by Janny Wurts
Dace blinked. “I’m Lysaer’s valet. Not a stickling lawyer.”
The circular breeze winnowed to frosty stillness. “Then, as the person entrusted with his bodily care, whose well-being may lie within my purview to remedy, precisely what do you imagine you might require?”
Dace blotted damp palms on his trousers. He regarded his liege. Settled candleflame toned the milk purity of a face half-swathed under bandages. The wounded eye underneath still seeped moisture. By the healer’s prognosis, scarred tissue blocked the tear-duct draining through the sinuses. Pity clamped Dace’s throat and mangled his answer. “What’s the implied riddle? Since you can’t lift a finger in Lysaer’s behalf, you suggest I must act on my own initiative?”
“The very gist,” Kharadmon affirmed.
Dace sucked a taxed breath. “All right. Lysaer’s moods are drastically volatile. He’s unbalanced by even slight usage of Shadow because he cannot curb his primal response. He can’t battle the curse without mindful reason to blunt his reflexive hatred. The Mistwraith’s directive will wreak violence upon anyone who tries him with restraint. I must break that impasse. If not to calm him, then at least to redirect his attention. Some way to manage the geas that brands me in the crux as the enemy.”
A puffed exhalation winnowed the candle. “I might teach you the rudimentary knowledge to cast a simple glamour.” Innate humour banished, Kharadmon qualified with grave reluctance, “The working involved is not clean, do you follow? While Lysaer is incapable, to meddle in his behalf infringes upon his free will. Such action denies the due grace of his conscious permission.”
Dace swallowed, anguished. “Don’t I know! Lysaer will be furious. Nobody dares to cross his prickly autonomy.”
Kharadmon demolished the wry dismissal. “To blind another is to bind yourself!” To his refined sight, the figure before him was not an aged man but a young woman subjected to cruel isolation. In other ways tenderly innocent, even her dauntless spirit might shrink from the consequence. “Do you realize the degree of accountability such a choice might invoke?”
“I can guess what happens if I stand aside!” Dace sighed. “Could I live with the slaughter? More, how will Lysaer? Can he be responsible in this state, stripped of his basic awareness as a civilized human being? And what is my oath to Asandir worth? I vowed under a Fellowship seal to stand as my liege’s shadow! I promised to be the voice of his conscience. And more, love in his case cannot step aside, or abandon him with no compass. He will blame himself for the Mistwraith’s designs: revile his faults and condemn the mistakes inflicted by this vital wounding. For every armed foray made in his name, he’ll rake his conscience over the coals and brand himself for inadequacy. Tell me true,” Dace addressed the nexus of cold that anchored Kharadmon’s presence, “does the inborn gift of justice lend my liege any footing for self-forgiveness?”
“The royal endowments are not absolute.” Kharadmon picked his words like silk thread unreeled through a thorny morass. “The trait does not direct choice by itself but plays in concert with personal character. Your liege must find his requital himself. I have no pat answers or platitudes to ease the rocky course of his fate. Only the cautionary advice: a glamour may stymie the drive of the curse by transference of Lysaer’s fixed focus. But once he recovers empowered awareness, that false stay is destined to shred. Desh-thiere’s geas is altogether too powerful. Your liege will break through any one-sided working the moment his wilful alignment embraces disaster.”
Dace’s sharp, expelled breath streamed the candleflame. Wax dammed at the wick dribbled like a widow’s tears congealed in midfall, while outside, muffled by stonewalls, the temple bells in the Sunwheel towers tolled the hour above Erdane’s rooftops.
Against faltering nerves, Dace reinflated his hollow chest. “If I do nothing, the cost will be writ in more than the blood of mass slaughter. My liege may survive to heal in the body, only to condemn himself by self-loathing.” Courage shouldered the cause. “Someone must protect for Lysaer’s integrity. While he cannot commit for himself, right or wrong, the friend at his side would never allow the atrocities driven by Desh-thiere’s curse. Not to further the True Sect Canon, and never to feed a campaign of massacre visited upon innocents.”
Erect on the stool, Dace set his jaw. “Grant me the knowledge. I’ll proceed on hope. When the day dawns, and Lysaer regains his right mind, he may forgive my transgression tonight. Perhaps, if my faith in his goodness prevails, he’ll agree to extend the stay by permission, and in conscious partnership we might continue to thwart the Mistwraith’s directive.”
