Cephrael's Hand: A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book One

by McPhail, Melissa

  “What do any of you know about it for that matter?” the zanthyr growled. “Mankind bears the wars like a banner proclaiming their victimization, but mankind was—” Abruptly, he stopped, paused, and then waved his dagger to dismiss the subject—and his ire—completely. “You asked how the Fifth Vestal can still be the Fifth Vestal. The answer is simple: because the new Alorin Seat, who you know as the First Vestal, Alshiba Torinin, has no one to replace him. It will take none other than a fifth strand Adept of Björn’s caliber to assume his position, and as you correctly stated, my prince…” and here he paused, his tone taking on a terrible and unexpected sorrow, “Alorin has no fifth strand Adepts any longer.” He added more quietly, “None have Returned for generations.”

  Ean could tell from the gravity of the zanthyr’s tone that this circumstance was far more serious than he understood. “In the North, my homeland, we follow the old ways,” he offered. “We honor the sacred festivals and speak the rites, though I don’t know how many truly believe and how many do these things out of tradition. But we believe in the Returning, and we say the Litany for our lost ones, and we…hope.” He managed a smile that didn’t quite touch his eyes. “We hope we might someday meet them again, and somehow know them though they look different to us. But you speak of the Returning with more…meaning.”

  The zanthyr looked him over critically. “There is Balance in all things—life and death, day and night, and extremes not so easily identified—all fall easily within the scope of this Law. The Adept races are the earliest children of this realm, and their lives are tied to the realm’s life, for all living patterns are inextricably intertwined.

  “Always before, those Adepts who died yet Returned, and always they maintained their Adept gifts in their next life. Thus the race continued. But now…now the realm is dying.”

  “And so dies the Adept race,” Ean concluded. He didn’t know what to say, so he apologized without knowing why. “I’m sorry.”

  The zanthyr gave him a tolerant sort of look. “Eat your dinner.” He pointed his dagger at the rabbit.

  Out of respect more than lingering hunger, Ean complied. But first, he asked, “The uh, Shade…did he use the fifth strand to destroy my blade?”

  “No.”

  Ean shook his head and chewed his meat. So many mysteries…

  The zanthyr seemed in a conversational mood, for he exhaled a thoughtful sigh. “Your humankind was a different people before the wars,” he observed. “Magic was an integral part of life in many of the kingdoms. Wielders, Adepts, warlocks from the Shadow realms, shapeshifters and Sundragons…once all the races lived in tandem with the civilizations of men.”

  “Terrorizing civilizations, you mean,” Ean countered, then he grimaced at his own obvious ignorance and added by way of apology, “Or so I’ve heard.”

  The zanthyr opened palms skyward. “A subjective conclusion.” He fixed Ean with a quiet stare. “What is it you hope to hear from me?”

  “Only the truth.”

  The zanthyr laughed softly. “Ah...truth is it, my prince? And whose truth would that be? My truth? Malachai’s truth? Perhaps the truth of the Sundragons who were banished to the nether-reaches of the realm by the First Vestal simply because they’d served her ex-lover, Björn van Gelderan. Do you expect those dragons, who thrived in the warmth of the desert kingdoms, think their banishment to the icy edge of the realm was justified?” He shook his head. “There is only one truth in this universe, my prince.”

  “Which is what?”

  “There is Balance in all things.”

  Ean frowned. “Balance again,” he grumbled. He dared not take that one up as a topic, for the zanthyr had already proved he’d no intention of explaining the subject. “But what of the histories—”

  “Since when did historians concern themselves with facts, much less objectivity?” the zanthyr challenged. Leaning back again, he waved his dagger and remarked, “Once in a while some historian will stumble over the truth, but most of the time he’ll pick himself up and continue on as if nothing has happened. Never you mind that some things…” He paused and settled Ean a telling look. “Some truths are better left to myth and legend, Prince of Dannym.”

  It was a sobering thought.

  Ean set aside what was left of the meal, his appetite lost. “What of our plans?” he asked with a sigh that felt strange as it left his chest. “Do we sti—” but the question went unfinished, for the zanthyr had raised his hand, demanding silence. Fast as a cat, he leaped to his feet and slipped soundlessly through the branches, drawing his blade as he left.

