The Curse of the Mistwraith

He was kin, and the only other in this mist-cursed world who recalled that Lysaer had been born a prince.

The mare shied again, hauling the chestnut a half-pace sidewards. Fixed and diligent in his search, Lysaer kept his seat out of reflex. He swept the grey rocks and the trampled spread of drifts and finally sighted the cloak, crumpled in a shallow depression, and pinned by the black shaft of an arrow. His breath locked in his throat. The dun had not come by the gash on her shoulder through mishap: now he had proof.

Tautly controlled as a clock spring, Lysaer looped the dun’s lead through a ring on his saddle and addressed Asandir crisply. ‘Arithon suspected trouble in these mountains. Why?’

Before the sorcerer gave answer, shouts cut the misty pass. The abutments came alive with archers.

‘Halt!’ called a bearded ruffian from the cliff-top. ‘Dismount and throw down your arms!’

Lysaer spun in his stirrups, his bearing of command unthinking and wrath like torchflame in his eyes. ‘What have you done with my half-brother?’

‘Shot a hole in his cloak, as you see.’ Accustomed to arrogance from the mercenaries hired to guard caravans, the barbarian dared an insolent grin. ‘If you’re minded to protest, I can add to that.’

He rapped orders to someone in position over his head. There followed a flurry of activity and a bundle appeared, suspended over the cliff face by a swinging length of rope. As the wind lulled and the snow settled to clear the view, Lysaer recognized Arithon, bound hand and foot and suspended face-first over a drop that vanished straight down into mist. The brutes had gagged his mouth.

Lysaer forgot he no longer held royal authority. Very pale, but with unassailable dignity, he accosted the raiders on the ridge. ‘Lend me a blade. For the sake of the life you threaten, I’ll set honour above cowardly extortion and offer trial by single combat as settlement.’

‘How very touching!’ The barbarian ringleader raised up a dark-bladed weapon, unmistakably Arithon’s Alithiel, and set the sharpened edge against the hanging cord. One ply gave way, loud as a slap in the silence. ‘You mistake us for our ancestors, who perhaps once affected such scruples. But as long as mayors rule there are no fair fights in this pass. Who will hit ground first, you?’ The ruffian dismissed Lysaer and dipped the sword toward the hostage who dangled without struggle over the abyss. ‘Or this one, who provoked us by drawing first blood?’

‘Would that Arithon had done worse!’ Lysaer cried back in indignation. ‘Unprincipled mongrel pack of thieves! Had I an honour-guard with me, I’d see the last of you put to the sword!’

A hand restrained his arm, Asandir’s, restoring Lysaer to the shattering recollection that his inheritance was forever lost; in cold fact he owned nothing but a poignard to manage even token self-defence.

‘Dismount as they wish, and quickly.’ The sorcerer did so himself, while more barbarians armed with javelins closed in a ring from the cliffside.

Stiff with wounded pride, and galled enough to murder for the brutality which had befallen his half-brother, Lysaer watched in seething compliance as Asandir threw the reins of his black to his apprentice and confronted the cordon of weapon-points.

‘Who leads this party?’ the sorcerer demanded.

‘I’ll ask the questions, greybeard,’ said the red-bearded young spokesman who descended in a leap from the outcrop. Cocksure, even ruthless with contempt, he strode through the circle of his companions.

‘Ask then,’ Asandir invited in silken politeness. ‘But take care, young man. You might gain other than you bargain for.’

‘You overstep your value, I think,’ the barbarian said, while the wind parted the furs of his jerkin and cap and spun the fox-tail trappings on his belt. ‘The advice of old men is widespread as the mist and as easily ignored.’ He gestured a bloodied fist at the hostage strung over the mountainside. ‘For his life, and yours, some grandchild or relative had better come up with a ransom.’

‘It’s not gold you want.’ Asandir surveyed the barbarian from his red-splashed boots to the crown of his wolf-pelt cap. ‘For your sake, you should have heeded the wisdom of your elders! Vengefulness has lured you into folly.’

The raid leader drew a fast breath. He found no words. The sorcerer pinned him with a regard like deathless frost, then killed off refutation with a command. ‘Lysaer, come forward and remove your hood.’

The barbarian gave way to blind outrage. ‘The next man who speaks or moves will wind up butchered on my signal!’

‘Not so easily,’ rebutted the one who stepped forth, a figure muffled in ordinary wool, whose fingers bore neither ring nor ornament as he slipped off his gloves and raised his hands; but a man so unconsciously sure of his position that every clansman present paused to stare.

Dark cloth slipped back to reveal honey-gold hair, blue eyes still glacial with fury and features that reflected a bloodline not seen in Camris for centuries, but recognizable to every clan along the Valendale.

‘S’Ilessid!’ exclaimed the scar-faced woman at the fore. ‘By Ath, he’s royal, and who else could be his spokesman but the Kingmaker himself, Asandir?’

Jolted as if struck, Lysaer saw the sorcerer return the barest nod. ‘At least one among you recalls tradition. I bring you Prince Lysaer, Teir’s’Ilessid, scion of the high kings of Tysan, and by unbroken line of descent your liege lord.’

The snow seemed suddenly too white, the air too painfully thin and cold to breathe; stunned by the impact of astonishment, Lysaer stood as if paralysed.

The raid leader went from ruddy to waxen pale. First to react, he stepped back, undermined by horrified, weak-kneed humility. ‘Merciful Ath, how was I to know?’ He set Arithon’s sword point-down in the snow at Lysaer’s feet and dropped to his knees. ‘My liege,’ he said in strangled apology. ‘I place myself and my companions at your mercy.’

‘At last you recall the manners of your forefathers, Grithen, son of Tane.’ Asandir’s cool regard passed over the barbarian to encompass the shocked ragged circle of aggressors as bows and javelins were lowered, then let fall with a clatter onto the trail; movement followed. All the scouts in the company prostrated themselves before their prince until only the sorcerer, Dakar and a stunned-speechless Lysaer remained standing.

For half a dozen heartbeats nothing stirred on the exposed spine of the ridge but swirls of gale-whipped snow. The revealed heir to Tysan’s high kingship kept his feet and his bearing only through unbending royal pride.

Then, encouraged by a smile from Asandir, the reflex of command reasserted; the prince raised a voice of stinging authority. ‘Restore my half-brother to firm ground and set him free.’

A pair of scouts scrambled to their feet, sped by the mention that the captive they had manhandled was royal also. Lysaer showed their consternation little mercy, but swept up Arithon’s sword. ‘You,’ he said coldly. He touched the naked blade against the nape of Grithen’s neck. ‘Mayors might rule in Erdane, but honour shall not be forgotten. Remain on your knees until my half-brother is returned safely to my side. Then, since anger might bias my fair opinion, I leave your fate in the hands of Asandir.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ the sorcerer interjected. ‘The Fellowship of Seven pass no judgement upon men, but Maenalle, Steward of Tysan, will properly perform this office. She is qualified, having dispensed the king’s justice in the absence of her liege most ably through the last two decades.’

Chilled through his leggings by melted ice, and shamed by the steel which revoked his last vestige of dignity, Grithen submitted without a whimper: if the s’Ilessid prince was displeased by the rashness of his scouts, Maenalle was going to be mortified. Her verdict was certain to be ruinous, and no comfort could be gained from the fact that Lord Tashan, clan elder and Earl of Taerlin, had opposed the attack from the start. No doubt the old fox had recognized a true sorcerer, Grithen thought in despair; word of Asandir’s party had perhaps crossed the passes already.

Stilled with dread, acutely suffering from cramped muscles, Grithen silently cursed his sour luck. Given Maenalle’s hard nature, he would not be the least bit surprised if he became disbarred from his inheritance as a result of this one ill-favoured raid.

An Arrival

Despite Asandir’s insistence that Grithen not send ahead with the news of Prince Lysaer’s arrival, his party with its escort of clan scouts was greeted at the head of the valley by no less than Maenalle herself, companioned by a ceremonial guard of outriders.

With the storm past and the cloud cover thinned, the mists of Desh-thiere prevailed still; the vale beyond the passes lay enshrouded in featureless gloom. Warned by the clear call of a horn, then by the dimmed flash of gold trappings, Grithen groaned in pained apprehension. Lord Tashan had indeed roused the camp, for no less than a Fellowship sorcerer could get Maenalle, Steward of Tysan, out of hunting leathers and into anything resembling formal dress.

A companion jeered in commiseration. ‘Who would have guessed the old earl could still skip on his shanks like a lizard?’

The young lord responsible for the disaster in the pass was not the only one taken aback. At the head of the column beside Asandir, the freshly pronounced heir to the throne of Tysan hid confusion behind princely decorum as he confronted the glittering guard from the outpost.

‘The woman who wears the circlet and the tabard with your colours is Maenalle,’ Asandir said quickly. ‘She is Steward of the Realm, last heir to a very ancient title. She and her forbears have safeguarded Tysan’s heritage in the absence of the king through the years since the rebellion. Let me speak to her first. Then you shall greet her with due respect, for all that she rules she has held in your name.’

The travel-worn arrivals drew rein before the ranks of clan outriders. This company wore no furs, but livery of royal blue velvet and swordbelts beaded with gold. The bridles of their matched bay coursers were gilt also and polished to smart perfection. The woman at the fore was boyishly slim, mounted side-saddle and fidgeting with impatience. Her habit was sable, her fur-trimmed shoulders and slender waist engulfed by a tabard bearing the gold star blazon of Tysan. In her hand she carried a sprig of briar, and her greying, short-cropped hair was tucked back under a silver fillet. She rode to meet Asandir, drew rein as he dismounted, then laughed a merry welcome as he raised his hands and swung her down.

A servant took her horse and the sorcerer’s as she raised tawny eyes and offered greeting. ‘Welcome to Camris, Asandir of the Fellowship.’ Her voice was clear as a sprite’s and younger than her face, which wore the years well on prominent cheekbones. ‘You do us high honour, but thank Ath, not often enough for me to grow accustomed to wearing skirts!’

From her hands, Asandir accepted the thorn-branch that symbolized the centuries of bitter exile. A smile touched his eyes. Smoothly as a drawn breath he engaged his arts. Green suffused the stem between his fingers. A burst of new leaves unfurled from the barren sprig, followed by a bud, then the wine-deep flush of a flawless summer rose.

While the company looked on in awed silence, the sorcerer stripped the thorns and tucked the bloom into the steward’s fading hair. ‘Lady Maenalle,’ he said gravely. ‘After this I dare say you’ll need skirts for better occasions.’ He turned her gently, raised her hand toward the rider on the chestnut who sat his saddle like a man born to rule. ‘I give you Prince Lysaer s’Ilessid, scion of Halduin the First, and by blood-descent, your liege lord.’

Lysaer looked down at the steward his kingship would supplant, a woman who radiated command in her own right through every unconscious movement; unsure of his new-found status, he anticipated a reaction of enmity, resentment, even shock. But Maenalle’s hawk-bright eyes only looked stunned for a second before they filled with tears. Then she cried aloud for sheer joy, curtseyed without thought for slushy ground and gave up her hand for his kiss.

‘My royal lord,’ she murmured, looking suddenly fragile beneath the mantling weight of state finery.

Feeling dirty, reminded the instant he smelled her perfume that he reeked of woodsmoke and sweat, the prince set his lips against a palm welted with callouses like a swordsman’s. He mastered surprise at the steward’s mannish incongruities, overcame embarrassment, and belatedly applied himself to courtesy.

‘Your arrival is the light of our hope made real.’ Maenalle smiled brightly, turned, and shouted back to her escort of men-at-arms. ‘Did you hear? A s’Ilessid! A blood descendant of Halduin himself! Lysaer, Teir’s’Ilessid has returned to reclaim the throne of Tysan!’

A mighty shout met her words. Protocol was abandoned. Men leaped from the backs of their horses and closed in ecstatic excitement around the steward and their acknowledged prince.

‘You must forgive any disrespect, your Grace,’ Maenalle shouted over the tumult as Lysaer was swept from his saddle, embraced and pummelled roundly on the back by dozens of welcoming hands. ‘Five centuries was a very long time to wait for your coming and the times in between have been harsh.’

Too breathless to manage even banal reply, Lysaer struggled to recover equilibrium. Accustomed to royal propriety, and formal even with friends, the rough-cut camaraderie of Maenalle’s discipline bruised his dignity. Thrust unwarned into inheritance of a kingdom unknowably vast, he coped with no knowledge of precedence to lend him grace.

The whole-hearted abandonment of decorum permitted no opening for questions, not about the prince’s return from Dascen Elur, nor concerning the demeaning, mishandled raid in the Pass of Orlan. Tactfully reminded by the sorcerer that the storm had kept his party travelling through two nights with scanty sleep, Maenalle called her escort back to order. Quickly, efficiently, her outriders formed up into columns and set off to hustle their prince and all his company to the comforts of the clan lords’ west outpost.

While the needs of royal guests were attended to and tired horses led off to stabling, the crude plank door of the camp cabin appointed as the steward’s privy chamber clicked gently shut behind Maenalle. She had shed the magnificence of circlet and tabard. Shadowy in the fall of her black habit, her feathered hair pale as a halo around her face, she regarded the sorcerer who warmed himself by the hearth across a cramped expanse of bare floor. Although the room functioned as an office, it held neither pens nor parchments, nor any furnishing resembling a desk. A dry wine tun in one corner was stuffed with rolled parchment maps. Past an unsanded table, the only hanging to cut the drafts through ill-fitted board walls was a wolfpelt pegged up and stretched with rawhide.

‘You wished to speak to me,’ Asandir prodded gently.

Startled to discover she had been holding her breath, Maenalle clasped her hands by her hip where her sword hilt normally rested. ‘You can tell me now what you wouldn’t say in public.’

She had always had blistering courage; warmed by air that smelled of cedar and oiled leather, Asandir peeled back damp cuffs and chafed his wrists to restore circulation. When he faced her next, he was unsmiling. ‘If your people wish to celebrate, the festivities to honour their prince’s return must be brief. An outbreak of virulently poisonous meth-snakes has arisen in Mirthlvain. They derive from migrant stock, and if they spread in widespread numbers, our departure could be urgently swift.’

Still sharp from her interview with Grithen, Maenalle said, ‘Dakar already told me: you planned to travel on to Althain Tower in any case.’ She pushed away from the door panel, pulled a hide hassock from the fireside and perched with an irritable kick at the skirts that mired her ankles. ‘Distant troubles in Mirthlvain don’t explain your cagey choice of language.’

‘You’re asking to know if you can shed your office along with your tabard?’ Asandir’s sternness loosened into a smile. ‘The Seven have not yet formally sanctioned Lysaer’s accession to Tysan’s crown, that’s true. But not because the prince is unworthy.’

‘Well, thank Ath for that.’ Maenalle arose and walked the floorboards. Though she wore hard-soled boots for riding, her footfalls out of habit made no sound. ‘If I told the camp they couldn’t celebrate, I’d probably face an armed uprising.’

Moved by her leashed note of hope, Asandir spoke honestly and fast. ‘If Lysaer and his half-brother can successfully defeat the Mistwraith, you shall have your coronation as swiftly as injustices can be put right.’

‘Are the old records true?’ Maenalle seemed suddenly hard as sheathed steel as she propped her back against the chimney nook. ‘Was your colleague who barred South Gate against the mist’s first invasion left broken and lame by his act?’

