by Janny Wurts
The driving blaze of his preference resurged: to relentlessly quarter the cabin and seek the lost memory of his beloved. Vivet’s trauma curtailed a tranced assay through tienelle. The herb’s heightened expansion would mire his wits and sweep him into the magnified pain of her wounded emotions.
Arithon reclaimed his discarded jacket. He replenished the fire, lit a brand, and under the juddering light, pondered his limited options. No trace remained to suggest where his heart’s partner had slept. The soot-stained chimney showed nothing, not even a pot-hook, to define the character of her inhabitancy. In a dwelling stripped unremittingly bare, the weathered timbers themselves presented his only available sounding-board.
Patterns pervaded the flux currents. Over time, repeated events, or an individual’s unique traits combed the structures of stone and wood into sympathetic alignment. Listen deeply enough, and the sensitivity of his Masterbard’s ear might capture the ephemeral imprints. Latent impressions of his beloved should linger even after an extended absence.
Arithon wedged his torch in the cracked mantel shelf. He proceeded, no matter how exhaustively tired. His search must be done promptly. Before the delicate presence of her abraded under the stamp of recent experience, and Vivet’s reactive turmoil clouded the near-faded trace.
Wood’s vibration best amplified harmonic nuance, where mineral’s retentive record endured. Arithon began with the fieldstone hearth. Eyelids half-shut, he stilled into a receptive state and stroked his finger-tips over the masonry.
Fire spoke to his inner ear first, the pungent vitality of fir logs just burned for lifesaving heat. Below the sibilant shriek of live flame, beneath the drummed rampage of weather, he heard rain-song: a wind-driven sluice ringing yet with shrill overtones wrought by the winds of high altitude.
Arithon sounded deeper. Underneath surface noise, he touched a faint pang of desolate sorrow. Loss and regret wove in poignant refrain, beneath which should lie the strata of her more significant presence. But as he reached into the tenuous veil, seeking, a vehement blast of Fire! and sage smoke razed through, a deliberate scour unleashed for the purpose of annihilation.
A ritual cleansing had swept this place clean!
Adamant, thorough, the measure had unravelled the residual record. Gone, the patterns that would have charted the cherished inflections of her personality.
Wrung blank by the purge, Arithon shuddered in recoil. Nothing more remained to be read. With all resonance of her prior tenancy erased, she had fled this dwelling with no ties and no plan to return. Cast adrift where he sorely hoped to find answers, and crushed by desolation, Arithon opened his eyes.
Plunged back into the framework of natural sight, he caught a pinprick flash of reflection: something shiny, wedged into a crack between floor-boards.
Before thought, he seized on the hope a small leaving of hers may have been overlooked. Not glass, he discovered upon closer survey. A tiny, broken sliver of crystal surfaced under his effort.
Crouched with held breath, spurred by careless persistence, he fingered the shard, intently listening. The rush of awareness took him by storm, a leap of revelation that crushed expectation and shattered his incomplete recall with terrible truths: that she was a sworn sister of the Koriathain, trained in the usage of sigils amplified through a quartz matrix. The very same vicious knowledge once had been engaged to seal his long-term confinement. More than poisoned bait, she had made her love the willing tool of her superiors. Attached to his affairs by her Prime’s directive, she had abetted his downfall, her person the infallible leverage behind the capitulation that saw him ensnared.
Facts damned, by stark honesty. The impressions distilled in the fragment of crystal did not lie: he knew her well enough to sting under the bitterness of her heart’s yearning, shackled in oath-tied subservience. She had been a weapon beyond all compare: a danger to him above death itself, her magnetic allure a force fit to level all of his core defences. Even wounded, he ached with irrational yearning. Peerless proof of her secret duplicity did not destroy the fatal attraction. Arithon wept, unable to reconcile his instinctive, flawed trust with the voice of her very self.
He flung the crystal chip into the hearth. He could not bear the message, far less assimilate the black agony that stranded him in separation.
Since rain and cold, and the violent storm matched the bias of his temper, he stumbled erect, yanked open the door, and barged outside to quench his bleak fury.
