“A brother Shamshir’im travels with the company. He’s been reporting to me on an insurgent you wanted watched. He says there is no doubt of Trell val Lorian’s identity—apparently the prince announced it to the entire company.”
Viernan allowed himself a triumphant smile. Finally, Cephrael had turned His inauspicious eye elsewhere than Viernan’s activities. Yet…he found it strange that Sundragons and a zanthyr had rescued the val Lorian prince from Darroyhan only to drop him right back into the fray, unless…
Khor Taran.
Viernan’s dark eyes narrowed dangerously. The fortress had to be the linchpin in this mystery. He wondered…could there be some new alliance between the Akkad and Dannym? Would this explain the rampant mutiny among the Dannish troops? Or perhaps the prince merely hoped to rescue his father’s soldiers to reestablish himself in the line of succession?
Of one thing Viernan was suddenly quite certain: the Dannish soldiers somehow factored into the prince’s activities.
“Master, what shall I advise our agent to do?”
Viernan’s gaze took on a viperous gleam. “Kill him.”
“And if he cannot manage the act without compromising his position?”
“You will have to intervene—but carefully, lest you draw the unwanted attention of the prince’s immortal allies. The prince must be stopped before he can lead an attack on Khor Taran.”
The Shamshir’im wielder gave the equivalent of a mental snort. “He’s no Adept to challenge me.”
“Do not underestimate him!” Viernan’s warning carried a venomous bite, poison flowing as violent thoughts packaged within a piercing intent. There was naught but a skeleton crew holding Khor Taran now. Still, had it been any other opponent, he might not have blinked, but Trell val Lorian by all accounts had waged some nefarious deal with Cephrael, and Viernan greatly misliked those odds. “If you must destroy everything to destroy him, do so.”
“By your will, Master…” the wielder’s voice began fading, the connection growing fainter, “so shall it be done.”
Viernan released his ring and severed the contact with his Shamshir’im. He hoped the man had felt the point of his thoughts forcefully enough, because he would see the entire Fortress of Khor Taran and everyone in it burned to ash before he’d allow Trell val Lorian to rescue a single one of his father’s men.
Forty-three
“We might as well be playing Blind-Man’s Bluff with a handkerchief around our eyes.”
–The truthreader Cristien Tagliaferro, on deyjiin
Sebastian val Lorian paced in the shade of an obsidian temple raised from the volcanic ridge that supported it. Desert spread as far as he could see in every direction save south, where a violent storm was darkening the horizon.
It was always there, this storm, in every Dreamscape meeting he’d had with Isabel van Gelderan. He’d never asked her about it—whether the storm was real or imagined, or what those jagged red scars in the firmament signified; whether the constant flashes of lightning were natural or the result of a magical battle, or why, if the sun was high above them, was the lip of the world limned in blood-red flame?
Some things Sebastian didn’t want to know.
Maybe that was callous of him, or careless. He preferred to think of it as trust, faith, that if Isabel needed him to understand something, she would tell him; that if she needed his help, she would ask for it. She’d certainly never hesitated in the past.
It was because of one such request—his most important task—that Sebastian had sought her dreams this time. She’d instructed him in the necessary patterns, taught him how to find her consciousness in the vast expanse of the aether. But time between Alorin and T’khendar wasn’t synchronous, so he’d been waiting in Dreamscape for quite a while—pacing, rather, with his hands behind his back and his thoughts as the churning waves beneath his waterwheel steps. A long time trying not to look at the storm, fighting the magnetic draw it had upon his attention.
“Hello, Sebastian.”
Sebastian turned with an instant welling of hope. Hope always welled in the instant of her greeting, partly as a result of the impression of Isabel’s mind joining his in Dreamscape, a sense of her, which roused such protectiveness on behalf of his brother, such gratitude on his own; but partly also this hope derived from a glimpse of possibility, an instant’s view of a different path from the one they’d been walking for so long.