‘Yes.’ Seeing tension quiver through her, Asandir arose, touched her elbow and gently urged her to take his chair. In contrast with her staunch strength, her bones felt fragile as a bird’s. ‘I’ll not give you platitudes. Desh-thiere is an unknown and dangerous adversary. Dakar’s prophecy promises its bane clearly enough. But no guarantee can be given that the half-brothers who shoulder the burden of its defeat will emerge from their trial unscathed. Lysaer’s official sanction for royal succession must be withheld until full sunlight is restored.’

Outside the nailed flap of hide that shuttered the window, boisterous calls and laughter set a dog yapping over the everyday screel of steel being ground on a sharpening wheel. Maenalle took a moment to recover the steadiness to trust her voice. ‘What will become of my clansmen if our s’Ilessid heir is left maimed or dead?’

Now reluctant to meet her brave scrutiny, Asandir faced the fireside. ‘If Lysaer is impaired, he will have heirs. If he is killed, we know for certain there are other s’Ilessid kinsmen alive beyond the Gates in Dascen Elur.’ To show to what extent he shared her worry, he added, ‘The kingdom of Rathain is not so lucky. Since the Teir’s’Ffalenn now with us is the last of his line, rest assured, Lady Maenalle. The Seven will guard the safety of both princes to the limit of our power and diligence.’

A Return

The journey south from Erdane to the old earl’s summer palace in the foothills ordinarily took three days for a rider travelling light. Though the return dispatches Elaira carried for the Prime were not urgent, she crossed the distance in less. A sudden freeze and the late season’s sloppy mud discouraged caravans at a time when the trade guilds had stockpiled their raw materials for the winter. Left the solitude to order her priorities, the enchantress used her travel allowance for extra post horses instead of lodging. She could hope that a late night arrival might allow her the chance for a hot bath and a rest before she faced reckoning for the Ravens.

Weather conspired to foil her. In the dark, through driving rain, landmarks became invisible and the lane leading westward from Kelsing had fallen to decay since the Mistwraith. Only the ghostly trace of wheel ruts crossed the barren hilltops; the sheltered soil in the valleys encouraged brush and thickets, and oak groves choked the washes under obliterating drifts of rotted leaves. Since the mare collected from the last livery stable was her own beloved bay, Elaira could hardly drive at speed through scrublands riddled with gullies and badger setts that could snap a horse’s legs on a misstep.

Daybreak was well past when, skin wet and sore and made cross by storm and delay, she reined in the little mare before a disused postern that let into the ruined palace gardens.

A novice initiate awaited her. Miserable in the heavy fall of rain, she announced with clipped asperity that the incoming message rider was expected to report at once to the main hall.

Elaira dismounted with a dispirited sigh. If word of her doings concerned the Prime Council, she would have been met on arrival however inconvenient the hour. Rain hammered in sheets across the flags, rinsing rivulets through the arches overhead. Elaira draped her reins on the mare’s steaming neck and started to loosen girth buckles.

‘You should call a groom for that.’ The novice was shivering, as thoroughly drenched as Elaira, except that her vigil had been performed after breakfast and a warm night’s sleep. ‘The Prime Enchantress is displeased and delay will just worsen your case.’

Elaira felt the cold go through to her marrow. ‘Morriel wants me?’ She tried and failed to hide distress. ‘But I thought—’

‘That today was the time appointed to review the orphan wards,’ the novice interrupted, prim to the point of cattiness. ‘It should be. Your doings in Erdane caused the roster to be rearranged.’

A tingle of blood suffused Elaira’s face. Already her disgrace had seeded gossip. Had she not been the daughter of a street thief before the Koriani claimed her for training, shame might have hampered the wits that allowed her to rally. ‘I’d best not wait for a page, then. If their evaluation has been put off, the boys will have time on their hands. You’ll only need a minute to find one to see my mount cooled and stabled.’

The pages were all eating dinner at this hour, and serve one junior novice right, Elaira thought as she fumbled with icy fingers to unbuckle the satchel of dispatches from the saddle rings. If the Prime herself was displeased that made for worries enough without every new snip in the order troubling to point up the fact. Before the flummoxed girl could utter protest, Elaira surrendered her reins, shouldered her burden of papers and pushed on through flowerbeds choked with bracken and hedgerows run together into moss-green tunnels snarled with creepers and thorn.

The wing to the ladies’ chambers nested amid the overgrowth like a pile of moss-rotten stone. The beams that roofed the porticos had caved, spilling slate like shattered pewter over what once had been marble mosaic. Elaira kicked down a daunting stand of weeds to reach the doorway. The original portal of cedar and filigree had long since rotted away. Bronze hinges cast in a tracery of rose leaves now hung on rough-hewn planks nailed together with a strip of boiled cowhide. Wet leaves jammed the sill. Elaira wasted minutes in prying the panel open; she persisted rather than go around the front way, would endure obstacles far worse before she traipsed in her dripping, draggled state past the eyes of her curious peers.

That prideful scruple cost her skinned knuckles and added sweat to her smell of wet horse. Militant despite Asandir’s counsel of temperance, Elaira hastened through a chain of mouldering bedchambers; if the Prime Enchantress saw fit to demand audience after an all night ride with no bath, she deserved to endure the result.

In better, idle moments, the carved wainscoting and decaying bas-reliefs that ornamented the cornices and ceilings invited daydreams of the original inhabitants. But on a morning made gloomy by cascades of falling rain, the rooms of dead earls’ ladies seemed musty with sorrowful memories. Elaira let herself out into a brick and flagstone inner corridor and proceeded through shadowed archways and around puddles let in by leaks to the anteroom where the enormous halfwit who served as Morriel’s doorguard granted her instant admittance.

The gentle man was not smiling, a distressing sign.

Left alone beneath the cavernous vaults of the great hall while the panels boomed shut on her heels, Elaira stopped short. The chairs before the friezework dais stood empty and no fire burned in the grate. The Prime Council’s review had not just been deferred, but cancelled for today altogether. No disdainful circle of seniors awaited; only two cowed-looking page-boys, scarcely twelve years of age and identically blond, bearing the paired standards and crested crane device that symbolized Morriel’s authority.

The Prime herself held audience. Aged and thin as a whip, she sat her seat of power looking faded in official purple robes and skin as translucent as antique porcelain. Yet her shoulders were not bowed; her hand on her order was unyielding as northfacing granite, hard as the diamonds that netted her bone-white hair and flashed on her blue-veined wrists. Couched amid calculating wrinkles, her eyes gleamed black as a carrion crow’s.

Clumsy at the worst of moments, Elaira tripped on the hem of her travelling cloak.

Morriel looked up at the sound, sharp cheekbones and hawk nose enhancing her bird-like rapacity. She waved her hand. The bundle of cloth by her elbow stirred upright and turned around with a feline grace. Elaira caught her breath in true fear as she identified First Enchantress Lirenda, present all the while, and whispering in the matriarch’s ear. Clad in judiciary black, veiled in muslin, she stood in attendance as Ceremonial Inquisitor.

For her late transgressions in Erdane, Elaira was not to suffer enquiry, but the formal, closed trial reserved for enchantresses who broke their vows of obedience.

Frowning, scared and chilled from more than damp clothing, Elaira reviewed her mistakes: she had spoken with a sorcerer, but not to betray her order’s secrets; she had gambled with a drunken prophet, but except for flouting an unwritten code of manners, she had committed no indecency. If Erdane’s officials had caught her at spell-craft, she might have burned, but no others in the sisterhood had shared her risk. Last and surely least, her talk with the s’Ffalenn heir in the hayloft had passed in absolute innocence.

Why should she be called in for judgement as if she had plotted a grand offence?

Rumpled and travel-stained before her seniors’ immaculate presence, Elaira lowered the message satchel. She slipped the strap from fingers gone nerveless and threw off her muddied cloak. Her knees shook through her curtsey, a detail made obvious by her riding leathers. Somehow she managed a level voice. ‘I stand before my betters to serve.’

Prime Enchantress Morriel inclined her head, the shimmer of her diamonds and lace netting pricked with light like new tears. She did not speak; since by custom the Prime addressed no outsiders, oath-breakers fell under the same stigma.

First Enchantress Lirenda spoke in Morriel’s stead, her enunciation as ominous as the cross of swords behind her veil. ‘Junior initiate Elaira, you were sent north with routine dispatches for the house matron outside of Erdane. Instructions did not mention taverns, or brothels, or card gambling with drunken prophets who consort with sorcerers of the Fellowship.’

Left light-headed by the pound of her fast-beating heart, Elaira returned the only excuse she could plead. ‘I was told to be observant, to bring back the news of the road.’ Dakar had told more in five minutes than lane watchers had gleaned through a month of tedious observation; yet that truth would but incense the Prime further. Elaira stared at the floor. ‘Mistakenly, I thought facts were of greater importance than the methods used to seek them.’

Morriel twitched a finger at Lirenda, her nail a yellowed claw against thin-skinned china fairness. ‘Ethics do not matter?’

The First to the Prime elaborated upon the matriarch’s arid statement. ‘Dakar sober would hardly reveal his master’s purposes. Drunken, he is incapable of separating fact from fancy. Not in collective memory has our order stooped to scouring brothels and taprooms for knowledge of events. To your shame, you’re the first initiate who has tried.’

The Prime rapped her knuckles against the ebony arm of her chair. Lirenda stepped to a side table and fetched a steel-bound coffer secured by a mesh of interlaced wardspells that shed a resonance to wring dread from even the least talented perception. The page-boys behind Morriel’s chair shifted in wide-eyed discomfort as the First Enchantress laid the box on the silk-covered lap of the Prime.

The Koriani matriarch released the wards one at a time. As protective enchantments gave way with snaps like over-wound harp-strings, Elaira fixed desperately on the young pages. Though their sex disbarred them from training, the children had spent their early lives surrounded by arcane mysteries. Whatever they had witnessed concerning that coffer’s contents made them quake to the soles of their feet.

Lirenda accepted the unsealed box from the Prime and raised the lid. Inside, the focus jewel of Skyron glittered cold blue as an ice shard. Although this crystal could not channel anywhere near the same degree of power as the amethyst Great Waystone lost since the rebellion, any enquiry directed through its matrix would be impossible for Elaira to defy.

Only the thinnest tissue of secondary circumstance masked her forbidden interview with Asandir. One straight fact, one opening to invite a direct question concerning her doings in the earlier evening, and her paper-thin weaving of subterfuge at the Ravens would collapse.

‘Begin,’ Morriel commanded, her eyes fixed darkly on her Inquisitor.

‘Look into the crystal, Elaira,’ Lirenda instructed. ‘Surrender your will absolutely.’

The accused must show immediate compliance, or else condemn herself outright by refusing a direct command. Consumed with anxiety, aware that if she were judged guilty, the self-awareness that defined her individuality would forever become forfeit, Elaira bent her mind into the crystal’s twilight depths. She locked her teeth against protest and lowered her inner barriers.

Arcane restraints blazed over her mind like the slamming jaws of a trap. Her senses swam through a moment of vertigo; then the gloomy expanse of the hall was seared away by an indigo force that smothered her will to quiescence. Elaira drifted. Dissociated from her surroundings, she did not hear Lirenda’s voice asking questions, nor did she frame verbal replies. Instead, like some tired, played-over script, past scenes were pried out of her memory and picked through in embarrassing detail.

She saw the face of Arithon s’Ffalenn, framed by a cloak hood wrung in the grip of white knuckles; again and again until she ached, she braved the smoky taproom of the Ravens and waited while Dakar spoke a name. Time froze, looped back, paused again while the moment was analysed, her tiniest reflections jabbed out and examined. Somewhere in a locked off corner of her mind she was screaming in frustration and fear; but the inquest continued inexorably.

The past became present. Again she wrought spells to stem the mob of headhunters, and again she made her stand amid the cluttered shelves of the Ravens’ pantry. Since the enchantress on lane watch had discovered her in the hayloft, her business at Enithen Tuer’s and her interview with Asandir were mercifully left overlooked; but the particulars of her encounter with Arithon were exhaustively tracked and studied, until the brief moment he had touched her hand, and the brush of his fingers removing straw from her hair sawed at her nerves like pain.

Every word he had spoken, every line she had replied was replayed, dissected to underlying nuance and then cross-checked against her later reflections in the course of her return journey south.

By the time her tormentors released her will from the shadowed blue confines of the focus jewel, Elaira was no longer merely tired, but physically hurting from exhaustion. Emotionally ragged, all but reduced to tears, she recovered self-awareness in fragments. Hearing returned first and gave her Lirenda’s voice emphatically expounding a point.

‘…for this I remain unconvinced. She’s possibly hiding something. I strongly advise a deeper probe.’

The Prime’s reedy voice interjected, while Elaira struggled to overcome draining dizziness. Aware of a hard chair beneath her, of ice-cold feet cased in tight-laced, sodden boots, she dragged a breath against the sensation of weight that bound her chest. Even through confusion, she realized she had not betrayed Asandir’s trust because her inquisitors had combed only those events where her overriding concern for Arithon s’Ffalenn had eclipsed any thought of her interview. Left in dread of a possible second inquest, Elaira knew that chance could not possibly spare her twice.

Lacerated in nerve and mind, she was driven at last to rebellion. ‘What earthly purpose can another interrogation prove?’ Her eyesight came and went, rent by patches of darkness. ‘I’m aching with weariness, and so stiff it’s a trial just to sit here. If I’m disgraced, name my punishment and be done, for nothing else prompted my doings in Erdane beyond an ill-advised quest after knowledge.’

‘Tell her to be silent!’ Morriel’s immutable eyes fixed on the space above Elaira’s head. ‘The initiate has no cause for impertinence. Plainly she has inclinations toward a personal entanglement with the Teir’s’Ffalenn, but she is so emotionally disorganized she seems unaware of her lapse. Let me remind that as Koriani she is pledged to avoid involvement with any man, no matter how exalted his bloodline.’

Elaira bowed her head. A sorcerer of the Fellowship had entrusted her to be wise: trapped by his steel-clad expectation, she stifled an impetuous retort and overlaid defiance with submission.

The hush in the chamber grew prolonged.

Lirenda seemed faintly disappointed. After an interval, Morriel said, ‘I withhold judgement. Inform the accused.’

The First Enchantress removed her veils, her manner stiff with thwarted vindication. ‘You are warned, Elaira. Dissociate yourself from the Prince of Rathain. Cleanse your thoughts of his memory and dedicate your heart to obedience. You are charged to be mindful. Your actions henceforward shall be weighed until the Prime sees fit to issue verdict.’

Morriel inclined her head.

Frostily, Lirenda interpreted. ‘You are declared on probation and hereby excused from this audience.’

Elaira pushed upright and curtseyed before the dais. Measured by the carrion-bird scrutiny of the Prime, watched enviously by the duty-bound page-boys, she beat quick retreat from the hall. Relief left her weak in the knees. Lirenda might cling to suspicions, but Morriel seemed satisfied that a card game had prompted her sojourn into Erdane; there would be no more inquiries, no deeper truth-search by crystal, not unless she incited further cause.

Adroit enough to dodge her communal quarters and the questioning curiosity of her peers, Elaira slipped out to the stables to check on her travel-weary mare. Surrounded by horses, the near-to mystical quiet of their presence scented by straw and oiled leather, she groomed the bay’s damp-matted coat with unseeing, mechanical efficiency. In the yard outside, a boy-ward whistled as he split kindling for the kitchens; but the ordinary peace of the moment failed to settle her composure.