Kharadmon’s image unfurled and bowed to her. “You have more than upheld your sworn oath as caithdein. Under the law of the Major Balance, this burden you’ve taken as yours was never our Fellowship’s, even to ask. A glamour is a binding enchantment, regardless of whether the act is done selflessly in Lysaer’s behalf. You had to assume the willing responsibility. The outcome you strive for may never resolve. Or it could, and your purest intention may fail.”
“Then Daelion Fatemaster must balance the debt after death, mine or Lysaer’s,” Dace determined. “Abandonment would be the greater betrayal.”
Had Kharadmon still possessed the warm flesh to give comfort, he would have embraced Lysaer’s guardian and eased his stressed trembling. As a shade, he had naught to bestow. Only a moment’s inviolate safety, as he granted the layman’s knowledge to enact the blood binding that anchored a stay spell.
“You’re quite sure?” he said at the crux.
Dace took up the penknife kept to trim the candle wick, and without hesitation enacted the configured circle of containment. Kharadmon noted his grip did not shake as he let the requisite droplets from a pricked finger. The words that consecrated the ritual followed with level conviction. Amid the silence of a sealed tomb, Dace twined the subservient ties of enchantment and brought the invocation to closure.
The working locked with flawless care, each line of ephemeral energy finished with precision. “Treat with your liege’s fate wisely, my dear,” Kharadmon whispered in gentle farewell.
“Wait!” Dace pleaded quickly. “Please, I have one last request.”
A breeze that recoiled and eddied the candle, Kharadmon paused with acerbic forbearance. “As long as I don’t have to murder a priest!”
Dace managed a tremulous grin. “Will you accept my word of permission under Fellowship auspices? I request the privilege of your due warning, if I should stray from a caithdein’s true purpose. I would not cause harm. If I ever held my liege entrained past the point of conscientious restraint, would your greater wisdom advise me, by Dharkaron’s witness?”
“That much can be done in good faith,” though Kharadmon added the tart observation, “Let us acknowledge the stickling caveat. You never have yielded to anyone’s effort to bestow due precaution before. Fellowship power can’t stay your destruction. You shall proceed as your free will determines, by your innate strengths or your weaknesses. Can a principle bend your fixed loyalty enough to shift your personal stake in the outcome?”
“I don’t know,” Dace allowed. “At least, come the dark hour, I would beg not to stumble through blindness.”
Kharadmon’s devilish humour could almost be felt. “Your liege has won himself a staunch advocate. Let me add that your ancestor, Sulfin Evend, did not check the course of catastrophe through self-effacing humility either.”
While Dace blinked in startlement, the Fellowship Sorcerer vanished and left him.
Alone in Lysaer’s cell, nicked flesh stinging like vengeance, Dace leaned on the bedside and started to shake. Tears followed, a torrent of grief for the straits that imposed such a bitter decision upon him. “Ath above, lend me foresight! Let me wield the power of this perilous gift with awareness beyond my experience.”
For the man who languished in tonight’s wounded majesty one day would regain his unimpaired cognizance. Release Lysaer’s natural focus too soon, and Desh-thiere’s curse would ride him to cataclysm
ic destruction. Dally too long, and the tenets of royal character would recoil in righteous rage.
Dace found himself saddled with the dread reckoning Dakar had proposed in the flint stacks of Lanshire, that gut instinct had shied to embrace. Love spoken then with untrammelled clarity now trod a rough passage through murky waters. Denied self-reliance, Lysaer’s spirit relied on a crutch, no matter how well-intentioned. He might not fall to the fatal mistake. But steered by another, neither could his mature growth evolve the blistering courage needed to heal.
Price for undue interference, Dace risked every footing for credible trust, precariously built up between them.
The deeps of the night at length wore away. The watch changed, and the distanced bells clanged the dawn carillons. Yet the nightmares that warped Lysaer’s peaceful sleep, for a merciful first, never came.
