease effort, unquickened. Then the boy on the table stirred and moaned.

  Elaira felt the breath reel out of her. She slid to her knees, lost to dizziness. This time, no music leaped to ease her. She found herself too drained to rise, too spent to insist that the invalid stay quiet while she mixed the necessary draught to bring sleep. The enchantress buried her face in laced hands, unstrung by a running fit of trembling.

  The boy could die yet. She wept for frustration as exhaustion yawned an impossible gulf between what was needed, and a vacuum that sucked away energy.

  Too late, too faintly, a gilded play of lyranthe notes rocked through the span of stilled air. Elaira struggled to rise and recover the willpower to match them.

  Failure dragged her down. The grand nets of harmony seemed frayed beyond reach, diminished and tinny with distance.

  Pressed by the fogs of unconsciousness, she grasped after the bard’s measures and understood: his melody was not tuned for her after all. The irresistible call of each fretted chord was pitched to settle suffering and smooth her patient into sleep.

  Elaira thrashed against the honeyed compulsion to surrender all ties to awareness. Arithon must not be abandoned with the burden of securing the boy’s weakened life signs. Hours would pass before his body stabilized from the fluxes of a major, forced healing. But thought bled away in a fierce, sucking rush. Thrashed by the demands of channelled power, bruised by the after-tides of a backlash too savage to grapple, the enchantress collapsed against the grain of cold floorboards, beaten down into darkest oblivion.

  The febrile flutter of a single candle became the first harbinger of an awareness that returned in slow stages. Her lashes cracked open. Still set adrift in a welter of confusion, Elaira clung to that pinpoint of light. She sensed like an odd and unwonted peal of sorrow the silent absence of a melody.

  As stunned senses rearranged to sustain reason, she pieced together bits from her surroundings: the storm had abated to a fitful splash of droplets off the shingled cedar of the eaves. The shutters of her bedchamber, swung and latched open, let in the raw thunder of the breakers churned up by strong winds. Each contrary draught came freighted with smells of salt and tidewrack and soaked foliage.

  A solitary cricket rasped from the cranny behind her clothes chest. Its song sounded racked out of true, a coarse intrusion after the masterful play on fret and string that had beguiled her spellcraft in sweet-ringing waves to new heights.

  Best not to recall that partnership too clearly; Elaira squeezed her eyes closed. The sting of loss lanced her, regardless.

  The grinding, dull throb of taxed nerves released her one limb at a time. She noticed she lay half-supine on her pallet. A warmth beneath her cheek held a scent of clean skin and the muffled rhythm of another heartbeat. Snapped back on a breath to full consciousness, Elaira came aware that she rested in the circle of Arithon’s arms.

  He had not taken time to retrieve his damp shirt. The same hands that had commanded the lyranthe to high art cradled her cheek and her waist. The disfiguring scars on his wrists were left unabashed in plain view. His hips were twisted underneath her, his bare feet still braced on the floorboards; as if he had sat, her weight borne in his arms, with intent to settle her to rest.

  And a phrase, not her own, rose and burst across her thoughts: some temptations could be too sweet.

  Languid in the throes of exhaustion, Elaira absor
bed the possibility an empathic link might still be in place between herself and the Shadow Master. The spells they had handled in paired resonance had been strong ones. The aftershocks to the mind could hitch and start in a thousand unpredictable directions.

  Content with inclinations left in harmony with his, she melted to the pleasure he drew from this brief, stolen moment: the comfort of her body secure within his care, her narrow, lean limbs folded neatly.

  Man and prince and musician knew peace. Arithon held in the tender awareness that this happiness might never come again.

  Elaira cherished each detail along with him. The rich, auburn hair he had braided while wet now spread, combed and shining, to mantle her shoulders. No drag of wet skirts weighted her ankles, only the nap of a blanket. Underneath, she wore very little beyond the linen of her shift.

  A kinetic sense of her wakening must have reached him.

  ‘Elaira?’ Arithon inquired, softer than a sigh. ‘The lad rests quietly. Forgive me, but for you, I had to stay to be certain. Someone had to watch over your recovery.’