By now recovered enough to think, Elaira reviewed the ramifications of Morriel’s suspended verdict. Her unease increased. In cold reflection, the accusation concerning Arithon no longer seemed silly and far-fetched. The restraints of probation felt unpleasant to the point of suffocation, and the shadowed stillness of the stables offered no refuge at all.

Not when the smell of hay and warm horses reminded inescapably of the man.

Stung by a pitfall that should never, ever have entrapped her, Elaira threw aside brush and curry and let herself out of the stall. The mare shoved a friendly nose over the door, her nudge for attention unnoticed. Her young mistress saw nowhere but inward. With the ritual phrase, ‘you stand warned,’ ringing in cold echoes through her mind, Elaira cursed for a long and breathless minute in the gutter dialect of her early childhood.

The words of Enithen Tuer returned to haunt her. ‘You don’t need a seer to tell your future’s just branched into darkness.’

Shivering in her damp and crumpled leathers, Elaira fled into the misty afternoon. Four hours and an eternity ago, a warm bath and bed had been all the earthly comfort she had desired.

Portents

On the marshy banks of a sink pool, a serpent with blood-dark eyes pauses, flicks its tongue, then slithers purposefully through a crevice in a crumblingly ancient stone wall; it is followed a moment later by another, and another, until soon a horde of its fellows seethe after, breaking eddies through murky waters and shivering pallid ranks of reeds…

North and west, under a hide tent pitched in misty forest, a scar-faced barbarian chieftain tosses in sweat-soaked furs; yet before his lady can waken him from the grip of prescient dreams, he has seen the face of his king, and the blood of his own certain death…

In a wild stretch of grasslands, on the crest of a windswept scarp, four tall towers loom above a ruined city, while rainfall gentle as tears rinses the shattered foundations of a fifth…

VIII. CLANS OF CAMRIS

Lysaer awoke at dusk to strangely carved walls, a warm fire and blankets of softest angora that wrapped his sweating limbs in clinging, suffocating heat. He tossed away the coverlets, rose naked from the feather mattress and paced across fine carpet to a casement paned with glass. Outside, clustered around a snow-trampled compound spread the tents, stone huts and rough, log-timbered buildings that comprised the permanent mountain outpost maintained by the clans of Camris. Amid falling gloom, the descendants of Tysan’s aristocracy set about their evening chores as they had through five centuries of exile. They carried cressets, because lanterns were scarce. Most wore the leathers and furs of wilderness scouts. Grim in aspect as occupants of a war camp, or a settlement too long under siege, no one walked without arms, even those few who were women. If any of the tents housed families, Lysaer sighted no children, though he lingered unseen at the window to study his new subjects while they were yet unaware.

Shouts arose from two hunters who dragged in the carcass of a deer. A woman called back in derision, and laughter dissolved into banter that coarsely disallowed even token respect for her gender. Lysaer rested his coin-bright head on his wrists. He did not feel refreshed. Nightmares had dogged his sleep and the expensive scents of sandalwood oil and rare spices upon his skin left him faintly queasy. The beautifully appointed furnishings at his back gave no comfort: gold-embossed chests and patterned carpets were far too much an anomaly in this bleakest of mountain settings.

‘We give you the King’s Chamber,’ Maenalle had said matter-of-factly as she opened a door to a room that held the atmosphere of a lovingly maintained shrine. The manservant who brought water for the royal bath had explained that every clan encampment in Tysan kept similar quarters, perpetually held in readiness for the day of their sovereign’s return.

Deferentially left to his privacy, unused to being worshipped as a legend come to life, Lysaer badly needed to speak with Asandir.

But the sorcerer had gone off with the clan chiefs while he, as acknowledged royal heir, had been spirited off for food and rest. Where Arithon might be was difficult to guess; presumably, Dakar would have found oblivion in some ale barrel by now. Lysaer scrubbed clammy palms across his face, distressed to be left at a loss in a land where civilized merchants would slit the royal throat, and barbarians who preyed on the trade roads welcomed their prince with open arms.

‘Your Grace?’ said a youthful voice by the doorway.

Lysaer started, spun and only then noticed the page-boy who hovered past the edge of the candlelight.

‘I’m Maenalle’s grandson, Maenol s’Gannley, your Grace.’ Barely eleven, his livery too large over breeches of cross-gartered hide, the boy bowed with a confidence that any senior courtier might have envied. ‘I’ve been sent to assist with your dressing.’

Unable to foist his bleak thoughts on a child, Lysaer returned the charm that had endeared him to other footpages back in Amroth. ‘What have you brought, master Maenol?’

The boy grinned, showing a broken front tooth. ‘People call me Maien, which means mouse in the old tongue, your Grace.’ His grin widened and his small, tabarded shoulders straightened with pride. ‘What else would I bring but your hose, surcoat and arms?’

The boy stepped toward a stool and chest where an array of courtly clothing had been laid out. The sword in its sapphire scabbard was gilded steel, adorned by blue silk tassels, and in its way as venerable as Alithiel.

‘Daeltiri,’ Maien said in response to his prince’s admiring glance. ‘The blade of the kings of Tysan. When the city of Avenor was desecrated, one part of the royal regalia was entrusted to each clan lord for safekeeping. Until today, the Earls of Camris have faithfully held your sword.’ The boy crossed the chamber, impatience reflected in the toss of his ash-brown hair. ‘But hurry, your Grace. The banquet in the main hall cannot begin until you’re ready.’

Lysaer slipped into the silken hose, lawn shirt and finely-embroidered tabard with a relief that bordered on shame. He had not appreciated the comforts of rich clothing until he had been made to do without. Humbled by the honest recognition that he desired the throne these clansmen offered at least as desperately as their disunited realm needed sound rule, he laced gold-tipped points and fastened mother-of-pearl buttons and tried to dismiss his suspicion such luxuries might have been dishonestly procured. As Maien buckled the sword Daeltiri at his side and handed him the matching chased dagger, Lysaer, Prince of Tysan, felt whole for the first time since exile through Worldsend.

He quieted his creeping doubts over the lifestyle of the realm’s subjects until he could know them better. Under fair consideration, he might find the differences between Athera’s wild clansmen and Amroth’s more sophisticated courtiers were just reflections of profoundly changed perception. He was no longer the pampered prince who had been haplessly tossed through the Worldsend Gate. In a rakingly perverse turn of conscience, he wondered which promised the sounder reign: the cosseted and idealistic royal heir he had been before banishment, or the more self-sufficient man who needed a crown to feel complete.

Outside, the temperature had fallen severely. Chilled through his fine velvets, Lysaer followed Maien’s lead across the compound and through the midst of brisk activity as a company muffled in furs and armed with bows and javelins prepared to depart on patrol. Faces seamed by weather and scars lit at the sight of their prince. The men and two women offered him brisk salute while they checked laces and shouldered javelins, then slipped quietly away into the gathering mountain dusk.

‘Where are they going?’ Lysaer asked.

Maien regarded his prince slantwise. ‘Out to the pass on night watch, your Grace.’

‘To raid caravans?’ Almost, Lysaer let slip the contempt he held for such thievery.

‘Partly,’ said the grandson of Tysan’s steward, brazenly unabashed. ‘They guard the camp, as well.’

The pair skirted the blood-spattered snow where the deer carcass had lately been butchered. The prince received a smile and a wave from another sword-bearing woman who carried yoke buckets toward the horse pickets. Past the tied-back flap of a tent, a man whistled over the scrape of a blade on a whetstone. Maien turned down a much-trampled path that led through a final stand of cabins, threaded into a steep-sided defile, and deadended before the shadowed double arch of a gateway cut into the mountain. The doors were armoured. Stonework barbicans built against the rocks on either side lent the impregnability of a fortress. If the place had ever seen battle, any scars had been painstakingly repaired; four fur-clad sentries stood duty, the leather-wound grips of their javelins worn shiny from hard use. They dressed weapons in smart salute at the approach of their liege.

Maien spoke a password at a niche. Lysaer heard the clank of a windlass and a dismal rattle of chain; then the great portals ground on their hinges and cracked open.

Asandir strode from the gap. ‘Good, you’ve arrived.’ He dismissed the prince’s young escort with a smile. Maien darted ahead to alert the herald as the sorcerer ushered Lysaer from the cold into the torch-lit vault of an outer hall. Walls and floor of rough-hewn stone sheared his voice into echoes as he said, ‘Maenalle awaits you.’

Above the din as the defenceworks were laboriously cranked closed, Lysaer said, ‘You might have given me warning.’

‘I might have done the same for Grithen’s clansmen,’ Asandir returned. ‘I chose not to.’

Stonewalled, and for no apparent cause, Lysaer reined back annoyance. ‘Is this a kingdom that encourages lawlessness?’

Asandir regarded the prince with eyes like unmarked slate. ‘This is a land afflicted by mismanagement, greed and vicious misunderstanding. The clans rob caravans to ease a harsh existence, and the mayors pay headhunters to exterminate as a means to ease their terror. Your task is not to judge but to set right. Your royal Grace, justice must be tempered by sympathy if the unity of the realm is to be restored. So I did not explain, because words cannot substitute for experience.’

The heavy doors boomed shut, leaving a ponderous quiet.

Asandir gestured toward the light and warmth that spilled through a second set of arches. ‘Go in,’ he urged, while ahead, in cultured accents, Maenalle’s appointed herald announced the royal presence. ‘For these people you are the living embodiment of hope. Listen to their woes and understand what they’ve sacrificed to preserve their lives and heritage.’

Lysaer squared his shoulders under his exquisitely embroidered tabard. What Asandir expected of him was a great deal more than tolerance: he could return no less than his best.

‘You are favoured with the gifts of your ancestors,’ Asandir reassured as they walked side by side into a chamber transformed since afternoon. ‘If the Seven believed you incapable, you would never have stood before these clans as a candidate fit to rule.’

The drab rock walls beyond the threshold were covered over by tapestries, masterful weaving and bright dyes depicting a kingly procession that celebrated the first greening of spring. Lysaer stared in delight. For an instant, he seemed to view through a window into a prior age, when Paravian habitation had graced hills unsullied by Deshthiere’s mists. Here in shining glory lay the centaurs’ fire-maned majesty, spritely dancers wreathed in flowers who were the fair-formed sunchildren, and mystical as moonlight on water, the snowy grace of unicorns. Entranced, caught into thrall by emotion, Lysaer blinked; and the spell snapped. The weaving on the wall became just a fabric of ordinary thread, worked with extraordinary artistry. Dazed by split-second bewilderment, Lysaer shook off gooseflesh and continued after Asandir and Maien, over patterned carpets imported from far-off Narms. Torches were replaced by tiers of wax candles, and glittering in their smokeless light were the clanborn of the west outpost, descendants of Camris’s aristocracy.

They looked the part, Lysaer thought in astonishment. Divested of furs and weapons, reclothed in velvets, dyed suedes and jewelled brocades, one could almost forget that most of the women carried sword scars, or that the wrists of young and old alike were lean as braided sinew from the hunt.

Maenalle waited at the head of a delegation of clan lords. Regally gowned in black and adorned with silver interlace, she wore only a badge of rank to denote her office. ‘Colours are never worn in the royal presence,’ she explained in response to Lysaer’s compliment that a brighter wardrobe would become her. ‘By tradition, the Steward of the Realm wears sable, since the true power of governance lies in the crown. Before the rebellion my office was sometimes called caithdein, or shadow behind the throne.’ She regarded the prince at her side, her tawny eyes fierce in a face too weathered from outdoor living. ‘Liege, I am proud to become so once again.’

There was no envy in her, Lysaer observed, while she steered him through introductions to the officers and elders of her council currently in residence at the outpost. As she guided him past a bowing honour-guard and rows of candle-lit, damask-covered trestles toward the dais at the head of the hall, he watched with a ruler’s perception. Maenalle did not resent yielding leadership to a younger, unknown man; in steady, unquestioned and understated confidence, she placed absolute faith in the s’Ilessid name.

Prepared for the eventual trial of winning loyalty from these fierce and independent clansmen, of proving his fitness to rule, Lysaer found the gift of her trust unnerving.

He was shown to the seat of honour at the centre of a trestle covered by fine linen and set with an earl’s ransom in crested silver and crystal. Asandir was placed on his right, Arithon and Dakar to the left, while Maenalle and the elder clan chiefs assumed the places opposite, between their prince and the lower hall as surety for their hospitality. Since potential threat must first pass through their ranks, any retainer who sought harm to a guest must first commit public treason and strike his sworn lord in the back. Visitor’s rights had not been forgotten in the wildest reaches of Camris, although in the towns, old ways had been replaced by the fashion of placing important persons at the head of the boards.

‘Insult as well as folly,’ Maenalle admitted sadly. ‘A guest seated there is isolated, a target for foul play should a turncoat defile the lord’s house. What respect can a host claim, who would expose another in place of himself?’

Hiding discomfort, Lysaer watched Maien pour the wine. Amroth’s court had kept no such elaborate custom, and rather than risk insult out of ignorance, the prince forbore to comment.

A touch on his forearm recalled his thoughts; Asandir, with reminder that the hall expected guest-oath. That ritual at least was familiar. Lysaer rose to his feet. The glittering array of gathered clansfolk stilled deferentially before him as he raised his goblet in fingers too proud to tremble.

‘To this house, its lady and her sworn companions, I pledge friendship. Ath’s blessing upon family and kin, strength to your heirs, and honour to the name of s’Gannley. Beneath this roof and before Ath, I share fortune and sorrow as your brother, my service as steadfast as blood kin.’

Maenalle arose, smiling, to complete the ancient reply. ‘Your presence is our grace.’ She raised her calloused hands, took the prince’s goblet and drank a half portion of the wine.

Lysaer accepted the cup back from her, drained it and laid it rim downward on the table between. ‘Dharkaron witness,’ he finished clearly.

Maenalle faced around toward her following. ‘Honour and welcome to s’Ilessid!’

As prince and steward took their seats to thunderous cheers from the clan scouts the banquet began in earnest. Accustomed to court fare as Lysaer was, he could not help being impressed. Surrounded by all but barren rock, caught at impossibly short notice, the Camris barbarians provided hospitality as fine as any grand fete held in Amroth. But although in manner and bearing these people seemed flawlessly refined, their high-table conversation better reflected the temper of the culture underneath.

‘The arrogance of the townsmen swells beyond belief,’ the eldest chief, Lord Tashan confided over his soup. ‘We confiscated a wagon recently. Among the goods were paper documents dividing land into portions and allotting coin value to each.’ The spry old lord laughed hugely. He set aside his spoon and fingered his goblet without drinking, concern threaded through his amusement. ‘Next they’ll be trying to tax the air a man breathes, do you guess?’

‘Mortals have been known to presume far worse,’ Asandir interjected. A sharp glance warned Lysaer to silence as he added, ‘What was done with those papers?’

‘We burned them,’ Lord Tashan said in disgust. Now he did take a swallow, a deep one. ‘Without ceremony, as tinder to kindle a watchfire. It’s an affront against Ath’s creation to number a mountain among one’s possessions. Thrice damned to Sithaer, and Dharkaron’s curse on the mayor who started the infamy. If he dares to cross Orlan, we’ll speed the Wheel’s turning for him, and send the blooded arrow to his heirs.’

Asandir locked eyes with the older noble. ‘The matter is beyond your jurisdiction, and the mayor’s life subject to the king’s justice.’