Early Winter 5923
Trump
Days passed without the dark-haired outsider’s return to Ettinmere Settlement. His defiance of the shamans’ ultimatum sparked vehement criticism and gossip. The disapproval and pity directed towards Vivet suggested her man ran an honourless household, or worse, named him a callous dupe.
Her oldest brother met the slights with cold silence, then cornered his sister’s misery in private. Unwelcome as nettle-rash, he darkened her door, while she, with rolled sleeves, plied the washboard two-handed, drubbing a hireling’s collection of clothes in a borrowed wash-tub.
Tanuay’s assumption of misbehaviour raised matters not even her sisters dared broach. “You’ve been the bone in Arin’s craw, all along. Never mind he’s planted his brat in your belly! You will never be chia to him, or to anyone else, now the skulking faechaa has gone. He’s dumped his used goods and bolted down-country the moment he slunk past our patrols. End the family embarrassment, bend your stiff neck, and redress your sorry abandonment.”
Vivet glared, eyes bright. “For our Daldari pride, my child’s condemned?” She snatched the next soiled garment from her basket, shoved it under the sloshed water, and punched out the pocketed air. “What would I become, thrown to wretchedness as the lowliest of our kindred?”
Her brother reddened, shamed to acknowledge that a left woman, unmarried, must serve the wives of the extended family. Still determined, he crossed the threshold and banged his fist on the puddled trestle. “What are you now, stooped to washing your neighbours’ soiled linens for a pittance?”
Vivet blushed. She slapped down the sopped garment and scrubbed, up and down, until spattered suds flecked the wisped hair at her temples. “You know nothing of Arin! Or his intentions.”
Her brother, no fool, sensed her knot of deep fear. But not the dreadful secret coiled behind her trapped straits. His insular experience could not grasp the greater penalty riding her fate if she failed. Strict Ettin custom drove his disgust, his parting words as vicious as flung knives. “The family’s disgraced, and you are a wanton to hang your future on a lying foreigner. Don’t weep over your choice to ignore my last warning! By tonight, your plight will be sealed by the shamans.”
Yet Vivet persisted with her independence. She hung the sopped clothes, ironed and folded them, dried from the line, and under the lengthened shadow of sundown, collected the coin for her work when the basket was emptied. At the last, nigh onto the hour of forfeit, the delinquent returned for his reckoning.
The watchers’ birds spied Arin’s approach, cresting the northern ridge bold as brass. As though their scouring searches had never lost track of him, he descended the stepped stone without hurry, while his belated arrival stirred Vivet’s relatives to gather in force. Interest also attracted the curious. Granddames doddered in, elbows hung with satchels of darning. A gnarled grandfather propping a hay-fork stood amid a half dozen cronies, grizzled jaws jutted with talk. Craftsmen in leather aprons and goat-herds paused as they sauntered homeward, while children frisked in oblivious play and rambunctious dogs yapped on the fringes.
Since the Daldari kinfolk had been denied their requital for Arin’s defection, the pack came for the thrill of witnessing the altercation.
The foreigner’s transgressions defied more than a council decree: his evasion of Ettinmere’s sentries had breached the integrity of the border. Twelve archers summoned from the mountain watch formed a line with strung bows: no empty threat, with their shafts tipped in bodkin points for an execution.
The penalty for flouting security was death. Arin’s position appeared past reprieve when the council’s ranked shaman and four bearers in masks came to mete out their summary justice. Roaco’s presence itself inspired dread, his feather-cloaked figure furled like a bat enthroned on a lacquered sedan chair. The vulture plume fans on the posts rattled in the stiffening gusts, while the last daylight leached from the world and drained the colour out of the landscape. His cabal of attendants unburdened their load. They lit torches staked upright into the ground, flames streamed under the afterglow blush that stained the surrounding peaks. The wait stretched, while twilight shadowed the vales, and the last notes of bird-song dwindled to quiet.
Arin’s final approach raised the coarse scrape of wood grating over bare stone through the whisk of the breeze. A whistled melody followed, snatched to breathless gaps by exertion. When at length he emerged from the lace scrim of the evergreens, flame-light picked out the canvas of a cape-shouldered trapper’s coat he had not owned on his departure. Besides that proof of barter with outside woodsmen, the scapegrace towed the laden hulk of a handmade sledge. The shapeless bundles strapped to the frame overtaxed his bent figure, leaned into the straps.