  A frown marred Elaira’s forehead, for his need to excuse what was obvious: had she failed to awaken from this backlash on her own, he alone held the masterbard’s talents required to revitalize spirit with flesh. The initiates of Ath’s Brotherhood owned the knowledge to help, but her collapse was immediate and their hostel lay leagues down the road.

  Arithon had ignored no contingency. His lyranthe lay as he had left her, leaned against the wall by the headboard and ready to his hand if need required. The filaments of fourteen silvered strings scribed lines in reflection, captured intact from the candleflame.

  Delivered into warmth from the haze of oblivion, Elaira realized another thing. Arithon s’Ffalenn had never before spoken her name while alone in her presence. That belated recognition shot a prickle of reaction clear through her.

  Attuned to the uneven catch to her breathing, Arithon lifted his hand from her waist. As he had many times through the hours of the night, he trailed reverent fingers through her hair to smooth an unruly wisp from her temple.

  The barest taut frisson knit the length of her back in response. A sound of dismay escaped him; as though he willed her to stay peaceful in her daze, and felt deprived by the speed of her recovery.

  Elaira could have laughed in that moment for sheer joy. His presence of itself had called her back, as no other living spirit ever could.

  Then event caught up with reality. Imprinted against the sounding board of his body, she felt him gather himself tense, to disengage and rise at once. Her plea escaped before thought. ‘Please stay.’

  His words viced to indifference, Arithon said, ‘Lady, I’m relieved to see you waken. On my way, I’ll send Jinesse to attend you.’

  The desperate force of will in his effort to pull free shuddered through the contact between them. An awful, uglier truth arched across their tuned empathy: that what feeling he had would be denied out of self-preservation. He still believed her interest was false, created on command by Koriani aim to manipulate him.

  And anger shocked through Elaira like white fire, that her attraction had been genuine long and long before Morriel’s hideous plotting had seized on her love as a gambit. This she determined to let him see, before the consequences ruined them both.

  Strong, sun-browned from her long days of foraging, Elaira stirred against his move to rise. She pressed him back and looked up, and locked his gaze with her own. ‘Before Ath, before life, I love you. That’s been true, I think, since a rash escapade led to a hayloft in an inn yard.’

  She had just one moment to realize how weary he was himself, and how ill-prepared. No defence did he have, no ready barrier, as she moved in his arms, then closed the embrace and laid her lips against his in surrender.

  An immediate quiver lanced through him. The hands at her back closed hard and locked. His kiss met hers in a riptide of unleashed passion. Scalded, consumed, uplifted, exalted, for the unforgettable space of a heartbeat they were one flesh and one mind. The harmony between them stopped thought and waived every limiting fear for the future.

  Then Arithon s’Ffalenn made a sound like a man lashed to torture.

  His head turned, broke her hold and snapped aside. He jerked upright in a wildcat recoil, as a creature roped down for the knife might escape its deathblow in a slaughter pen.

  ‘Ath, oh Ath!’ he gasped, his voice broken.

  Elaira sought his expression, and saw the face of a man betrayed.

  Her own pain re-echoed in devastated imprint, she saw his eyes, stretched wide and bleak in the candlelight as he forced his breath back into stopped lungs. ‘What have I done? Dharkaron show us both mercy, your feelings are as mine, and I thought Morriel had sent you!’

  Pinned on the prongs of that ugly, dual truth, Elaira lost words. She had spirit in her only to endorse the more truthful obligation. Spurred by the overriding cry of her heart, she raised a hand in comfort to cup the side of his face.

  Her touch never connected.

  A whirlwind of motion heaved her up, flung her back. Arithon’s hands turned wholly ruthless as he twisted out from underneath her. Discarded in a shivering heap upon the bed, Elaira clawed back tumbled hair and blinked to clear her vision from a ruinous, blinding fall of tears.

  She never heard his step cross the room. But his pose said all his speech could not: back turned, head bent, his expressive fingers fanned in white outline against the board wall, while his shirtless body was raked and raked over in wretched, quivering spasms.

  ‘Don’t come,’ he forced out as he sensed her intent to arise.