The chieftain bowed to the rebuke, but his outrage smouldered hot as the candle-caught glint of his rubies as he turned in appeal to Lysaer. ‘I ask pardon, my prince. Avenor has been five centuries in ruins, and as many years have passed since a royal heir has graced our land. Survival has forced a harsh code of law, and from habit, I forgot my place. Judgement remains the king’s right. But I’m confident you’ll resolve the matter firmly on the day your high council reconvenes.’

Lysaer hid unsettled thoughts by toying with the meat on his plate. Land-owning, an inalienable tradition on Dascen Elur, appeared to be bloodletting violation in Tysan. The prince held the concept daunting and uncivilized that he might one day be expected to punish a man for laying claim to the farmland he tilled. If Tysan’s charter of governance denied the security of home and hearth-rights, small wonder the townsmen had let sedition from a spiteful sorcerer incite them to bloody rebellion. Anxious to change the subject, if not the injustice of such laws, Lysaer admired the exceptional beauty of the tapestries.

Lord Tashan chuckled with relish. ‘They were the unwilling donation of the first Mayor of Erdane, damn his memory.’

‘Stolen?’ Lysaer prompted.

The old chief’s smile faded. ‘Not precisely, my liege. The weaving was originally done by the masters at Cildorn, before the old races vanished from the world. The clan chiefs of Taerlin paid fair price for the art, though the records that prove this burned when their holdings were stripped in the uprising. The more valuable spoils were sent north, catalogued as tribute. As a protest, my kinsmen in Caithwood saw fit to lighten the mayor’s wagons. The bloodstains washed out, well enough. But the forest caves turned dismal with mildew since the mists, so the Paravian tapestries were brought here for preservation.’

Lysaer measured the cavernous grotto surrounding him with new eyes: ruffians who lived by the sword would have small use for grand celebrations. The chamber where these barbarians feasted had not originated as a guest hall; more likely it had been fashioned as a storehouse, a vault carved into mountain rock to safeguard generations of plunder.

Maenalle’s eldest son, and Maien’s father, went on to describe the particulars of that historical first raid. Tashan’s comment concerning bloodstains had been no understatement. Trapped in public scrutiny, Lysaer hid disgust like a diplomat. Nobly born or not, these folk endorsed outright robbery. Filled by dismay, the prince who must one day rule them understood that the fine cloth, the jewels, even the plates and cutlery that graced the table were no less than the spoils of generations of ambush and murder. Upright trade did not exist among these clansmen; only knowledge of arms and tracking and a predatory penchant for raiding. Alarmed to find his hands shaking, Lysaer set down his fork. His adroit attempt to change the subject was foiled by his half-brother, whose forthright laughter encouraged further tales of thievery from their hosts.

Unpleasantly reminded of the past, Lysaer lost interest in the food. Arithon had sailed with Karthish pirates; naturally it followed that he had no sensibilities to offend. That he showed no rancour for the rough handling inflicted upon his person in the pass seemed a perverse and unlikely reaction for a man whose intense preference for privacy seemed the cornerstone for an unforgiving character.

The musician who had played Felirin’s lyranthe by the fireside possessed the skills of a consummate actor; for such depths of sensitivity could surely not sanction tonight’s callous enjoyment of violence. Left heartsick and isolated by the temper of Tysan’s clansmen, Lysaer strove without success to rally his equanimity; he had seen the hardworking merchants in Amroth suffer the butt of s’Ffalenn effrontery too many times for complaisance. The blight on s’Ilessid justice remained, and the bitter taste of outrage transferred to any brigand who presumed to rob for gain.

Lysaer endured the meal; guest courtesy forbade him to do otherwise. Distant, even majestically polite, he listened to the rounds of wild stories until the boards were drawn for the revels. Then without compunction he sought counsel from Asandir.

‘How can I rule these clansmen?’ he demanded. ‘The townsfolk are no less Tysan’s subjects than they. In all fairness, is it right to set brigands and thieves as overlords above the very same craftsmen they have victimized?’

Asandir broke off contemplation of something in the chamber’s far corner and weighed the prince’s distress with silver, imperious eyes. ‘Have tolerance, your Grace, at least until you’ve sat at a mayor’s table and listened to the boasts of his headhunters. For where a townsman has lost riches, the clans have paid with the blood of kinsmen and heirs. These whom the townborn name barbarians have seen their children slaughtered like game deer, their wives, sisters, and daughters mercilessly raped and murdered. They inhabit the wastes and the wilds, because everywhere else they are persecuted.’

Hands clenched hard in his lap, Lysaer drew breath to temporize. The sorcerer cut him off. ‘Do not presume that I justify the lifestyles of clansman or townborn. I only point out the dissent that has plagued this land through the centuries since Davien’s rebellion. When sunlight is restored, we must all strive for peace. You’ll have time to study the problems before then, and no end of encouragement and counsel at the time you finally assume your crown.’

Further discussion was curtailed by the evening’s entertainment, a superlative demonstration of knife-throwing, followed by sword dancers who performed an intricate display to no other accompaniment than the rhythmic chime of crossed steel. Lysaer applauded their performance in admiration, for although he had watched similar gymnastics in Amroth, the dancers had never been female. The steps exhibited for his pleasure in Camris had been dangerously more demanding, and performed at frightening speed.

Warmed by the prince’s enjoyment, Maenalle apologized for lack of the gentler arts. ‘We don’t risk our bards in the mountains. Masters of the lyranthe remain in the foothills with our families, that our children learn grace before hardship.’

Lysaer’s surprise must have showed.

‘I forget you weren’t raised among us,’ Maenalle apologized. We’re not entirely the barbarians the townsmen name us. Our women serve with the scouts until marriage, and after that only by choice. The experience at arms is necessity, for in the event of attack, some of the mothers must defend while the households are taken to safety.’

Left selfconscious by his steward’s perception, Lysaer did his best to return her direct courtesy. ‘Your hall need not go tuneless this night. My half-brother is accomplished on the lyranthe.’

‘But I have no instrument,’ Arithon protested, as if all the while his ear had been tuned to the exchange. Having somehow evaded the ceremony due the half-brother of a prince, he wore his plain tunic and much-worn scabbard still. Though conspicuous in his lack of finery his preferences had been humoured without offence until Maenalle saw fit to correct matters.

‘You shall have your pick of instruments,’ she announced, and waved over one of her captains. ‘Escort the prince’s half-brother to the vaults and let him choose a lyranthe that suits him.’

Servants rolled one of the smaller tapestries aside and a key was brought that fitted the grilled doorway behind. Arithon and the leather-clad captain took candles and disappeared within, while Lysaer, who had not missed proof that his surmise concerning treasure-stores was accurate, involved himself with praising the knife-dancers.

An interval later, Arithon returned. Resting in the curve of his arm was a lyranthe so battered and plain it almost looked fit to be discarded. The tuning pegs were chipped and not one string remained intact.

‘He would have none of the jewelled ones,’ the officer who escorted him explained hastily.

Maenalle’s gaze turned stormy. ‘Do you mock us?’ At her tone, the knife-dancers melted away; nearby clansmen broke off conversations and went very suddenly still.

Arithon looked up from the instrument on his arm. ‘I chose the best,’ he said, bemused beyond thought for deceit. ‘Listen, lady.’ He whistled very softly over the sound board just ahead of the bridge. The wood in his hands caught the tone and responded in a resonance of absolute, dusky purity.

The sound caused Asandir, involved in discourse with Lord Tashan, to turn and stare. ‘Ath in his mercy,’ the sorcerer exclaimed. ‘Allow me to examine that lyranthe.’

Clansmen stepped aside as the sorcerer approached and lifted the worn old instrument from Arithon’s hands. Asandir ran his fingers down the wood, scraped grime off one tarnished fret, then turned the neck in his hands to view the back. There, begrimed under layers of yellowed lacquer lay a single Paravian rune, inlaid in abalone that somehow through the years had not chipped.

‘Well, here we are,’ the sorcerer murmured. He scraped at the inlay with a fingernail and bared a rainbow glimmer of fine pearl. ‘There was truth to the tale that a second lyranthe crafted by Elshian remained behind on the continent. ‘ He returned the instrument to Arithon with reverence. ‘One is held in trust by Athera’s Masterbard, Halliron. The other now belongs to you, by courtesy of Camris generosity. Guard her well. The sunchild Elshian was the most gifted bard known to history and an instrument made by her hands sings more beautifully than all others.’

Maenalle laughed in flushed triumph at Arithon’s evident dismay. ‘Return us the gift of your playing,’ she said, and dispatched Maien to the tents to fetch wire.

But Asandir raised a hand in restraint. ‘Wait, lady. Brass strings will break on that instrument.’ He considered a moment, then added, ‘If you provide a few ounces of silver, I can refit her as the maker intended.’

Without hesitation, Maenalle removed her left bracelet.

‘Any bent spoon would do as well,’ Asandir said gently.

Maenalle’s eyes flashed. ‘Mine the honour, Kingmaker.’

The sorcerer inclined his head, accepted the heavy, interlaced band and cupped it between his palms. The clansmen crowded closer to watch as, unmindful of his audience, Asandir bowed his head. No other move did he make, but a power sang upon the air. The bracelet in his hands shimmered, then flashed incandescently white. The watchers nearest to Arithon felt a sear of heat on their faces. Yet the sorcerer’s flesh did not burn. His hands moved, and the light grew blinding, and the ones who dared the dazzle saw the metal in his grip glow red. As if he handled nothing in the least beyond the ordinary, the sorcerer twisted the ore between his fingers and drew out a glowing filament.

The task took scarcely a minute; then light and magic faded and the sorcerer opened unmarked fists. He held half an arc of silver knotwork and a shiningly perfect length of wire. As if the ruined symmetry of Maenalle’s bracelet prompted him to further inspiration, he gave a mischievous glance to the lady steward, then murmured, ‘Indeed, it is not meet that so great a gift should keep such mean appearance.’ And spell-light rinsed his hands once again as he reached out and cupped the fragment of interlace to the unadorned fretboard of the lyranthe.

A snap like a shock whipped the air. When the sorcerer released the old wood, the silver knotwork remained, its pattern transmuted into the ebony as though stamped there from the day of creation. Arithon ran his fingertip over the result. He felt not a single raised edge; the inlay had fused with the surface beyond any hint of a flaw.

When the lyranthe was re-strung with the sorcerer’s spell-tempered wire, the virtue of Elshian’s craftwork became apparent from the instant Arithon struck the first note for tuning. The scratched wood in his hands came alive with a tone that touched the farthest recesses of even that cavernous stone hall. Harmonics seemed to shiver and melt upon the air, and every conversation faltered to a hush. Speakers forgot their next words and listeners heard nothing beyond the dance of Arithon’s fingers and the languid, gliding sweetness of the strings as he turned each peg to true the pitch. When his work was done and the first full chord rang out under his hands, he stopped breathing, bowed his head, then damped the magnificent sound to silence.

‘Lady Maenalle,’ he said, in his voice a jar like heartbreak. ‘This lyranthe is too fine for me. Let me play this one night and return her for your masterbards in the lowlands.’

But the Steward of Tysan dismissed his conscience with an imperious lift of her chin. ‘I don’t begrudge you my bracelet,’ she called across the quiet. ‘And our bards, every one of them, passed over that instrument for another of prettier appearance. Since they chose by their eyes and not their ears, I call their claim forfeit.’

Arithon’s hand remained frozen against glittering bands of new strings.

‘If the word of a prince carries weight, I stand by Maenalle’s judgement.’ Lysaer chose a seat and by example all in the chamber followed suit. ‘Brother,’ he said on a strange edge of exasperation, ‘will you have done with moping and play?’

Lacking the knowledge of Athera’s own lore, Arithon chose a sea ballad from Dascen Elur, a lively recap of a pirate raid in which a wily captain reduced three merchanters to ruin. Although the names of the vessels were changed in deference to his half-brother, Lysaer remembered the incident well; the merchanters had died badly, the seamen’s widows and their families forced to beg charity to survive. Yet singer and lyranthe wove their spell deftly. The clan lords responded to the tale in raucous and whole-hearted enjoyment. No one beyond the performer ever guessed how the laughter stung their prince’s pride. In fairness, Lysaer could not blame Arithon: his duty was to please his hosts, and in a camp without wives or sweethearts, he had performed with a minstrel’s true insight, his choice most apt for the setting. Yet the thievery that delighted these barbarians had roots in a past that reminded how terribly wide lay the gulf between subjects and sovereign.

Lysaer took his leave early, pleading weariness. He retired to the small chamber with all its comforts, but hours passed before he undressed and went to bed, and the peace of sound sleep did not visit him.

Confrontation

The hour grew late. Candles burned low in the hall by the time Arithon plucked the closing bars to his last dance jig of the evening. Although admiring listeners still surrounded him and the exultant flush remained high on his face, he silenced the rich tones of Elshian’s instrument with something very near to relief.

‘Another drinking song!’ called a roisterer from the back.

Arithon shook his head and set the lyranthe gently down on the boards of an empty trestle. ‘My fingers are shot, my voice long gone and I’ve a kink in my back from too much sitting.’

‘Have a beer then,’ a younger woman invited.

‘What, and spoil my head for clear thought?’ Arithon rose, grinning with the abandon of a thief. ‘I’ve swallowed enough to ruin me already. Too much praise has done the rest. Have some mercy and let me retire while I still have the wits to find my bed.’

‘She’d likely show you to hers,’ somebody quipped from the sidelines.

But the admirers nearest at hand perceived the musician’s weariness. Reluctantly they parted to give him passage between the bare trestles, the last few occupied chairs and the boys who cleared away goblets and gathered up the linens from the feast. Though the clansmen of Camris had entertained lavishly, there were no drunks on the floors. The celebrants who lingered in the late hours were alert enough that an alarm from a messenger could see their finery exchanged for weapons at short notice. Quietly, unobtrusively, Arithon crossed the expanse before the arch. He disappeared into the gloom of the outer hallway without drawing Maenalle’s notice; but slumped in a heap with one hand still curled around an ale mug, Dakar opened one eye. He saw Asandir break off his discourse with a clan chieftain and take purposeful strides toward the door.

‘I thought so,’ the Mad Prophet mumbled through his knuckles. ‘Our Master of Shadow is going to catch an ungodly dressing down.’ Dakar licked his lips and smiled before he slipped back into stupor; but his self-righteous prediction proved slightly premature.

Asandir did not follow Arithon immediately, but visited the quarters of Tysan’s prince for a lengthy interval first. Afterward, as the winds sang cold off the heights and the mists of Desh-thiere obscured the early blush of coming dawn, the sorcerer let himself out to find Arithon.

The Teir’s’Ffalenn was alone at the horse-pens, his back to the inside rails and his hands busy working tangles from the black forelock of the dun. Asandir approached without sound across the compound of trampled snow. For all his care, he was noticed. Arithon spoke as the sorcerer paused behind his shoulder.

‘Elshian’s lyranthe should remain here.’ Pain threaded a voice worn rough by extended hours of performance. Too spent for nuance, Arithon added, ‘Better than I, you know how little she will be played.’

Asandir folded his arms on the top rail of the fence. Cloakless and hoodless in the cold, the wind stirred his silver hair and the night-darkened fabric of his tunic. ‘Much can change in the course of five centuries.’

Arithon at this moment preferred to forget the legacy left him by Davien’s enchanted fountain: he shrugged. ‘Quite a lot has not changed at all in the course of five centuries.’