  The prince scrambled to follow. But as he pushed through the veil of fir limbs after the zanthyr, he drew up short.

  Two men stood before him with upraised swords, their frozen blades dripping rainwater, their eyes downcast at a looping pattern scrawled in the mud. Ean returned his half-drawn sword to its scabbard and exhaled a measured breath. He carefully avoided looking at the mindtrap, but he couldn’t help but notice the way the rainwater ran in rivulets around the pattern, as if it was scrawled in stone and not simple earth.

  With a grimace, Ean squeezed around the frozen men and joined the zanthyr, who was standing next to a large oak scanning the dim forest through the rain.

  Ean’s attention kept straying to the living statues behind them. “How long will they stay that way?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Until someone pulls them off.”

  “What if no one does?”

  “Then we’ll have two less swords to worry about.” The zanthyr glanced Ean’s way. “Stay close.” He started off into the night.

  Quiet hung within the forest, draped like moss upon the branches. No ravens called from their evening roost, no crickets sang, only the rain pattered on dying autumn leaves. A fog was rising as they walked, dampening the earth as much as the evensong, so that Ean heard all too clearly his breath coming faster than he would’ve liked.

  The dagger struck without warning.

  Ean staggered back with a cry as something sharp and powerful jolted him just below his right shoulder, spinning him around. A searing pain radiated outward from the wound, and Ean soon found he couldn’t move his right arm. In the next heartbeat he collapsed to his knees, laboring to suck air into lungs that seemingly refused to fill.

  He watched in the detached way of the drugged as the zanthyr deflected two more flying daggers with his dark blade and then advanced on a far tree with murderous intent. When the next dagger flew, the zanthyr snatched the blade right out of the air and spun a tight circle, slinging it back whence it had come with whiplash force. Ean heard a cry, and then a man tumbled from high limbs. He struck the earth and bounced once, only to then lie still.

  The zanthyr bounded atop the man. He took him by the throat and stared into his eyes. “Geshaiwyn,” he growled menacingly. “You, at least, will travel the pattern no more.”

  The assassin smiled. “A halál csak az’eleje,” he whispered. Then his eyes glazed over and death claimed him.

  Ean’s shoulder felt an agony of burning flesh, and his muscles were twitching so violently that he couldn’t even grasp the hilt of the dagger to pull it from his chest.

  Poison, he thought as he watched the growing circle of blood soaking his already drenched tunic. Poison on the blade.

  The foul stuff burned with the fire of acid in his veins. He opened his mouth to call to the zanthyr, but a sudden wrenching pain in his stomach assaulted him, and he pitched forward into convulsions.

  Ean sensed a shadow approaching and tried to turn his head, but his insides were trying to force their way out and in his attempt to keep them contained, coherent thought quite eluded him. Even when the zanthyr yanked the dagger from his flesh, the scream he emitted sounded far away. Only the pressing of hands upon his wound brought a moment of clarity. Ean saw the emerald eyes of the zanthyr looking into his own. Then another wave of nausea overcame him, and he rolled onto his side and vomited until he blacked out.

  Secon
ds or perhaps minutes later the prince found himself aware, only partly knowing he’d been unaware moments before. The zanthyr’s eyes were pinned on his, and holding the man’s gaze helped Ean focus.

  “You were lucky,” the zanthyr said once he saw that Ean had regained himself. He pulled the prince to his feet.

  Ean reeled; his world spun, and he passed out again.

  When he came to, he was sitting atop a black horse—a running black horse. Daylight bathed the forest in dreary grey, and they were deep in the Gandrel cantering among sky-scraping hemlocks whose trunks were broader than a horse was long. Caldar paced along beside them unusually at ease playing second to the zanthyr’s stallion.

  Pale and unsteady, Ean tilted his head back to view the zanthyr, who held him securely against his own body with one strong arm wrapped around the prince’s chest. “He got me…again,” Ean managed. Forming his thoughts into words too effort, and his tongue felt heavy and thick. “But how…?” Ean couldn’t understand. “Poisoned, but…?”