But Sebastian saw in the calm acceptance of her expression, in the set of her shoulders—held slightly straighter than they had to be, as if the overused brace for her endurance—that the one thing he most cared about hadn’t changed.
“Isabel.” He hadn’t meant for her name to carry such disappointment. Sebastian greeted her with a kiss on each cheek and a touch to her arm. “He hasn’t contacted you then?”
“Not in the sense you mean it.”
“He is young. Give him time.”
Her colorless gaze chided him. “He is an old soul.” She wasn’t wearing her blindfold anymore. He’d never asked her about that either.
Isabel looked past him to the storm, and something shifted in her gaze—recognition perhaps, or resignation. “I’m spending far too much of my time here these days.” She cast him a smile, redolent of apology. “I would that my dreams took me elsewhere, but Dreamscape is unpredictable. Sometimes we see things as we want them to be, other times as we expect them to be. Rarely exactly as they are.”
“I wouldn’t mind conversing elsewhere, to be perfectly frank. The storm is…”
“Disturbing?” She offered understanding with her gaze and touched his arm—
They stood in a wood of dappled sunlight, with a blue lake glimmering in the distance. The tree tops soared high above them on thick branches softened with moss. High in the emerald canopy, one might walk a path of those wide, tangled limbs and never touch the carpet of grass beneath. The air held morning’s early crispness, an effect heightened by the birds singing in the treetops.
Isabel smiled. “Better?”
“Quite.” He looked her over. “I hope for you also.”
She arched brows resignedly. “We walk the path we walk, Sebastian.” She touched his arm by way of invitation and set off through the trees towards the lake, her mood pensive. The green dress she wore emphasized the air’s emerald cast, and the elaborate plait in her chestnut hair mirrored the twining limbs above. She looked like she belonged there among those ancient, magical trees, a steward of the forest.
“This was my favorite wood as a child.” Isabel glanced at him over her shoulder. “I spent many hours here seeking dryads, holding conversations with the trees…hiding from Phaedor.” A fleeting smile graced her lips, whispers of old amusements.
“Did you ever find them? The dryads, I mean.”
“Every day…but only in my imagination. Phaedor claimed the dryads would never reveal themselves to a child who made so much noise in the woods.” A shadow crossed her brow, chasing the lightness from her expression. “I wonder sometimes if Phaedor didn’t doom us with his prescience.”
She glanced uncertainly to Sebastian. “When Arion and I worked the Unbreakable Bond, Phaedor warned us that our paths would ever be diverging and converging. There’s a fine line between prediction and postulation, between perceiving a consequence and causing that consequence to become. It’s the intention beneath the statement; a simple slip, the slightest misthought, and prediction becomes a curse.”
“You don’t think Phaedor caused this.”
“No.” She smiled in reassurance. “But my path would be easier to accept if he had.” Isabel pressed fingers to her brow, rubbed it as if to banish a persistent ache. “These are private fears, Sebastian. I normally wouldn’t speak of them, but my fortitude is low, my brother is away, and the man I’m bound to for eternity is refusing my contrition.” She winced slightly and cast him a glancing smile, full of sorrow. “It was easier to be apart from him in death than to live separated by contention.”
&nbs
p; They emerged from beneath the trees into the bright of day. The lake spread before them, azure and sparkling in the bosom of steep emerald mountains. Behind them rose granite peaks capped with snow.
“Forgive me.” She looked softly to him. “You didn’t seek my dreams to hear my laments.”
“On the contrary, Isabel. I wish there was more I could do.”
She gave him another glancing smile. “I confess, you’re a better ear for my sorrows than my brother. Björn knew Arion, but he doesn’t know Ean. Not really, not as the man he is now. He’s kept his distance for several reasons, but most of all to prevent his influence on the tapestry from affecting Ean’s path. Would that I’d had his strength of will.”
“Ean wouldn’t be here today without you. He knows that.” He touched Isabel’s arm to emphasize his words. “He doesn’t want to be without you at all.”
She regarded him with a delicate sadness. “He will not accept my attempts to contact him.”