At which point, directly confronted with the purpose of his visit, Asandir abandoned tolerance. ‘Did you believe me unaware of what happened in the loft of the Ravens’ stableyard? Or that, the other day in the pass of Orlan, you baited Grithen and his scouts with intent to force my hand and expose your half-brother’s inheritance?’

‘Lysaer has what he longs for: a crown and the cause of truth and justice.’ The dun blew softly through her nostrils, stepped back, and left Arithon’s hands empty. The cold made him wish he had his gloves.

Asandir seemed impervious to the wind’s cruel bite. ‘Let me tell you a thing, Teir’s’Ffalenn. You were left to your devices because the mindblock I set was never intended to bend your will.’

‘Was it not?’ Arithon retaliated fast and hard as a blow. ‘Then why bother setting any ward at all?’

The sorcerer did not rise to anger. Measured and wholly mild, he said, ‘Would you warm a man just tortured by fire before an open hearth? The memories of your failures in Karthan were all too hurtfully recent.’

Arithon flinched. The sorcerer pressed on, remorseless, though he never once sharpened his voice. ‘Maenalle was to receive the Prince of Tysan today. The Fellowship had already decided. She would have been informed of his lineage in private, that Lysaer not learn of his heritage until he had experienced the atrocity of the mayors firsthand. Except that your meddling with events caused your half-brother an unpardonable shock, and Grithen has been sent in shame to the camps in the low country. He may be denied his inheritance.’

Now Arithon went still as fire-hardened stone.

Asandir resumed, quietly precise as the tap a gemcutter might use to shear diamond. ‘Grithen is the last living heir to the late Earl of Erdane. Since his two siblings died on a headhunter’s spears, yesterday’s affray in the pass could disrupt a succession that has endured since the years before the uprising.’

Arithon did not leap to claim the implied responsibility. Inflectionless as the windborne scrape of loose ice, he said, ‘You’re telling me things that might all have been prevented.’

‘If the Fellowship were to use power to compromise a man’s destiny, yes.’ Asandir regarded the knuckles left at rest on the midnight cloth of his sleeves while Arithon absorbed implications: that his fate was neither absolute nor proscribed. That he might cross the corral, saddle the dun mare, ride out and not be pursued, except by townsmen who mistook him for a clanborn barbarian. Or he might take up the superlative lyranthe given him by Maenalle and study under her bards in the lowlands to the advanced senility of old age.

Arithon faced around and met the sorcerer’s eyes, which were clear as mirrors and as matchlessly serene. ‘You would let me go that simply?’

‘I would.’ The sorcerer added, ‘But let us be accurate. Would you let yourself?’

Struck on a nerve left raw since Dascen Elur, Arithon could no longer curb bitterness. ‘Dharkaron, Ath’s Avenger might show more mercy.’

‘Who will speak for the clansfolk of Rathain?’ Asandir said, a dark and terrible weight of sorrow behind his words. ‘For them, what mercy will there be when the sun returns, and the townsmen order killings caused by fear of a king who is not there?’

Arithon made a sound halfway between a sob and a curse. The biting sarcasm he used to deflect unwanted inquiries would not serve, but only drive through Asandir’s tranquillity like a spear cast through seawater: passion dispersed without trace by the infinite. The sorcerer watched his struggle with neither cruelty nor challenge, but only an understanding as steady and deathless as sunlight.

Through a throat racked by tears he refused to acknowledge, Arithon said, ‘You give me Karthan, all over again.’

‘The man would not stand here, who did not choose Karthan first.’

‘Oh, Ath,’ Arithon let go a twisted laugh. ‘The bitterest enemy is myself, then.’ For the open-handed freedom set before him was no choice at all: just the repeat of a fate poisoned through by an unasked for burden of human suffering.

‘I asked only that you travel with me to Althain Tower,’ Asandir said. ‘Wherever else will you find the guidance to reconcile your powers as a mage with the responsibilities of your birthright?’ The compassion in his tone was a terrible thing, a whip and a scourge upon a mind already mauled by the quandaries of duty. Arithon spun away, weeping regardless, and cursing the light hand of his tormentor. One threat, one compulsion, one word spoken with intent to bind would have given him opening to escape.

But Asandir closed the net with a pity that shattered and crucified. ‘If you finish the journey, your case will be brought before the Fellowship. I can make no promise. But if a compromise can be found to release you from kingship, I will plead in your favour.’

‘The last nail in the coffin,’ Arithon managed. ‘Of course, under protest, I accept.’ The air ached his lungs and his head hurt. His back to the sorcerer, his eyes on the shifting shadows of the horses, he clung to the fence, mostly to keep his hands from violence.

Asandir looked at him and did not miss the murderous undertones of conflict. ‘For Desh-thiere, the Mistwraith, the Fellowship has no other choice.’

‘Ath,’ Arithon said. He managed a savage jab at humour. ‘Dakar would be crushed if we wrecked his precious prophecy. But against the Mistwraith, I do recall giving my word.’

‘Of the two, your kingdom is equally important.’ The sorcerer might have departed then, his movements masked by a gust from the north.

Yet Arithon sensed his intent. Not yet ready for solitude, he whirled around, met the endlessly deep eyes and planted a barb of his own. ‘Then we understand each other all too perfectly well.’

Given clear warning that Arithon remained ambivalent concerning his inheritance, Asandir showed no annoyance. Rueful instead, he listened to the sigh of the wind across the compound as though it held answer to all suffering. ‘I’d like to know,’ he said at last to the prince who waited in jaggedly prideful silence, and who was far too wise to vent frustration through belief that the Fellowship sorcerers were his enemies. ‘If our roles were reversed, what would you do?’

Arithon hesitated barely an instant. ‘Find the Paravians.’

Asandir sighed. A sadness settled over him as oppressive as the mists on the mountains. ‘We tried,’ he said bleakly. ‘Ciladis of the Fellowship took on that quest, for he treasured the old races most of all.’ A minute stretched painfully through silence. ‘He never returned.’

As if the night were suddenly too dark, or the cold off the peaks too penetrating, Asandir abandoned the subject. He strode back toward the lights of the outpost, leaving Arithon to the company of the horses and a moil of frustrated thoughts.

Traithe

Set on a knoll above the scrub-covered dunes that bordered the Bittern Desert, the spire of Althain Tower endured winds that never eased. Time and seasons might change, but in snowfall or sultry summer, drafts moaned through the shutters on the highest floor, riffling the corners of parchments caught between musty stacks of books. Unwashed tea mugs nested between the piles like abandoned eggshells in straw; walled round by clutter, surrounded by unstoppered ink wells and a row of meticulously sharpened quills, Sethvir of the Fellowship minded his cataloguing. While his awareness ranged far and wide beyond his tower eyrie, tracking events and portents that encompassed the grand movements of armies to the change of polliwogs into frogs, he penned neat script onto parchment and recalled candles only as an afterthought. Darkness came and went in its daily rhythms, unmarked by sleep or lighted sconces.

And yet amid the wail of a gust off the fells, when something flurried at the casement as slight as the scuffle of a mouse, Sethvir lifted his head. His poet’s eyes lost their vagueness as he laid aside his quill pen.

‘Traithe?’ he said, on his feet in an instant. A six-day accumulation of dust billowed up from his robe as he shoved between chairs heaped with scrolls and opened the shutters on a predawn sky coiled with mist.

Rewarded the next moment by a downward rush of dark wings, the sorcerer’s pensive frown melted. ‘Welcome back, little brother,’ he greeted the raven that alighted on the knotworked border of his cuff. The bird croaked. It cocked a pert head and blinked an eye intent with intelligence.

Sethvir shut the casement, a detail he intermittently neglected. ‘Did you bring your master, little one?’

The raven hopped to his shoulder and reproachfully preened its left primaries. When Sethvir responded by waiting, it shifted its feet and spoke again, sharply impatient. The sorcerer chuckled. ‘All right, I’m on my way.’

Forgetful that wet ink now hardened on his favourite nib, the Warden of Althain bore the bird from the copy chamber and down the bare spiral stairwell that accessed the tower’s nine levels. Shadows of past ages lingered thickly here, but no place more than at ground level, where the mist-filtered gleam of first light etched the marble-carved statues of centaurs, sunchildren and unicorns. Jewelled eyes and gilt trappings flashed at Sethvir’s passage, wakened to glittering reflections as he brightened the torches by the tower’s sole entry. At the foot of a shallow flight of steps, Sethvir caught a ring from a recessed socket and slid aside gold-chased panels of red cedar. The dusty smells of books and old tapestries gave way before the sharper tang of oiled steel, while new flamelight threw grim highlights over a clockwork array of counterweights and chain. The raven unfurled its wings for balance as the sorcerer set hands to the windlass. He cranked back the bars on two massive, metal-bound gates, which opened on a vaulted sally port cut through the base of the tower.

Here the drafts sang in dissonance through arrowloops and murder holes. Sethvir touched ink-stained knuckles to a secondary barrier of carved oak; the arcane bindings he released next collapsed in a blue-white sheet of clean fire, letting in the moist scents of grasses and mist and damp earth.

Sethvir paused, fleetingly touched by regret. That Althain Tower had ever needed its antiquated, second-age defenceworks was sorrowful enough; but that he should require wards, and that he should need to unbind such protections to admit another sorcerer of the Fellowship went beyond tragedy.

The guard-spells that Sethvir had dissolved on a thought, that he could have stepped through with little more difficulty than breathing, lay beyond the grasp of Traithe who, at cost of the greater share of his powers, had singlehandedly sealed the south Worldsend Gate in the hour of greatest peril. For the Mistwraith that afflicted Athera was but one splintered portion of a vaster whole; had Traithe not limited its access, Desh-thiere’s rank coils would have strangled more than sun, but choked off all life on the planet.

The raven flapped irritably.

‘All right, little brother.’ Harried back to duty, Sethvir unbarred the wooden doors.

Outside, beyond the battered barrier of a final portcullis, stood a sorcerer, his deeply-lined face and hooked nose shadowed under a wide-brimmed hat. A patterned silver band and straight-cut silver-white hair were the only bright aspects about him; the rest of his clothing including scuffed boots was fashioned of unadorned black. The raven did not wait for Sethvir, but bounded through the grille to light on its master’s shoulder.

‘Welcome,’ murmured the Warden of Althain, the usual misty distance restored to his blue-green gaze. ‘I trust your passage was swift?’

Traithe of the Fellowship shrugged, his iron-clad stoicism shaded ineffably toward disgust. ‘I was only in Castle Point.’

The clang of the outer winch re-echoed through the arch while the portcullis ground ponderously upward. Traithe shouted over the din. ‘I searched for six days before I found a captain still willing to sail the coastline!’

The portcullis stopped. Sethvir ejected a rude word that rang isolate across fallen silence. Then he said, ‘That frustration won’t last, my friend. Banish Desh-thiere, and you can restore the lost arts of navigation.’

‘But that would take—’ Traithe’s sombre mien transformed before a smile of wounding hope. ‘The Prophecy of West Gate? Is this why you called me? A prince has returned from Dascen Elur?’

‘Princes,’ Sethvir said succinctly. ‘S’Ilessid and s’Ffalenn, on their way here with Asandir.’

Traithe chuckled outright. ‘Even better! Ath, I was going to grumble about sore feet, and here, you’ll have me dancing on them instead.’ He reached down, lifted the saddle and bridle heaped by his boots as though he no longer felt the miles he had ridden through the night.

Determinedly bent to mind the winch, Sethvir took no brightness from his tidings. That Traithe, who had sacrificed more than any to avert the desecration of Desh-thiere, who was most vulnerable to harm if town factions should discover his identity, who through these late and troubled years was most resilient over his failures – that of the Seven, Traithe must wait weeks and travel miles to receive news that Asandir, Kharadmon and Luhaine had all known on the wings of the moment itself was a grievous injustice.

Through the passage, Sethvir re-set gates and defence-wards with the motions of long habit, while Traithe regarded the statues commemorating old-race heroes of a past that now seemed febrile as a dream, though the jewelled settings were polished bright and the caparisons on the centaurs hung rich as if fresh from the loom. ‘However the world comes to suffer, the sanctity of Althain remains unbreached. Your wardenship rests lightly, here.’

Mildly pleased, Sethvir returned a vague gesture. ‘The upstairs is shambles. If you ask for tea, we’ll need to scrounge for clean cups.’

Traithe made his way in halting steps toward the stairwell. ‘Well, you do have more on your mind than all the rest of us put together.’

‘Sometimes.’ Pursued by echoes, forgetful of lamps, the Warden of Althain began the ascent. Through the pause as Traithe deposited his horse gear in the armoury, he added, ‘Right now, just Mirthlvain.’

Traithe tripped on a door-sill, and not because of his limp. For Mirthlvain Swamp to command his colleague’s undivided attention meant trouble of fearful proportions. The raven resettled disturbed balance with an indignant ruffle of feathers while, worn from travel, and oppressed by the mists, Traithe felt the frost go through to his bones. He fumbled at his belt, hooked the thong that hung his flint striker and seeded a spark in the sconce by the storage level.

In the sulphurous flare of new lamplight, Sethvir’s gaze glinted hard and immediate as chipped glass. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘The tea must wait. Meth-snakes have bred with cierlan-ankeshed venom and Verrain has just now sent word: there are many of them, and a mass migration is imminent.’

Unsurprised that a disaster of such shattering proportions should be announced in the midst of banalities, Traithe said,’And the others?’ Worry eclipsed his weariness. If these meth-snakes spread beyond Mirthlvain, countryfolk from Orvandir to Vastmark could be decimated in a matter of days.

‘I’ve called them.’ Sethvir’s voice seemed to echo beyond the confines of Althain’s stairwell, to bridge the wide leagues that separated the far-scattered members of the Fellowship.

‘Well, at least I’m at hand to be helpful,’ Traithe added, and this time his bitterness showed.

Still focused and fully attentive, Sethvir surveyed his companion from lined, dark eyes to scarred hands, to the limp and travel-stained cloak that the raven had torn threadbare at the shoulders. ‘There was never a time that you failed us, old friend.’

Then, as if Desh-thiere’s desecrations were trivial and large-scale catastrophe from Mirthlvain did not threaten the Kingdom of Shand, the sorcerer clapped both hands to his temples in contrition. ‘Dear me. There must be a thousand or so books heaped in the upper library and Ath’s own jumble of inkwells lying about without caps. By nightfall, we’re going to be needing the table underneath.’

‘Well,’ said Traithe benignly. ‘Between you and the spawn of the methuri, we’ve got a dashed handful to tidy up.’

‘Mess?’ Fixed on the underlying concept, Sethvir raised bristled eyebrows. ‘There’s really no mess. Just not enough corks for the inkwells, that’s what drives me to chaos.’ He whirled and rushed up the stairs.

Traithe followed. In the deliberate, sure-footed manner that masked the worst of his infirmities, he lit sconces the entire height of Althain Tower. Asandir might not need them, nor would Kharadmon and Luhaine; but two princes arrived from Dascen Elur were bound not to welcome a mage’s disregard of the dark.