  The slithering fall of the blanket turned informer, or maybe the shift of air across his skin: she would disregard his plea. This time, he would be pressured too far. Integrity, joy, the bright, tragic fabric of the miracle shared between them would unstring all of his control. ‘Don’t come. I beg you, for your life’s sake, don’t.’

  ‘For my life?’ Elaira gasped. Her surprise yawned as wide as the night that pressed inward, to drown the failing candle on its stand. ‘Beloved, what is there of me that is not yours before anything?’ She advanced a step toward him, and the creak of a loose floorboard seemed to peel his raw nerves and wring out a drawn, silent scream.

  The next second, her raised hand would touch him.

  He sucked an agonized breath, then in scalpel sharp diction, launched into flat recitation: ‘All states of fleshly desire to renounce, this I vow. All ties of the heart, of family, of husband and lover to put aside, this I vow.’

  Elaira stopped, stunned, between steps.

  The words fell and chilled her, unflinching as steel sliced through a fall of running water, and familiar: hatefully abhorrent to the last, most damning consonant. Arithon gave her, line by line from a masterbard’s knowledge of law, the binding oath sworn by a Koriani initiate over the Prime’s master crystal.

  The phrases continued, implacable. ‘And should I weaken or falter and come to forswear my commitment, all that I am shall be forfeit, body and mind. This I vow, no witness beyond the Prime Circle, no arbiter beyond the crystal matrix into which I surrender my Name and my imprint as surety through all my living days.’

  There came a space, rasped to dissonance by the chirp of the cricket.

  Elaira masked her face and muffled her ears, helpless. She could not escape fate. No move forward was possible, now, even to unman him, even to defeat the unassailable integrity that acted in sacrifice to spare her: not without admitting that her Prime Matriarch had a hand in this design. To say that leave had been granted to break her order’s primary vow was to gut an inviolable trust.

  What Elaira felt for this man was real, untarnished. Yet she could not wrench hope back into her hands, nor cross the gulf, nor complete the desire between them. Not without sullying forever the shining truth of her love, that Morriel’s manipulation had no part of.

  No word existed under earth or sky to explain that her presence here was less due to Koriani intri
gue than to the burden of Sethvir’s warning prophecy.

  She must have made a sound in her torment.

  For Arithon gathered himself again and forced speech. ‘Lady, for the love that I bear you, let me leave. Your order’s vows cannot tolerate my claim. Give me torture and loss, give me death, before I become the instrument that seals your utter destruction. Of all the atrocities I have done in the past, or may commit in the future, that one I could never survive.’

  There was nothing to do, nothing at all, but stand aside, mute, and let him pass.

  Convergence

  While the craftsmen at Merior’s shipyard whisper among themselves that the night at the healer’s has brought their master back changed, his tolerance thin-drawn as wire, the brig Black Drake makes port bringing word that city garrisons in Rathain have been called to muster at Etarra; and the news causes Arithon to send his request, asking rendezvous with a clan lord who dwells in the forest of Selkwood…

  Since the portent which slashed the night sky in the hour of Lady Maenalle’s execution raised the city of Isaer into panic, and while Lysaer’s officers labour to dispel fraught dread among the troops, Asandir rides out from Althain Tower to seek the clan encampment along the Valenford River and invest the caithdein’s grandson with Fellowship sanction to inherit her powers of office …

  When word from the watcher on the seventh lane reaches the Koriani Council that Elaira’s attempt to bind the Shadow Master through affection has been met with flat failure, Morriel Prime issues sharp rebuke as her First Senior questions the outcome: ‘Our initiate did not fail to gain Arithon’s trust. On the contrary, rather her prince has outmanoeuvred us, and through flaws in our own design …’

  XII. WAR HOST

  High slimmer cast blistering light over the anvilled stone summits and knife-edged cornices of the Mathorn Mountains. Under their frowning rims, the taint of pine resin filled the copses, huddled in their tangles of black shade. Witch hazel grew riot in the defiles, floored in moss and speared sedges, and hazed silver in clouds of midges where springs trickled down from the heights.