Practical measures steered his direction. Any anchor to dull a raw hurt that no remedy could assuage. Over the ridge, the corpse of a knifed trapper awaited a burial. More, survival relied upon setting game traps for sustenance. He could manage the insignificant chores. Fix his attention upon mindless work, before the crippling blow ground his spirit under the weight of stark sorrow.
Arithon ran. Downpour soaked him, and lightning flared, silver-white in the grey dawn. But the cruel severance could not be escaped, unequivocally framed in betrayal.
Summer 5923
Personation
The breezes stirring midsummer’s brass heat still carried the tang of defeat out of Havish. Rampant talk sown by Sunwheel deserters spread vivid accounts, embellished by the disaffected anxiety still building apace since the past spring’s explosive flux surge. Few townsfolk doubted an outbreak of sorcerous Shadow had broken the True Sect invasion. If rumour claimed the Light’s avatar also had vanished from the field in the after-shock, as dust settled in The Hatchet’s retreat, port towns along Instrell Bay moved more reliable news in sealed dispatches. These confirmed the Master of Shadow’s escape. Fewer, kept secret, traced Lysaer s’Ilessid’s reappearance in anonymous seclusion at East Bransing.
While Sethvir at Althain Tower strained errant hearsay from truth, news of the war trickled eastward across the continent, hampered where Athili’s bounds and the haunted pass through Lithmarin thinned the hectic flow of town trade across the Storlain ranges, and stalled altogether where the merchant guilds’ influence languished at Backwater. Itinerant tinkers crept word of mouth northward. Morbid fears and suspicion spread from Daenfal Lake gradually through Araethura’s back-country herders, where Iyat-thos Tarens and his youthful clan companions traversed the open steppe.
Footbound for weeks in an isolate vista of grassland and quicksilver streams thatched with briar, the party had been run off by vicious dogs. Where the goats grazed, unfenced, they were stoned on sight by furtive boys wielding hide slings.
Distance from the settlements added rank distrust. Appointed as spokesman for his friendly smile and crofter’s accent, Tarens found his most polite knock met by a screech from the cottage matron who answered her door. His honest request to trade for a waxed cheese was put off by a meat skewer, the uproar unpleasantly quick to draw riled kin from the byre brandishing hay-forks.
“You’d think I’m a sorcerer in league with Shadow!” he vented, chased to breathless flight. Returned to find that morning’s campsite stripped down, and no sign of his furtive companions, he required a clan tracker’s skills to ferret out their direction.
Tarens caught up with Siantra at midmorning, soaked to the neck and flushed after crossing the swift-running creeks that furrowed a landscape riddled by narrow ravines. “Slinking weasel!” he accused. “You knew my reception was going to cause mayhem.”
Sidir’s willowy descendant fingered her strung bow and shrugged. Seal-dark hair and the fey glint in pale eyes accented the wolfish cast to her cheek-bones. “Why the injured surprise?” Daughter of her lineage, she evaded with truth. “You look like a ruffian inclined to steal eggs.”
In fact, thieving was the most likely aim of a townsman this far off the beaten track: a large stranger scarred by a broken nose and armed with knife and sword posed a threat great enough to inspire hostility. Perhaps shamed she had played that advantage and bolted, Siantra flicked her sly glance askance. “You swam to throw off pursuit? That’s foolhardy.”
More than wet clothes prickled Tarens to chills. Warned
he ruffled more than the young woman’s poise, he bristled with incredulity. “This near the Arwent Gorge? Brazen sneak! Don’t mock me with the belated concern that I might have drowned in the current!”
The vixen blushed. “If you’re all that wise to the lay of the land, why risk your life?”
“Because I don’t trust the pair of you out of my sight.” The glib request to restock supplies in hindsight should have been questioned. “Esfand’s gone ahead,” the frank crofter accused, doubly annoyed to have fallen for the transparent deception.
“I stayed.” Guilty, Siantra defended, “You can’t fault us! Esfand rightfully should report first as his sire’s heir apparent.”
“More than my own sensibilities would argue,” Tarens flared back.
“You can’t overtake him,” Siantra protested, hot on the crofter’s heels as he passed her. “I held back only to stop you! If you manage to find the way down to the gorge, Esfand’s alert will have warned the patrol scouts.”