  The zanthyr silenced him. “You will die yet if you don’t get that shoulder tended to. I am no Healer. See to it that you don’t die before we can get to one, or I will be quite vexed with you.”

  Ean blinked at him.

  “And mind you keep your mouth shut along the way, Ean val Lorian,” the zanthyr warned irritably. “This is just the beginning of your Return, and I cannot follow along forever silencing you.”

  Ean stared at him. He had never known such awe, such gratitude…or such impatience to understand. “I…I owe you my life,” he managed.

  “You owe me much more than that,” the zanthyr muttered.

  The prince didn’t know what to say. He leaned his head weakly against the zanthyr’s broad chest. “Somehow I will return this. I pledge you my service, my trust—”

  “No!” The zanthyr’s response was ferocious enough to call Ean back to full awareness. “Do not trust me!” He locked eyes with Ean to reinforce his command. “I will not have it upon my conscience.”

  The warning seemed a strange sort of farewell. Ean felt darkness calling like an old friend. He managed a weak nod, already forgetting what he was agreeing to, and tumbled down to greet it.

  Six

  ‘All good men are cleaved by the struggle between duty and desire.’

  – Gydryn val Lorian, King of Dannym

  “This is it.”

  Franco Rohre looked up beneath his brown hair at a sign swinging over the door of the tavern. The establishment was easily the seediest of dives in the small harbor town, a truly forgotten sort of place where naught but shadows came to die. The guttering flame of a single lantern illuminated the stoop and its sign. “The Gilded Boar.” Franco read the faded lettering beneath a peeling image of its namesake and wondered why anyone even bothered giving name to such a place.

  The man beside him made a derisive grunt. “Fitting.”

  Franco frowned. “I don’t see how it fits at all, my lord Raine. Why would he take rooms here? Surely he is not without means.”

  “Scion of the royal house of Agasan and uncle to the Empress?” Franco’s lord returned derisively. “He has all the coin in the world.” Raine pushed back the hood of his cloak and exhaled a sigh that seemed to convey the enormity of their task. “But I didn’t mean the inn’s condition befitted him, Franco,” Raine corrected. “Rather that the name is consistent with all the others. Didn’t you notice?”

  Franco pushed the hair from his eyes. He was bone tired. They’d traveled to seven cities in five days pursuing a trail that was already cold, and he couldn’t have been less interested in the names of the damned taverns. “I confess my attentions have been focused elsewhere, my lord.”

  “I see.” Raine gazed upon the dilapidated inn as if to penetrate its soiled walls with his eyes alone, as if to pull forth the man they hunted with the force of his will. “Then permit me to recall some of them for you. The hostel in Dheanainn was called the Blood and Boar; in Kroth it was the Black Boar. In Cair Thessalonia, it was the Boar’s Return. In Tregarion, it was Le Sanglier Bleu de Rivière,” he finished in his native Veneisean tongue.

  “The Blue River Boar,” Franco translated.

  “You see the theme now, no doubt?”

  Franco did, though it shed no light for him. And really, do I care about his whim and fancies? Isn’t it more pertinent to wonder if I shall still be alive to draw breath the moment we catch him? If they caught him, mind, which was a very big if. Still, Raine seemed to want to mull over the subject, and Franco was loath to deny the realm’s most famous Truthreader what conversation he could muster, especially when so many topics were taboo between them. “What is the significance of the boar, my lord?”

  “An excellent question. I have been putting some thought to it. Perhaps it has some personal significance from his time before he took the Vestal oath. Perhaps in Agasan it has some meaning?” and he cast a look of inquiry at Franco for confirmation of this last. Franco forced himself to hold Raine’s unsettling gaze, the latter’s eyes so colorless as to be cast from diamonds. But their lack of color was not what disturbed Franco.

  The Empire of Agasan was Franco’s homeland—the province of Ma’hrkit, to be specific—and he’d been well educated in both its mythology and its Houses; indeed, in Agasan, the two were nigh inextricable. “The van Gelderan crest is the Imperial Diamond Crown on a field of white,” he answered with admirable composure despite the gaze that held him fast, “and the animal isn’t used by any of the Great Houses, though several of the Lesser Forty contain it. Could it be a part of his personal seal?”