Then his merry tune ceased. The outlander straightened, confronted by Vivet’s inimical kinfolk, and surely dismayed to find himself marked by the squad of archers.
He discarded the burdensome harness of tow-lines. Hands wrapped in cloth to ease blisters flexed once before his peaceable gesture linked them behind his waist. Then he spoke, a crisp statement addressed to the shrivelled elder upon the sedan chair. “Is this justice, when by your design I was set up to fail?”
The silence intensified. No rebuttal was possible: any versant herbalist knew that seasonal dormancy gripped the plants at high altitude. Frost had withered the seer’s weed, and the brittle tassels of seed were already wind-stripped. Gum sap in the balsams withdrew to the roots, while above the timberline, the hardiest lichens useful for dyestuff lay buried beneath ice and snow until spring.
“An earnest trial demanded a trip across the north ridge.” Unrepentant, Arin finished his case. “My obligation to support Vivet’s household involved setting traps on the way. I’ve brought the requisite sack full of herbs. Also quality pelts and fresh meat for the smoke-house, collected upon my return.”
Roaco thumped his staff. “You interfered with the sentries and flouted our established boundary. No matter how glib your excuse, the behaviour’s a killing offence.”
Impatient amid the thickening darkness, the outlander pressed, “I swore your oath of child-right in good faith! To deny my liberty is to hold me captive and enslaved.” Undaunted, he challenged, “Accept my penance, or else risk unleashing your bowmen. Don’t expect me to run for your wicked convenience. I won’t brook the sacrifice, or abandon my pledge to a blameless infant, not to salve rankled community pride by an act of cold-blooded murder.”
“Offspring sired by an untrustworthy parent are better off staked for the vultures! Your carcass also will be thrown to the scavengers by our lawful custom.” Roaco lifted a slender black wand. Plumed tip brandished at the offender, he decreed in a rusty quaver, “We do not reprieve foreigners who flout our ways! Neither will a pittance of meat and pelts buy our leniency. Instead, for your arrogance, the offering becomes your widow’s impoverished legacy.”
The poised wand swept downward. Its death-whisper flutter of feathers brought tensioned gasps from the onlookers. Signalled, the archers drew their nocked shafts. Since no kinsman pleaded for the condemned, the villagers closed ranks and presented their backs. Twelve bow-strings twanged
in release and let fly.
The outsider did not panic as the hail of arrows converged. Dusk obscured his expression. The clasped hands at his back never moved. Wary, the mage-sighted shamans detected no tell-tale, sly work of defence engaged through initiate mastery.
Yet the dozen shafts aimed at the devilsome foreigner glanced awry, scattered on harmless tangents into the forest behind. Against the staccato rattle of impacts, the wand in the Roaco’s grip cracked in twain as an insolent, last retort.
Amid the stunned impasse, the sentenced man temporized, “I count the welfare of Vivet’s child above your sentries’ humiliation.” Unfazed by the surge as the flustered attendants flocked to shield their spurned elder, the outlander capped his denouncement. “The bard’s title I carry is a living record that interprets the nuance of law. Justice in Havish does not call a life forfeit for behaviour that has brought no harm!”
Roaco levelled a quivering finger. “The crown has no case and no standing, here! Not when you’ve threatened our people’s security!”
“I have not!” Arin’s exasperated rebuttal stirred the unsettled bystanders, and backed Roaco’s bearers into an unnerved retreat. “The north vale has no pass to invite an invasion. What few hardy woodsmen fare up-country from Silvermarsh name you an inhospitable people, dangerously quick to draw blood. They take fearful care to steer clear of your territory, a habit my foray has not overturned. Further, I’ll manage my own destiny through the encumbrance of Vivet’s pregnancy. Be sure I’ll rejoice to be quit of your claim when the infant I’ve sponsored reaches maturity.”
The shaman’s lackeys exchanged alarmed glances, while their master flipped back his cowl and shoved erect in his midnight mantle. Formidable despite egg-shell bones and frail balance, Roaco stepped from his sedan chair. The back-drop stir of the Ettinfolk quieted. Stillness gripped even the wind off the heights as the iconic figure of authority opened a line of arcane incantation.