But Tarens possessed in full measure the past memories of Jieret, once caithdein to Rathain and High Earl of the North. He required no guide. Unless two hundred and fifty years of weather had crumbled the gap through the notch, he knew the hidden access into Halwythwood better than any.
Tailed by Siantra’s dismayed footsteps, Tarens glanced backwards and spat in the dirt. “That, for cold-blooded murder! Your choice.”
Then he sprinted. Shocked, nearly tearful, Siantra could not check a grown man twice her weight, short of taking him down with an arrow. Which the forest scouts’ vigilance might well do anyway, denied their due chance to verify the outlandish twist: that this affable stranger who spoke in town dialect was not the bumpkin he appeared but a feal liegeman to Prince Arithon of Rathain.
Siantra shouted, distraught. “Esfand went to break the news that the clan relay through Halwythwood may be overfaced. And he’s right! We can’t grasp how deeply the True Sect’s defeat has gutted treaty law, or what oppressive policy’s arisen since Lysaer abdicated the mayor’s seat at Etarra to Canon Law.”
The recent lane shift unleashed hard against the disastrous campaign to fight Shadow had recoiled into fanatical hysteria. Distrust fed the Light’s cause, while the volatile terror stirred by the heightened flux incited still more widespread purges. Old blood-lines were pursued under bounty again as True Sect doctrine inflamed the south. Irruptive outbreaks of latent talent at Backwater unleashed the renewed predation of trackers with dogs, funded in force by the head-hunters’ leagues and the temple’s coffers. Hounded under blood-letting unrest, the free wilds’ scouts would be primed to kill any outsider on sight.
When Iyat-thos refused to wait upon reason, Siantra shed her cumbersome pack roll and raced in scared desperation to flank him.
The snare dropped with barely a slither of warning. Twine mesh weighted with stones netted Tarens halfway down the notched path, zigzagged through the cliff where Araethura’s plateau dropped off sheer at the central fault-line. The cleft where he tumbled swooped a hundred yards downwards, straight for the rocky ravine that channelled the snaked froth of the Arwent. Banged and cut as he fell, unable to save himself, he slid at frightening speed towards the precipice.
A spindly, stunt fir snagged him short of fatality. Subject to a rough rescue, spluttering the spray inhaled from the white water boiling down the river-course, he swore vengeance in outraged Paravian. Siantra’s shouts, more than his fluent insults, forestalled the scouts’ ready swords. Murderous still, unimpressed by his grasp of old language, the clan patrol guarding the fringes of Halwythwood preferred distrust over lenient caution.
They trussed his hands, no surprise, given such callous handling deserved the honest retort of his fists. The gag that followed imposed an indecency Tarens fought tooth and nail.
The scouts jerked the knots brutally tight, while Siantra sniped from the side-lines. “Well, what did you expect? You’ve trespassed without leave, and not only that, crossed the honour of Esfand’s ancestral name.”
Which provocation Tarens already had acknowledged in unvarnished words. Restraints alone forestalled his scathing redress: Jieret’s outrage demanded due reckoning. Dharkaron Avenger’s Black Spear take the hour he should face High Earl Cosach s’Valerient: a blood chieftain, a father, and unconscionably terrifying, an invested caithdein whose cowardice had let three youngsters hare off after the realm’s rightful duty to Rathain’s crown prince.
That dangerous trek into enemy territory had led onto the red field of war and entangled their fates, with one feckless boy’s life lost untimely.
Where Esfand’s rebellious impulse had strained the leash of adult interference, not every rigorous standard had slipped since the day of Earl Jieret’s authority. The patrol scouts that Tarens had thrashed to singed rage still reacted apace to unsanctioned intrusion.
They hauled his bulk upright. Efficient and quick, they disarmed him, then prodded his person at weapons’ point down the precarious, switched-back trail into the ravine. Met at the river’s edge by Esfand, and spoken for over the thundering rapids by Siantra’s passionate argument, he found himself blindfolded and hoisted on a sling across the white race of the Arwent. Forced, stumbling, over the slippery rocks on the far bank, then from chilly shade into sunlight, he smelled grass, ears deafened by the shrilling of summer cicadas in the parched scrub underfoot. He endured more brisk handling. Another tussle, that ended with him in duress, lashed by a stout rope on horseback. By then, his captors’ exasperated forbearance suggested his fight, or Siantra’s insistent appeal, had been heard.