Summons

Far off, where daybreak has long since brightened Desh-thiere’s oil-thick murk, cold winds whip across the grass-gowned hills of Araethura, stirred by the essence of a sorcerer who whirls his way south in grave haste…

South and west, with the ease of an entity long discorporate, a second sorcerer once called the Defender rides the force of the flooding tide in response to distress call from Althain…

Under gust-swept peaks in Camris, wrapped in dawn-lit mist, the sorcerer Asandir pauses as if listening on the threshold of his quarters in the barbarian outpost; a moment passes, then he whirls at a run for the guard post to prepare for immediate departure…

IX. ALTHAIN TOWER

Accustomed to threats and fast action, Maenalle’s scouts had horses saddled and provisions secured on the pack pony only minutes after the urgent summons from Althain Tower reached the west outpost and Asandir. Lysaer emerged from his quarters looking hollow-eyed. Secretly relieved to be quit of the company of subjects he found disturbing, he remained in flawless command of his manners, a trait young Maien admired as he held the stirrup for his prince to mount. Not all men would be so pleasant to serve after being rousted at dawn on the heels of a rowdy celebration.

Arithon sat his dun looking murderous. He had not rested. Neither had he been so far into his cups the evening before that indulgence should have spoiled his sleep. As Asandir swung into the black’s saddle, the Master said, ‘I should have liked to ask for audience with Lady Maenalle.’

The sorcerer adjusted his reins without reply; and while the wind chased a cloak-snapping blast of cold off the heights, his reason for silence became apparent.

‘If you wanted to speak for young Grithen, spare the trouble,’ announced Tysan’s lady steward, present all the while as observer. Dressed like her scouts, her hair bundled under the hood of a sewn-hide cloak, she had passed unnoticed in the bustle.

Grudging to show surprise beyond a fractional rise of one brow, Arithon greeted her. As close to apology as Lysaer had ever seen him, he said, ‘Surely I have reason to plead the man’s case.’

Maenalle’s features stayed hard. ‘Tysan’s scouts do not act for personal vengeance. No matter what the provocation, they are forbidden to take hostages. We are not like Rathain’s clans, to extort coin and cattle for human lives. For breaking honour, Grithen must answer. The fact he was invited into his temptation, and that his action also threatened his liege bears very little on his punishment. The code that condemns him is one that upholds clan survival.’

The dun sidled under Arithon’s hand as he fielded the nuance in challenge. ‘You disapprove of your counterparts to the east?’

Maenalle’s lips tightened. Though aware that the dun’s combative crabsteps reflected the mood of the rider, she responded in the bluntness that abashed the most brash of her scouts. ‘Unlike your subjects in Rathain, my following need not contend with the trade city of Etarra. Feud between clanborn and townsman is pitiless there. In the eastlands the governor’s council can execute a man for the offence of singing the wrong ballad. Play your lyranthe in those halls with caution, young prince.’

The Shadow Master said, ‘Spare the title, lady. I might never acknowledge any claim to the city you speak of.’

Maenalle stood braced against a vicious blast of wind. ‘Would you risk the perception that inspires your talent by hardening your heart against need?’

And Arithon suddenly laughed, his anger absolved by admiration for her unflinching toughness. He bent in his saddle, raised Maenalle’s hand and kissed her sincerely in farewell. ‘Were you caithdein of Rathain I might find myself sorely oppressed. Dare I suppose that Etarra’s governors would also find their ways compromised?’

Strikingly free of vindictiveness, Maenalle said, ‘If you want my earnest opinion, there can be no remedy for Etarra, except to raze it clean to the ground.’

Piquant as her remark was, the chance was lost to pursue it as Dakar emerged from his cabin, stumbling in the grip of two scouts. They had needed to shepherd him into his clothes, for his voice arose in complaint that his breeches were laced inside out, and both his boots on wrong feet. His keepers only smiled at his protests and hoisted him toward his waiting horse. Maenalle disengaged her hand from Arithon’s grasp and took hurried leave of her sovereign. If Lysaer’s response was cool with propriety, the reason became lost in the rush. The instant the Mad Prophet’s bulk was stowed astride, Asandir wheeled his stallion and urged his party to the road.

‘Ath’s mercy,’ Dakar cried in vociferous injury. ‘What disaster brings this uncivilized change of plans? I thought I could nurse last night’s hangover under dry blankets for a change.’

Asandir answered between the snow-muffled thunder of hooves. The words ‘Mirthlvain’ and ‘meth-snakes’ carried forth with incisive clarity and Dakar’s recalcitrance withered.

Lysaer observed this. Despite an ambivalence resharpened by last night’s ballads, he spurred abreast of the dun mare. If the unaccustomed rub of Maenalle’s lyranthe left the creature wayward and edgy, the Master was seasoned to her tricks. Aware his half-brother would respond though his hands were full, the prince called over her rebellious snorts. ‘The page who wakened me said our sorcerer had received emergency summons from Althain. What horror in this land do you suppose might be worse than Khadrim?’

The Master grinned back in speculation. ‘We do seem in a hurry to find out.’ He did not add that Maenalle’s scouts had shown him maps: Althain Tower lay ninety leagues distant, a six-day journey over roads sparsely stationed with posts for adequate remounts. Yet Asandir spurred toward the foothills at a pace not intended to spare horseflesh.

After scrambling descent of a rock-strewn slope, the riders clattered onto a level stretch flanked by wind-stunted cedars. The footing softened to frost-crusted mud, safe for a prudent trot. Asandir shook his black to a canter, and conversation dwindled before the need to duck clods spattered up by its hooves.

The peaks lost altitude as the sorcerer’s party progressed. Under muted daylight, the heavy snows of the passes thinned to slush sluiced by ribbons of run-off. Lowland damp blunted the cold to a miserable ache and the horses streamed lathered sweat. The dun abandoned her antics, her wind and energy consumed entirely by running, and still Asandir pressed on, the stride of his rangy black unflagging through league after passing league.

‘By the Wheel,’ Lysaer called in distress. ‘Is he going to run our horses till they founder?’

Dakar roused from his misery, surprised. ‘Asandir? Never.’ Morosely, he added ‘one could wish the sorcerer spared some pity for the aching head of his apprentice.’

‘Magecraft,’ Arithon explained as Lysaer questioned such unnatural display of endurance. ‘Touch your horse and you’ll feel the energy.’

Lysaer stroked his chestnut’s steaming neck, and snatched back from the tingling warmth that surged in a wave from his fingertips. Nettled to be alone in his ignorance, he glanced across whipping strands of mane. ‘Could you make such a spell?’

Arithon regarded his brother with eyes unnervingly thoughtful. ‘Not for so long, and not without harm. A balance must be maintained. If the horses don’t suffer, the sorcerer must stand as their proxy.’

Curiosity overshadowed Lysaer’s distrust. ‘Then Asandir depletes himself to replenish the strength of our mounts?’

‘In effect, yes.’ As if reluctant to elaborate, Arithon faced forward into the wind as they thundered on into the lowlands.

Morning wore on toward noon.

The countryside steadily flattened and the road improved to a span of stone paving scored white by the passage of cartwheels. Asandir pressed the horses to gallop through gentle hills and vine-tangled orchards, stopping only once at a wayside tavern to buy raisins, sausage, bread and spirits for refreshment. While his companions ate and swallowed dry whisky, horseboys towelled lather from the horses and checked their hooves for loose shoes. Within minutes the company were back in their saddles, still cold, still sore, but none more haggard than the sorcerer, who seemed a figure pinched out of clay as they clattered back onto the thoroughfare.

‘How much longer can he keep this up?’ Lysaer asked as his horse picked up a brisk trot. The pause at the tavern had not refreshed him. His muscles had stiffened, wet breeches had chafed his knees raw and he owned no mage-trained detachment to set such discomforts out of mind.

Dakar glanced wistfully over the gates of a farmstead; smoke from the chimney carried an aroma of roast ham. Lighted cottage windows glimmered through bare trees and birch copses, their cheery shelter as useless as mirage to travellers harried by rain and mounts hard-driven over slate grey and glistening with puddles. When Lysaer repeated his query the Mad Prophet shrugged like a sodden crow. ‘Who can fathom the limits of a Fellowship sorcerer? I’ve studied for centuries and I daren’t.’

Lysaer was too spent to question whether magecraft or lying obstinacy gave rise to the Mad Prophet’s claim to unnatural longevity.

Cantering again, they crossed a blacksmith’s yard. Blocked by a packed herd of sheep across the roadway, Asandir wheeled his black into the weed-choked ditch by the wayside. His party followed, raked by branches, while the ewes beaded up in alarm against the far bank and the abused shepherd’s shouted invective faded behind.

The rain fell harder and farmsteads thinned away into wilderness before the sorcerer at last drew rein. Engrossed in miserable discomfort, Lysaer jounced against the chestnut’s crest as it clattered to a halt underneath him.

‘We leave the road here,’ Asandir called while Dakar and Arithon pulled up. ‘Dismount and stay close. Every minute counts.’

Saddle-galled and sore, Lysaer managed not to stagger as his numbed feet struck ground. He swiped back wet hair and surveyed a site that seemed unremittingly desolate. ‘Here?’

Asandir turned the black’s bridle and shouldered without reply into holly and briars that hooked and snagged threads from his cloak. A stone’s throw back from the verge the brush subsided. Trees eaten hollow by age choked the light and faint depressions and upthrust stone kerbs revealed the ruin of an older road. Asandir pointed out a canted megalith traced over with weather-worn carving. ‘That stone marks the third lane, one of twelve channels of earthforce we will tap for swift travel to Althain. The soil itself sings with power, here.’ As if the land’s living pulse could also be drawn to sustain him, the sorcerer quickened pace.

Forced to keep up, Lysaer and the others stumbled over lichen-capped stones and splashed through bogs, their road-weary mounts trailing droop-tailed and tired over hummocks browsed short by deer. The failing day dimmed the mist in louring veils, broken ahead by a wall that once had been dressed white marble. The eroded pillars of an arch yet stood where the way had originally passed through. Beyond, patched with bracken and a criss-crossed stitchery of game trails, the land sloped into a bowl-shaped hollow too symmetrical to be natural, and ringed by oaks scabbed over with ancient blotches of lichen.

Footfalls silenced by wet leaves and moss, the party moved through the green-tinged twilight of the grove. In places of thinned vegetation, iron-shod hooves clanged across weathered black agate. Runes were inset in the half-bared slab, fashioned from a light reflective mineral. Passing seasons had matted debris across the design, but the artistry in those fragments left visible roused an uncanny prickle across the skin.

Lysaer tugged his wet cloak around his shoulders, while Arithon scuffed away sticks and leaves to lay bare the ringed pattern of a cipher. ‘A power focus,’ he mused in an awed whisper.

Asandir stopped his horse. ‘Yes. We stand at the centre of the Great Circle of Isaer, built in the First Age to channel earthforce to guard the halls of the earliest Paravian kings. Those defenceworks are long vanished, yet the Circle itself was maintained, at least until the conquest of Desh-thiere.’

Arithon passed his reins to his half-brother and took an entranced step forward.

‘Don’t stray,’ Asandir cautioned. ‘In fact, you might wish to rest. This will be your last chance before we relocate to Althain Tower.’

Arithon regretfully contained his curiosity. ‘Are there any Paravian cities left standing?’

Sorrowfully the sorcerer shook his head. ‘Unlike mortal men, the old races seldom built, and then only through necessity. What holdfasts remained from the First Age were laid waste in the course of the rebellion, except the towers of the citadel at Ithamon. Those stand protected by mighty wards, and the armies who came to desecrate could not enter.’

But mention of the city ruled by s’Ffalenn ancestors withered Arithon’s interest. He retrieved his horse and subsided into thought while Asandir fetched a flask from his saddlebag and offered a round of strong spirits.

Too late, Arithon noticed Dakar’s unusual abstinence. He ran his tongue over his lips, but detected no trace of an aftertaste, nor any sweetness that might mask the suspect taint of drugs. His knees turned weak despite this. He had time to see Lysaer slump forward before his own senses whirled into vertigo. In the maddening space of a heartbeat, and despite his most desperate anger, he collapsed on wet stone in an oblivious heap beside his brother.

‘That was a dirty trick,’ Dakar observed.

Asandir shoved the stopper in the flask of ensorcelled spirits, his eyes steely with urgency. ‘Necessary, my imprudent prophet. Meth-snakes are stirring across Mirthlvain even as we speak, and I need you to quiet the horses.’

Dakar caught the reins the sorcerer threw him, then haltered the drifter-bred chestnut. Pale from more than his headache, he coaxed four lathered mounts into a huddle, then squeezed his eyes stoically closed while the paint rubbed her headstall against his chest, and the insolent dun lipped his cloak hood. ‘Keep doing that,’ he murmured, over and over like a litany. ‘Just keep on, and pay no mind to the wizardry.’

The last time he had been told to steady horses through the topsy-turvy disorientation of a lane transfer, he had suffered a dislocated shoulder. Unless Sethvir had much changed his ways, there would be a dearth of hard spirits in Althain Tower’s cupboards, even for medicinal emergency.

For Arithon, the spell-wrought sleep induced by Asandir did not last undisturbed. Brushed first by a passing energy current, then immersed in a burgeoning bloom of ward radiance, his enchanter’s sensitivity reacted, even through the veil of unconsciousness. Trained reflex took over and aligned his awareness to trace the source. The vibrations pursued by his innermind assumed hazy form, and he roved a landscape like dream, but not.

Even asleep, a part of him recognized that the energy net which drew him into vision was not fancy, but a peril less forgiving than a sword’s edge.

Arithon perceived a stand of reeds thrust through the ink-still waters of a marsh, no mere bog, but a vast expanse of wetlands criss-crossed with crumbled walls. Mist and night chilled air already dank with rotting vegetation: in the absence of moon or stars, ward-glyphs glimmered above drifted fog, wraith-pale and sharp-edged as blades, their forces interlocked to form a boundary. Inside, under apparently calm pools, the swamp’s depths moiled; serpents darted and dived, fanged, venomed, and guarded by a still figure in russet. Disturbed as if startled by footsteps in a place where no man dared tread, the watcher looked up sharply.

A soundless shock jarred the vision as the eyes of the guardian and the perception of the dreamer met; then the marshlands whirled away, replaced by a lofty tower chamber, walled with leather-bound books, and centred by an ebon table upon which a brazier burned like a star. Around this charged point of power, truesight identified the signature energies of Asandir, the Mad Prophet’s muddled contradictions, and a third mage strangely shadowed and overhung by the spread wings of a raven. That moment Arithon felt his awareness gathered in by a touch of inexpressible gentleness. His vision narrowed to encompass the face of a fourth mage seated with the others.

Mildly snub-nosed, seamed like crumpled parchment, the sorcerer’s features expressed grandfatherly bemusement, lent a benign touch of frailty by a woolly shock of white hair and beard tangled for want of recent grooming. The impression of childlike senility proved deceptive. Half-buried beneath bristled brows, eyes of diffuse green-grey reflected all the breadth of Ath’s Creation.

‘Teir’s’Ffalenn,’ pronounced a voice that rang through Arithon’s mind like the sonorous stroke of a gong.

The Master of Shadow snapped awake. His eyes opened to a red-carpeted chamber warmed by a hearth of banked embers. A kettle dangled from an iron hook wrought into the serpentine loops of a dragon. Nearby stood a marble plinth, but in place of artwork or china ornament, this one held a tea canister that somebody thoughtless had left open.

Arithon blinked. Disoriented, he stirred, then recalled Asandir’s ensorcelled flask. If transfer from the power focus at Isaer had been accomplished while he slept, this place would be located in Althain Tower. He lay on a cot under blankets. His boots had been removed; also his tunic, belt and breeches. He still wore his shirt, damp yet from rain. A heartbeat shy of a curse, Arithon spied his missing clothes, slung over a chair alongside a bridle in need of mending and a snarled up twist of waxed thread. An awl jabbed irreverently upright through a sumptuous velvet seat cushion. His sword, drawn from its sodden sheath and oiled, rested against a table heaped with books, some flopped face downward. Others were dog-eared at the corners, or jammed with torn bits of vellum or frayed string pressed into service as page markers. The dribbled remains of a tallow dip lay couched in an exquisite silver candlestand, and chipped mugs, used tea spoons and mismatched inkwells filled any cranny not encroached on by clutter.