  “No. His signet is one of his patterns.” Raine exhaled a sigh and turned back to the inn.

  Franco suppressed a shudder of relief to be released from Raine’s attention; it was like the Truthreader had no awareness of how compelling his questions were upon others, or of how powerless a man became when held in the thrall of his gaze.

  But he has to know, Franco thought. He is Raine D’Lacourte!

  Franco studied his lord as the name rang repeatedly in his head. Raine’s was a well-known profile—he was one of the most recognized of any of the Five Vestals—captured in many forms across the realm; a profile shared by relations of equal fame. Raine was, after all, himself the cousin of queens.

  “Perhaps the boar holds no significance at all and is simply a whim,” the Truthreader noted, seemingly heedless of Franco’s study of him, so embroiled he was in his own musings. “He is prone to whimsy…of a fashion.”

  So it would seem. Though from everything Franco knew of the man they hunted—which was a deal more than he would’ve liked—what seemed like whimsy was probably planned and counter-planned to the ninth hand of chance.

  No doubt Raine knew this, also.

  They looked at the inn together then. Franco hardly believed the man could be there. Not really. Not after visiting so many cities in pursuit of him and finding only the dust of his passing.

  Yet for all his assuredness in this conclusion, with each tavern or inn they approached, Franco feared…. feared that this time he would be there, that Franco would come face to face with him. Above all else, he feared what that might mean to his own future.

  Franco worked the muscles of his jaw, clenching and unclenching, and wondered if Raine felt the same hesitation, the same wary anticipation of confronting their quarry. Well, the feelings might be shared perhaps, he decided, if not our reasons for them. That much seemed true, for they’d been standing on the opposite street corner now for some time, neither of them entering.

  As if hearing the thought, Raine turned Franco an apologetic smile that didn’t quite touch his diamondine eyes. “Yes,” he agreed. “I am stalling. But no longer.”

  He set off across the street, a regal form in modest garments and a suede-trimmed chestnut cloak. Franco forced himself to follow.

  They were not unlike each other in coloring and build, and Franco’s long legs matched Raine’s pace for pace. Both were tall and on the slen
der side of muscular, and both hailed from a noble Adept house, but where Raine held his head high and stared down any foe with an untarnished soul, Franco hung his head in shame.

  They reached the tavern stoop, and Raine opened the door and swept inside without breaking stride. A grizzled old man looked up from his tankard long enough to expectorate on the floor at his feet. Then he went back to nursing his ale with both hands as if a Healer’s medicinal tea. The tavern’s only other occupant was the portly tavern master who was clearing tin dishes from a beer-blackened table.

  Franco paused just inside the doorway while Raine walked across the room. “Evening, Goodman. You are the proprietor here?”

  The man continued about his work and answered in a despondent voice, empty save for its weariness, “Who wants to know?”

  “I do.”

  It was in his tone this time, Franco noted. The special inflection. All Truthreaders learned it in due course, but the Vestal Raine D’Lacourte’s was honed to the finest point, sharper than Vaalden steel and as compelling as a Merdanti blade pressed to one’s throat. The tavern master looked up sharply, and his eyes widened as he recognized Raine’s countenance. He dropped his tray of dishes with a resounding clatter. “You!” he gasped, taking a reflexive step backward. It was the first sign of life in him.

  “Aye,” Raine agreed solemnly.

  Franco reflected that it must be strange to be recognized in any tavern the realm over, to have stories told about you for the entertainment of kings…to tell kings your own stories in the privacy of their chambers. Yet Franco also knew that for every tale told of the Fourth Vestal Raine D’Lacourte, there were four times as many told about the man they were hunting.

  Having now recognized Raine, the innkeeper gaped at him. “M-milord D’Lacourte,” he stammered. “I—I didn’t do it! Whatever they told you, it wasn’t me!”

  Franco knew Raine was used to this sort of thing. He received the most amazing confessions as soon as someone realized he was a Truthreader—that Truthreader, the legendary Vestal.