Sebastian thought of his last conversation with Ean. “You broke his heart, Isabel. Young men can heal from the wounds of battle far faster than from the wounds of love.”
They walked down a hill towards a marble path and accompanying railing, which followed the line of the lake.
Isabel hugged her arms. “I remember the moment I first knew Ean was near.” She glanced to Sebastian. “I felt him the instant he walked into my brother’s game room in T’khendar. I felt his eyes find me.”
She pressed curled fingers to her lips and lifted her eyes to the mountains, as if seeking escape from her memories in those remote reaches. “You cannot know how hard it was not to run to him, Sebastian—his attention was practically hauling me across the room like a ship dragging its anchor. It was all I could do to resist, to let our reunion come in its time.” She looked resolutely back to him. “This is the strength my brother possesses which I do not, to watch Arion Return again and again, to watch him die, again and again—three times again—”
Isabel pressed her lips together tightly, and for a time she stared away from him, her shoulders held rigidly, her mouth set with firm defiance.
“All those years…” she confessed after a while, still not looking at him, “I held so desperately to my memories of Arion. They were all I had to protect myself from his loss, but in doing so…” she met his gaze with confession offered in her own, “in trying to guide Ean, in skirting that line so closely—all the while fearing I would drive Balance’s dagger into his heart yet again—in trying to protect him, I might’ve wounded him in the worst possible way.”
“Isabel…” Sebastian wrapped an arm around her shoulders. But what could he say to comfort her that she didn’t already know? She leaned against him, accepting of his support. Her body felt frail in the circle of his arm, too slender to bear the weight she was carrying, and from what Sebastian understood of the problems in T’khendar, Ean’s anger was the least of those, if perhaps the one that stabbed most deeply into her heart.
He tried to reassure her, though she hadn’t asked for it—didn’t seem to need it, truthfully, only his ear lent in compassion. “Ean is resilient. We can at least count on that.”
“He is astonishing.” She turned slightly to better meet his gaze. “I don’t know if you realize just how astonishing.”
Her words instantly recalled to him a midnight plunge from the Palace of Andorr, a head-over-heels tumble into night’s abyss, limbs entangled with his brother’s, their two minds in a struggle of wills as they plunged towards the earth—Ean’s against Dore Madden’s compulsion. Sebastian smiled softly. “I have an idea, yes.” He offered her his arm then, which she accepted, and they started strolling the path around the lake.
Isabel returned her colorless eyes to the way ahead. “We all experience tragedies that overwhelm us.” She appeared so strong to him in profile, so dauntless, but Sebastian shared her Dreamscape thoughts; he knew she was feeling overcome. “Such experiences make us afraid—of repeating the same mistakes, of straying too far from the comfortable known, of adventuring anew. It becomes increasingly difficult to set aside our fears upon our next attempt, because those moments of loss are so constricting. Too easily we let past failures prevent us from finding future success.”
She looked portentously to Sebastian. “But your brother, despite everything that’s happened—dying three times for our game, Sebastian!—despite all Ean has endured, what can only be powerful failures for him, remembering so many of them as he does…that he continues on despite all of this?” She exhaled forcefully. “I’ve never encountered anyone so brave.”
Sebastian smiled softly to himself. Bravery, his littlest brother had in ample supply. Prudence, on the other hand, perspective… He shifted his gaze back to her. “But surely, Arion—”
“Arion had the benefit of education,” her gaze conveyed the import of this fact. “over a century of practice and study. He knew he could do impossible things. Ean has neither that experience nor Arion’s strength of conviction. He simply embraces the challenge along with the recognition that he might’ve failed that very same challenge in the past, sometimes more than once.”
She shook her head and gazed tragically at him. “I fear I’ve slighted him in the worst possible way, for I’ve denied him the admiration he’s due in his own right. It is Ean working these feats now—not Arion. I well know this, yet well have I failed to say it. There are so many things I admire about him that I’ve never told him. Would that I’d spent more time praising him and less time fearing my influence on his path.”
“You only did what you thought was right, Isabel. What more can anyone ask?”