Nested amid oak-panelled walls and age-faded tapestries, the air of friendly disorder offered the weary traveller a powerful incentive to relax and rest. But charged to disquiet by the tingling, subliminal ache that partnered the proximity of thundering currents of power, Arithon felt nettled as a cat in a drawstring bag. Although Lysaer lay curled in contentment in a cot alongside, his half-brother tossed off his blankets, arose and pulled on his rain-damp clothing. Since his boots were nowhere to be found, he crossed the thick carpet barefoot and opened the chamber’s single door, a studded oaken panel strapped and barred with heavy iron. The sconce-lit stairwell beyond removed any doubt that Althain Tower had been built primarily as a fortress. Chilled by fierce drafts through the arrowslits, Arithon stepped out and closed the latch softly behind him. A moment of considered study revealed the power’s source to be above him. He set foot upon worn stone and climbed to the highest level, where he encountered a narrow portal as starkly unornamented as the first. The latch and bar were forged iron, frosty to his touch as he set hand to the grip and cracked the panel.

Inside lay the round, book-lined room from his dream. The central table was supported by ebon carvings of Khadrim, and seated there, faced away from him, were Dakar, Asandir and a black-clad stranger. Opposite sat another, robed in maroon with sleeves banded in dark interlace and rubbed thin at the cuffs. He was neither tall nor portly, but his presence had a rootedness like the endurance of storm-whipped oak and his face and eyes matched that of the sorcerer who had spoken his title and aroused him.

‘Arithon of Rathain?’ said Sethvir, Warden of Althain, in gentle inquiry. ‘Enter, and be welcome.’

Dakar swivelled around in astonishment. ‘You should be asleep and beyond reach of dreaming,’ he accused as the Shadow Master stepped through the doorway.

‘How could I?’ Aware of all eyes upon him, not least the attention of the black-clad stranger, Arithon pulled out an empty chair and sat. He rested his hands on the table edge, careful not to look directly into the brazier. More like a spark than natural flame, its blue-white blaze carved the chamber into starred, knife-edged shadows, but radiated no heat, for its source was drawn direct from the third lane. To Dakar, Arithon retorted, ‘Could you lie abed with such a grand spate of earthforce in flux just over your head?’

To Sethvir, he added, ‘I came to offer help, if you’ll accept it.’

Befuddled in appearance as any care-worn old man, the Warden of Althain said, ‘We cannot deny we’re shorthanded. But you should be aware, there is peril.’ Though mild, the look that followed searched in a manner unnervingly subtle.

Read to his innermost depths, Arithon was touched by a contact so ephemeral it raised no prickle of dread; and yet, the image conveyed to him was harrowing. The swamp-dwelling serpent he had first seen in dream recurred now in migrating thousands, possessed of an intelligence that hungered, and envenomed with a poison more dire than anything brewed up by nature. Secure within Althain Tower, Arithon felt the restlessness that drove the meth-snakes in their hordes to seek the defenceless countryside beyond the marsh. Shown the villagers, children and goodwives whose lives were endangered, he was given, intact, the knowledge of the forces currently at work to stay the migration; then, in blunt honesty, the daunting scope of energy needed to eradicate the threat.

‘Now then,’ Sethvir finished aloud. ‘You would take no shame, if you wish to retire below and sleep. A wardspell might be set to isolate your awareness, if you desire.’

Arithon measured the Warden, whose kindliness masked a razor-keen perception. After a slow breath he said, ‘If I were to retire, I’d be asking no protections where plainly none can be spared.’

As he made no move to rise, Sethvir laced together fingers blue-veined as fine marble. ‘Very well, young master. Our Fellowship would be last to deny that against the meth-snakes of Mirthlvain every resource is needful. You may stay, but these terms will apply.’ His regard pinned Arithon without quarter. ‘You will lend support to the spellbinder, Dakar, unconditionally, and from trance state. You will hold no awareness of the proceedings as they occur, and retain no memory afterwards.’

Severe strictures; Arithon understood that if the conjury went awry, his life would be wrung from his body as a man might twist moisture from a rag. He would have no warning, no control, no shred of self-will. Across the table, the sorcerer in black watched him with feeling akin to sympathy; Asandir stayed firmly nonjudgemental. If heirship of Rathain seemed no hindrance to a perilous decision, expectations remained nonetheless. Whipped to resistance by that certainty, the Master moved on to Dakar, and there read fatuous contempt, for why should any trained master lend a brother’s trust to an apprentice who binged on beer to evade discipline?

Moved to black and bitter humour, the Master looked back at Sethvir. ‘I accept.’ The words were charged with challenge: if limits existed to the free will Asandir had inferred he still possessed, he would risk his very life to expose them.

The Warden of Althain rested misty, poet’s eyes upon the Master. ‘As you choose. You may set your mind in readiness at once, for meth-snakes won’t wait for second thoughts.’

Arithon bowed his head, aware through closed eyes of Dakar’s unadulterated dismay. The faintest smile curved the s’Ffalenn mouth, then faded as he engaged his self-discipline and submerged his consciousness into trance.

A great deal less gracefully, and with a martyred sigh the Master of Shadow was quite beyond hearing, Dakar gathered his own, more scattered resources.

Through the isolated interval of concentration, while the Mad Prophet assimilated the link offered by Arithon, Sethvir turned in piercing dismay toward Asandir.

‘Difficulty with the succession was an understatement, my friend.’ The Warden of Althain waved an exasperated hand at Rathain’s now unconscious prince. ‘You inferred a past history of blood feud, but this!’

At Traithe’s blank look of inquiry, Sethvir hooked his knuckles through the tangled end of his beard. ‘Our Teir’s’Ffalenn has the sensitivity imbued in his fore-father’s line, but none of the protections. His maternal inheritance of farsightedness lets him take no step without guilt, for he sees the consequences of his every act, and equally keenly feels them.’

‘That doesn’t explain his recklessness,’ Traithe said. ‘Nor such guarded resentment.’

‘No.’ Asandir answered his colleague levelly. ‘A prior conflict between ruling power and trained awareness of the mysteries has already broken Arithon’s peace of mind. An attempt on my part to ease his despair misfired and nearly earned his enmity.’

Sethvir steepled his hands, thoughtful. ‘Set him free, then. Let him pursue his gift of music, marry, and let us seek Rathain’s prince among his heirs. After the passage of five centuries, what is another generation, or even two?’

‘I beg to differ,’ Traithe broke in, his quiet, grainy voice tinged to regret. ‘If Etarra’s merchant factions are not curbed with the advent of clear sunlight, their intrigue could grow too entrenched to break.’

Silence fell, harsh under the glare of the brazier. Each of three Fellowship sorcerers pondered upon the trade city that commanded the heart of Rathain’s trade-routes. There the old hatreds ran deepest, and there misguided justice had brewed a morass of bloody politics and decadence. For Etarra, there could be no tolerance. The prince who assumed Rathain’s crown would be charged with dismantling that nest of corruption, and no chance offered better opportunity than the time of Desh-thiere’s defeat, when governors and guilds would be plunged into disarray by the return of the open sky.

‘The long-range effects bear careful study,’ Sethvir concluded. ‘We shall cast strands, when this matter of meth-snakes is resolved.’ Then, since the task of quelling serpents was dire in itself, he took brisk stock of their resources.

Two other Fellowship sorcerers rushed to the site of trouble had earlier raised a barrier ward to seal off the swamp. Their combined efforts were barely sufficient to stay the serpents’ migration, which left Mirthlvain’s guardian, the spellbinder Verrain, alone in the old watch-keep at Meth Isle. Although the fortification had been augmented with a fifth lane power focus to combat worse horrors in the past, an unaided apprentice could never man such defences without becoming charred to a cinder.

‘I see no alternative but to shape and direct the power from here.’ Sethvir sighed in naked regret. ‘What else can we try but to bend the third lane current across the continent in a reduced vibration that Verrain can safely transfer to bolster the barrier ward?’

To hear such a note of uncertainty from the Warden of Althain was enough in itself to inspire fear. By now in firm rapport with the resources lent by Arithon, Dakar shot a glance around the table. Traithe was openly sweating and Asandir sat with one fist braced in trepidation. In a stillness more eloquent than words, each sorcerer faced the appalling truth: never in five thousand years of history had they been so critically understaffed. The circle they would close for the task of saving Shand would only be as effective as its weakest link. Miserably conscious of his shortcomings, Dakar knotted clammy hands and cursed Arithon s’Ffalenn for scheming arrogance. Never mind that the Master’s magecraft held none of the shifty cunning his conscious mind affected; however he might disparage Dakar for slipshod ways, the trust he gave in trance was clear-edged and forthright as his music.

The paradox that a spirit so exactingly controlled should vengefully surrender all that he was into jeopardy jabbed like insult.

For as Sethvir described the coming trial, Dakar would become the check-rein on that awesome flow of power to be channelled through Verrain thousands of leagues away. If the spellbinder at Meth Isle should misstep, and Dakar keep less than perfect vigilance, the influx sent from Althain would merge unchecked with the fifth lane. The overload would sear the heartlands of three kingdoms to waste, while the meth-snakes that compelled such unconscionable risk would themselves evade annihilation.

Riddled through by anxiety, Dakar started at a touch upon his shoulder. Sethvir stood beside him, his manner tempered with sympathy. ‘We ask a great deal more than is reasonable of you.’

Dakar shook his head, struck mute. He had watched a man suffer death by cierlan-ankeshed venom; the memory still harrowed him in nightmares. Any stresses he might share through his link with Verrain must surely be less than the horrible invasion that threatened Shand.

‘I’ll cope,’ Dakar mumbled.

The Warden of Althain was never so easily deceived. ‘You will guard Verrain’s well-being and your own. Arithon’s strength will back you, but his safety will be mine to secure. He need never know. But as the last living s’Ffalenn, his line is too precious to risk.’

Sethvir gave Dakar a last pat in reassurance, then bent over Arithon’s limp form and with a gesture wove a protective ward that stung the eyesight to witness.

Although relieved of a burden, the Mad Prophet felt galled to no end that the Master should pass scatheless through a direct challenge of the Fellowship’s wishes. ‘It’s not as if he gave a whistle for the land, or the people, or even a spit over principles,’ Dakar grumbled as he stuffed shaky fingers in his cuffs to wedge them still.

Already attuned to larger matters, Sethvir returned a vague murmur. ‘You misunderstand the man gravely.’

But since the Mad Prophet had been engrossed beyond hearing through the Fellowship’s recent discussion, Dakar believed only that Arithon’s genius for duplicity had caused Sethvir himself to be misled. The Warden of Althain settled in his seat with a rustle of robes, and his trusting regard touched his colleagues.

No spoken signal passed between the three, yet when the Fellowship sorcerers at Althain commenced rapport, the air in their presence quickened at the call of some unseen current. Shadows swelled as the spark in the brazier condensed to a pinpoint, dim at first, then waxing as their touch bound the pulse of Athera’s third lane ever more relentlessly into focus. The light flared to piercing brilliance. Forced to avert his eyes, the Mad Prophet was awed to find the sorcerers unmoved by the dazzle. Rooted as stone, they twined the earthforces tighter still, until the chamber resonated with a palpable, mounting charge. A stinging bite of ozone eclipsed the smell of books. The tower’s granite walls lost aspect, became edgeless and transient before that vast tide of power which itself seemed to cancel time.

The atmosphere became stillness before storm, and out of pent silence, Sethvir spoke a word.

Light arced from the brazier toward Traithe.

He received it unflinching, cast it around space and time in a manner that defeated reason. A snap sheared the air into wind as the ray honed out of earthforce bridged the wide distance to Meth Isle.

Dakar bit his lip. The salt taste of sweat seemed unreal on his tongue, as if the proximity of lane-force estranged him from bodily sensation. Then the connection completed. His thoughts were slammed to incoherence as, across the breadth of the continent, the spellbinder who was Guardian of Mirthlvain recaptured the current sent from Althain. The focus pattern on the stone floor at Meth Isle keep flashed scarlet as power lapped against power, and the fifth lane’s inherent energies surged in sympathetic resonance.

Barefoot, terrified and stripped down to animal reflex, Verrain wrested the flux apart with a cry that echoed outward into the night beyond his walls. He rocked under a buffeting slap, shared by Dakar, as the awesome, fiery rush of power deflected through his body, and on, into the deft control of the sorcerers who held the barrier along Mirthlvain’s perimeter. Although stepped down to a finer resonance by the pair Asandir and Sethvir, the current’s passage was a dry, lacerating wind of agony. Dakar drew gasping breaths and struggled. He must preserve self-identity against the burning assault of sensation experienced by Verrain, or risk himself and all who depended on him.

The powers whipped and raged. Dakar fought not to be swept from control, though he had no anchor. The chair beneath his body had no meaning, nor the stone under his feet. He was a mote in a whirlpool, flexed, twisted, shoved and driven until physical orientation seemed an illusion cast outside reality.

Sethvir sensed the Mad Prophet’s distress, even through the shaping of the third lane’s raw bands. ‘Sometimes it helps if you hold someone’s hand,’ he said gently, and offered his own.

Dakar accepted with a gratitude compounded by desperation. Like a boulder in the thrash of a millrace, the touch steadied him. Distantly he was conscious of Sethvir’s link with Asandir, and the incomprehensible strength they engaged to tame the wild pulse of the third lane. Dakar blinked tears, or maybe sweat from his eyes. Confusion enveloped him, and a duality that dizzied. He endured, held to the body seated at Althain Tower, though a part of him also stood, barefoot, chilled and blinded by the inflamed focus pattern that channelled the untapped fifth lane. Dakar suffered with Verrain as wave after wave of energies coursed through their twinned awareness, to be snatched and turned again, before they merged in ruinous concert with the native currents underfoot.

Beyond moss-streaked keep walls and across the silvered waters of Methlas Lake, the mists of Desh-thiere muted a dance and flash of blue light, as the last two sorcerers in the chain fused with the borrowed powers to stabilize their defence ward. The critical moment arrived, when the vast and intricate matrix had been strengthened enough to be passed into the control of one sorcerer. Apprehension stirred through the circle gathered at Althain.

‘Steady, hold steady,’ Asandir said aloud.

Traithe returned a sharp nod.

Dakar felt Sethvir’s fingers tighten over his own. He had no chance to wonder if stress or reassurance prompted the gesture, for Verrain’s recoil as the power-flow shifted unbalanced him as well.

Through a terrible, precarious interval, the Mad Prophet battled for cohesion, the will that held him to cognizance gone febrile as a spider’s silk stretched against a gale. By the time the onslaught eased, Luhaine, once known as Defender, now contained the serpents’ migration, bolstered by assistance from Althain Tower. With one mage less in the link every risk lay redoubled. Dakar’s mouth felt packed with ash. Should the energy flow from Althain to Meth Isle keep fail now, Luhaine’s barrier would crumple and meth-snakes in teeming thousands would descend like a plague upon the countryside.