“Rest easy, fellow!” the scout captain snapped. “You’re under our escort for a clan hearing.”
If Jieret’s inherited wisdom approved of the ruthless precautions, Tarens endured a pace that blistered his knees, painful sacrifice for the blessing of speed. His imperative charge to reach Halwythwood’s council scalded his nerves to unease. Each passing hour since the past evening, the gut wrench of his instincts screamed warning. Wherever Arithon fared in the Storlains, whatever his current activity, Tarens sensed that a crucial dynamic had turned for the worse.
Family ties, before Sighted urgency, shaped the High Earl of the North’s explosive response to the news of the prodigal children’s return. The message relay that sent word by notched arrows flagged him down where he stood in tense conference. Cosach ran out on the council’s debate over the True Sect hazard brewing at Etarra.
Burst into the lodge where his fair-haired wife nursed their four-month-old infant, he grinned ear to ear through his wiry beard and lunged for his weapons. “Esfand’s back at last!” Aware of her tears as she surged to arise, he kissed her forehead and resettled her before the babe lost its suckle and howled. “I’m going myself.” Busy with buckles, he answered her thought. “Laithen’s heard. She’s already away. When you’ve done with the wean, take over the reins and talk common sense to the chieftains. A few flaming maniacs think we can repel the Canon’s blood purge with a war band.”
The door flap slapped to his vigorous exit, through Jalienne’s bemused rejoinder, “I’m not the best choice to keep order in there. Ask me, our warmongering dolts should be cooled like a dog scrap with pails of flung water.”
“If only that worked,” Rathain’s caithdein lamented over his shoulder. A scrambled thud of hooves saw him mounted and gone, swiftly enough to meet the inbound scouts enroute from their post by the Arwent.
As usual, Laithen s’Idir’s stringent sense outpaced everyone else. Her advance dispatch saw a hide tent pitched in wait, tucked under the dappled shade at the southern fringe of Halwythwood.
Late-afternoon sunlight seeped through the tied-back entry when Cosach stalked in. He found pine torches staked in place, but unlit, beside a plank trestle surrounded with grass-stuffed hassocks. Surprised to raised eyebrows by the banner of Rathain, hung behind, his glance met the whipcord-tough woman who emerged from the shadows. “I’ve received state visitors with much less fuss. My son won’t be cowed. Are you try
ing to wake the fear of Dharkaron’s vengeance in your only daughter?”
“As if anyone could,” Laithen said, too blunt for his blustering. “Our youngsters may come in hungry and tired. Let’s welcome them home and hear their report. In formal quiet, before they are mobbed for details by a raucous audience.”
“Well.” Cosach gestured askance at the curtain strung to provide private quarters. “Jalienne will skin me alive if I stall our boy overnight.”
Laithen’s mouth quirked. Slender in restraint as a planted spear, she countered the feint. “They aren’t children, no matter they’ve not come of age. After this, you don’t think they deserve the respect of an adult reception?”
Cosach snorted. “Maybe.” He fumed, bunched broad shoulders, and swore with bad grace, then shucked his sword and filled the cramped tent with his restless anticipation. Ever the model of cool sobriety, Laithen leaned on a support pole to quell her impulse to pace.
A woodpecker’s tap pocked the stillness from the humid depths of the forest: no bird’s industrious foraging but a signal from a concealed sentry. Cosach froze between steps, while Laithen let go and shoved forward. Muscular High Earl and mercurial woman barely avoided collision as the outriders reined up lathered mounts in the glen. Both anxious parents poised with stopped breath until the boisterous commotion sorted itself out, and the dismounted pack of scouts swirled and parted.
The son whose rash exploits had sent him too dangerously far afield emerged first. Esfand was no longer the unfinished stripling, all elbows and knees with the gawky neck of adolescence. Taller, fleshed out, he advanced with confidence, his seal-dark clan braid secured with grass twine, and his leathers the worse for hard wear. Intent hazel, his eyes locked on the father poised at the tent’s entry.