“More.” She turned him a look. “Far more.” Then she sighed, slow and thoughtful. “You’re right to remind me of his youth, though. I look back on the first hundred years of my life and think how young I was throughout that time, yet Ean has but twenty name days in his current shell. Age is incidental to a wielder who’s worked the Pattern of Life.” She glanced his way, and some of the tension eased from her brow. “Have you worked it, Sebastian?”
“Not yet, my lady.”
“But you intend to?”
Sebastian cast a half-smile off towards the hills. “I think Ehsan will not give me much choice in the matter.”
“Then you intend to wed her, bind with her?”
His smile turned droll. “I think she won’t give me much choice in that, either.”
“I would love to attend you both for that ceremony.”
Sebastian blinked. “We…would be honored, Isabel.”
She smiled and they continued their walk. In time, the lakeside path led to a marble gazebo, which seemed the perfect ornament to crown the slight peninsula extending there. With the sun, the breeze, the green mountains and the dazzling water, Sebastian thought he’d never been anywhere so beautiful. An impassioned sigh escaped him. “I never imagined I would have a chance at life again.” He shifted his gaze to meet Isabel’s. “I owe you for that.”
“You owe your brother for that. From the moment he perceived you at Tyr’kharta, Ean knew only you. You’d drawn him onto your path.”
Sebastian shook his head. “I don’t have that power.”
“His love for you has that power.”
He dropped his gaze to his hands, realizing not for the first time that he owed Isabel and Ean for the fact that he even had hands instead of mangled appendages useful as a torment and little else.
Which contemplation brought him to the point of his visit. “Isabel,” he stopped and turned to face her, “we think we may have found a combination of patterns that will stop the eidola. Ean’s gone to Tambarré to test it.”
Only a flicker on her brow suggested any concern over this news. Then a smile manifested, so bright that it alone was fair acknowledgment for all of their hard work. “Well done, Sebastian.” She cupped his cheek with her hand, tenderly, yet with such conveyance in her gaze as only the High Mage of the Citadel might’ve summoned. “Describe the matrix to me.”
She took his arm again, and they continued their pastoral stroll, passing through a wood and across an arching bridge while he spoke of first-strand bindings, fourth-strand interruptors and fifth-strand molecular destabilization.
Beyond the bridge, a flight of marble steps led down, following the line of a cascading waterfall. Isabel hugged his arm more closely as they descended. “How will you convey the pattern broadly across an army of eidola?”
“We’re still working on that, but we have some ideas.” They emerged from the trees to a whole new view of the lake, and—
Sebastian halted. Directly across an inlet from where they stood, the whorls of a grand iron gate demarked a boat landing. Beyond this elegant entrance, steps led up to gardens, gardens to fountains, waterfalls to terraces, and terraces to an immense marble mansion framed perfectly by forested hills and the jutting mountains beyond.
“What is that?”
Isabel hooked a stray strand of hair behind one ear. “That is the Palazzo di Adonnai, my brother’s house in Caladria.”
He turned her a look. “That’s not a house.”
She smiled. “His home, then.” She drew him on towards the mansion. “Home is perhaps a fairer appellation, in any case, for Adonnai has always been our refuge. It’s where we go to restore our hearts, our hopes, to dream newly, free of the plague of past failures. It’s where my brother and his Council of Nine planned this game that has overtaken our lives. It’s where…” but whatever she’d meant to say, the words kept their own counsel behind her soft smile.
Sebastian looked upon the palazzo and marveled anew at Björn van Gelderan—Vestal, wielder, philosopher…brother. Maker of the Game. He really needed to meet this man who’d bound him and his brothers so fully to his pattern, like a painter swirling tri-colored paint upon a vast canvas.
He shoved his hair back from his eyes and flicked his gaze to Isabel. “You know, I’ve never met the man I’ve sworn to serve.”
She sought meaning in his gaze and found it, no doubt. A slight nod, a faint smile. “I will see what can be arranged.”
Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4) Page 65