Yet such perilous preparation had at last freed the other sorcerer on site at Mirthlvain to act. Ruthless as Ath’s avenging angel, Kharadmon brought his powers to bear upon the boglands. Stale pools lashed up into foam as a living torrent of serpents seethed, pursued out of cranny, mud-pool and reedbed by a corona of killing light. The serpents writhed in futile flight, turned at bay against Luhaine’s ward. They struck at air, at wind-lashed hummocks and in a madness of frustrated fury at each other’s struggling flesh, while the night passed and their hordes were pared back relentlessly by the efforts of the Fellowship’s circle.

Then Verrain faltered at Meth Isle. The fifth lane focus there crackled to a blaze that signalled cataclysm.

Caught without warning, Dakar felt his senses upend into vertigo. All his control unravelled. His teeth clenched, every muscle cramped, and his body twisted as if he tumbled in a fall from a great height.

Warned by Dakar’s groaned shout, Sethvir sensed the disaster. As though he was not enmeshed in rapport with Asandir, the whole untamed force of the third lane whipped to submission between, he severed the power transfer. Snapped out of range of all pain, the Mad Prophet slammed back in his chair. His composure dissolved into ugly, racking sobs that were the best he could manage for breathing.

‘Ath,’ he gasped, half-unhinged. ‘I feel like every hangover I ever earned has joined force in triplicate to plague me.’

Swept by giddy hysteria, Dakar jammed a fist in his mouth to stop his babbling tongue. His vision had gone patchy and his ears boomed to a surf-roll of sound. Somewhere in the echoing, hollow void where thought seemed to flurry and vanish, he re-encountered the current channelled in from the Master of Shadow, reduced now to an ember, but pitched with the same, rock-steady vibration that had marked its presence from the start. Merciless in his need, Dakar seized upon that glimmer. He tapped Arithon’s source to anchor failing senses and recover the strength to look up.

‘Luhaine’s ward!’ he cried out, pierced by a raw blade of fear.

A stark silhouette against the blue-white glare of laneforces, and the pallid grey light beyond the casement, Asandir caught his shivering shoulders. The sorcerer’s fingers were not steady; but the grip they delivered bruised bone. ‘Bide still, Dakar, it’s all right.’

The supporting hands fell away and the Mad Prophet slumped forward, his cheek cradled on crossed forearms. Beside him, a haggard Traithe had done likewise. Through ears muddied with bell-tones of ringing sound, Dakar heard Sethvir’s voice assure that before the defences failed, the meth-snakes had been reduced to manageable numbers. Kharadmon might track down and eradicate the survivors with a fair chance of success.

Verrain’s collapse had been due to exhaustion and overextension. Luhaine would tend him and keep watch at Mirthlvain until the Guardian spellbinder’s recovery.

Like a shell sucked clean of meat, Dakar allowed himself to be ushered to his feet. He was aware of jostling and of movement, as the sorcerers bore him up along with the limp form of Arithon s’Ffalenn. Perversely vindicated, that at least such damnably arrogant self-discipline had just limits. Dakar inclined toward a rich laugh; except the crushing intensity of his headache permitted only breathless speech. ‘The prodigy overreached himself. Bothersome meddling mind of his will have no choice but to sleep off the reaction now.’

‘Indeed,’ Sethvir responded in remarkable pique. ‘Our Teir’s’Ffalenn won’t escape his bed for at least the next few days.’

The sorcerer said something more in the lilting cadence of the old tongue, but the words escaped comprehension. Poised at the head of the stairs, Dakar swayed precariously. His knees let go all at once. As a falling rush of darkness claimed him, he fuzzily concluded that drunken binges befuddled a body less than overindulgence of magecraft any day. Most urgently, he needed to remember to clarify that point with Asandir.

Strands

Eventide saw the Fellowship sorcerers, Asandir, Sethvir and Traithe gathered once more in Althain Tower’s upper chamber. The blaze of the brazier lent crispness to profiles already hardened by the demands of the times. Conversation stayed light as they waited upon their colleagues Kharadmon and Luhaine, both of whom as discorporate spirits were able to cross the continent from Meth Isle at whim. Certain topics were avoided; as unflinchingly as any Fellowship sorcerer still physically embodied had weathered the setbacks engendered by Desh-thiere and Davien’s rebellion, none cared to count how many places would stand empty tonight. In better years, at other summons, the ebony table had seated the full Fellowship of Seven, five high kings and a representative from the three Paravian races: apprentice spellbinders had not been required to shoulder responsibilities beyond their training to fill, and mist had not smothered the land to the harm of the fruitful earth.

Sethvir sought his usual solace, scrounging in his cupboards for tea, when Traithe’s raven raised wings and flapped, disturbed by a draft that spilled through the east casement. The sudden inrush of wind carried a distinctive scent of grasslands spiked with frost.

Poised with his hands full of crockery, Sethvir addressed what seemed vacant air. ‘Kharadmon? You’re not too spent to project an image? The Mad Prophet, I think, would be appreciative.’

As the eddy swirled to stillness, the tower chamber rang with deep laughter. ‘Where is Dakar?’ said a voice in resonant Paravian that issued from a point inside the shutter.

A shadow coalesced in the spot, resolving into the slender form of a sorcerer in sable and green. A cloak lined in orange silk spilled from elegantly-set shoulders; the face inside the hood was an elfin arrangement of angles, accented by a spade-shaped beard, a glib smile and a hooked nose. The apparition raised tapered hands and pushed the cloth back, smoothing black-and-white streaked hair. Freed from shadow, the eyes were pale green and direct as a cat’s. The visual projection of the discorporate mage Kharadmon skimmed a glance over the assembled company, and in thoroughly changed inflections repeated, ‘Where is Dakar?’

‘On his way.’ Asandir gave a boyish grin. ‘Though I fear a bit the worse for drink. Sethvir had cider in his cupboard and our prophet drank it dry to blunt the aches of exhaustion.’

Kharadmon’s smile widened to show foxy, even teeth, and features that had no substance in reality flashed a look of pure devilry.

Two storeys below Althain’s topmost chamber, the Mad Prophet roused from dreamless stupor with a start that cracked his knee into Sethvir’s chess table. Ivory and ebony counters cascaded to the floor, the clatter of their upset entangled with Dakar’s peevish oath.

‘Dharkaron’s Chariot!’ He catapulted from the armchair that had supported his untimely nap, slammed into the table again and slipped and skated across rolling pawns through several unbalanced steps. A spectacular trip landed him belly-down across a footstool and a racked set of fire tongs.

‘Blessed Ath,’ Dakar wheezed on the breath bashed out of his lungs. ‘I’m coming!’

Moments later, the sorcerers upstairs were disrupted by the solid thud of a body against the ironbound door to their chamber. The latch rattled sharply but did not unfasten; after an interval of fumbling and swear words, Dakar burst in from the stairwell, his face beet-red under a tangled nest of hair.

‘I came as fast as I could.’ The Mad Prophet licked a bruised knuckle, tugged at his rumpled tunic and glowered at Asandir. ‘Your gift of a nightmare was bad enough without setting stay-spells on the latch.’

Sethvir clutched his tea mugs, innocuously intrigued, while the sorcerer so addressed sat back in his seat, his smile gone and one silvered brow tipped upward. ‘How thoughtlessly quick you are with accusations.’

Dakar yanked out a chair and dumped himself in a miffed heap. ‘Only Kharadmon would have—’ Suspicion congested his round features.

‘Greetings, Mad One,’ said the discorporate sorcerer.

Dakar shot straight, wildly searching, but his gaze surveyed the room repeatedly without enlightenment. As the other sorcerers gave way to amusement, his injury flattened to disgust.

He announced scathingly to no one, ‘If you’re going to bait me, ghost, you might be sporting and show me a visible target.’

The spirit returned unbridled laughter and Dakar’s eyes found focus at last as the illusion that marked the sorcerer’s presence became revealed to him. ‘You’re beyond your depth, anyway, my prophet.’ Kharadmon pulled out a chair, carelessly sliding the seat through his thigh and a fold of green cloak. Since tormenting Dakar was a favourite diversion, he might have added more, but Sethvir broke in to ask after Luhaine.

Kharadmon’s eyes became veiled. ‘On his way this moment.’ Blandly, he added, ‘I always best him at travel, argument and cards.’

As if whipped to instability by his words, the torches in the sconces by the doorway streamed and flickered, and though no breeze had arisen to partner the disturbance, one blinked out.

‘I protest that statement,’ a bass voice said in reproof. A second discorporate materialized alongside the table, this one wizened and bald, a beard as broad as a waterfall fanned across his chest. His corpulent form was robed in blue-grey. Apple-round cheeks were capped by brows peaked in prim inquiry, and eyes sharp and black as an irascible scholar’s trained upon the elegantly seated image of Kharadmon. More than usually petulant, the newcomer announced, ‘Your claim is unfounded, unjust and entirely unforgiven. We shall contest it later.’

‘Luhaine,’ Sethvir interrupted, ‘Could we dispense with tired rivalries and get started?’

The second of the disembodied sorcerers transferred his vexation to the Warden of Althain. ‘You asked to determine the impact of Desh-thiere’s Bane upon Athera. Might I know what’s gone amiss?’

Belatedly, Sethvir recalled his clutch of crockery; he deposited the lot with a sigh on the last bit of uncluttered shelf, while Asandir leaned forward, his robe lit indigo by the brazier. In careful phrases, and as much for Dakar’s sake, he described the backgrounds and personal attributes of the princes from Dascen Elur whose shared talents comprised the heart of the West Gate Prophecy. His words were received in grim quiet, even Luhaine moved to silence as he summed up.

‘The powers the half-brothers command are unquestionably direct, and evenly split. The risks are self-evident. Lysaer and Arithon are opposites in character and upbringing. Both inherit the gifts of two royal lines, which makes an uneasy legacy. Should their past heritage of feud become renewed, the consequences could be ruinous. Since Dakar has been troubled by precognizance to that effect, it seems wise to cast strands and seek a clear course for the future.’

Luhaine’s image blinked out and reappeared, seated with fingers laced on the tabletop across from Kharadmon. His assent followed, instantaneous and emphatic since elemental mastery of any sort was potentially limitless. Set at odds, Lysaer and Arithon between them could wreak havoc on a scale not seen since Davien the Betrayer roused the five kingdoms to rebellion.

Quiet as shadow, Traithe arose from his chair.

‘Cupboard underneath the Lanshire histories, third shelf,’ Sethvir murmured distractedly. He dissipated the spark of lane-force that burned in the brazier. Asandir removed the bronze tripod, while Kharadmon extinguished the other sconce. Unhindered by total darkness, Traithe found the place designated and retrieved a square of black velvet, which he shook out and spread across the table.

Luhaine’s brow creased as the cloth passed unimpeded through his elbow. ‘Has Dakar mastered the effects of tienelle yet?’

The Mad Prophet rolled his eyes and groaned. ‘I’d feel better after a draught of deadly nightshade.’ Then, on a plaintive note to Asandir, ‘Is seersweed truly necessary? Last night was awful enough. Today I don’t feel in the least like volunteering to ruin my health all over again.’

The rare, high-altitude herb he wished to avoid at all costs. Valued for its mind-expanding properties, tienelle’s narcotic was also a poison that caused cramps, headache and a sudden onset of dehydration that could end in coma and death. Spellbinders were schooled to transmute its toxicity, for need occasionally arose for them to perceive complexities beyond their training to encompass.

Asandir measured his apprentice with a calm that disallowed pity. ‘Had you not dropped a sword, once, to disrupt your native gift of prescience, you would not be required to attend this session.’

Dakar slammed his palms on the tabletop, his frustration damped to an unsatisfying thump by the heavy velvet covering. ‘Ath, you won’t forget a detail, not even once in a century.’

‘Under the north windowseat, in the coffer,’ Sethvir interjected in apparently idle afterthought.

The Mad Prophet was not fooled. If Asandir’s memory forgave nothing, Sethvir knew the precise location of every unwanted item in Ath’s creation. Since Traithe would not trouble to fetch and carry for an apprentice, and Kharadmon’s whetted interest promised mischief, Dakar heaved to his feet. Too lazy, or too obstinate to engage the self-discipline for mage-sight, he noisily smacked shins and knuckles in the dark and searched out the herb stores for himself. He clumped back to his chair clutching a stone pipe and a carved wooden canister, and busied himself with a martyred sigh. Most pointedly, he ignored the Fellowship sorcerers as they prepared for a ritual undertaken only at direst need.

Power gathered in the hands of Asandir. Above the dark velvet he spun a rod of energy, a glimmer like a line of veiled starlight. To this, he added a second, then a third, each for the triad of mysteries that embodied Prime Power and underlay all Athera’s teeming life. Next he added twoscore lesser lengths, to which Sethvir assigned Names in a Paravian ritual that summoned the essence of the ruler, place, or power and stamped its quickened current on the spell. The strands assumed identity and altered, each according to assigned nature. The governor’s council in Etarra manifested as hurtfully bright, a hedge of scintillant angles; the trio for the Paravian races interwove to the evocative beauty of lacework before fading to a near subliminal glimmer; the spark that captured the collective spirit of the clansfolk in their exile scribed an enduring sweep of arc. To cities, human consciousness and natural forces were added individuals; and after these, plants, animals and natural elements, until a geometric lattice glimmered above the velvet backdrop, an entire world’s interlinked complexity recorded in precise proportion and line.

The visionary mind of a Fellowship sorcerer could interpret such at a glance. Where other methods of precognizance might sound only broadscale highlights, the strands were superlatively sensitive. Each would react as its nature dictated, mapping even minute shifts of balance with pinpoint accuracy. The futures that might spring from alternate sets of events could be assessed instantaneously, even the least nuance made plain. To read the analogue set down into pattern without laborious mathematical analysis, Dakar packed his pipe with the notched, silver-grey leaves of tienelle. The scent of the herb permeated the room, sharp, bitter and edged as a winter wind.

The pattern over the tabletop reached completion, shedding radiance like summer moonlight over the faces of the surrounding sorcerers. Dakar accepted a spark off the finger of a sardonically smiling Kharadmon to ignite his pipe.

‘Commence,’ Sethvir said softly.

The Mad Prophet sucked hard on his pipe stem, filling his lungs with aromatic smoke. Vertigo spun his awareness, followed by a kick akin to adrenalin; his senses cartwheeled and slammed back into focus, enhanced to painful sensitivity. His ears recorded sound with unnatural nuance and his vision assumed a razor-edged clarity. The strands that reflected the power balance of the living world lost their random shapes, became a comprehensible whole. Configurations of lines and angles spread out like tapestry, the fates of kingdoms intertwined with the births and deaths of fieldmice.

Yet across the rhythms of this grand design, disharmonies stood out like botched tangles in string. Here lay a twist that told of a mayor’s prejudice, jealousy and greed; there, a warped line revealed a sapling stunted by the unending mists of Desh-thiere. Where the shining braid of Paravian presence had once enhanced the central axis of the prime vibration, Ath, a channel of emptiness remained, like notes lost from a bar of flawless counterpoint. Dakar wrestled to stem a flood of tears. Another pull from the pipe and the tienelle honed sorrow into a blade that harrowed his heart. His time sense blurred. Over the shining lines of Athera’s present, he sensed changes wrought over the ages, the strengthening of some aspects, and the splitting, weakening, or dissolution of others. He suffered knowledge of all pasts and possible futures in their thousands, until awareness of Asandir’s eyes upon him pierced through his strayed concentration. His mind might soar through a spiralling flight of enlightenment, but at a price. He must not neglect self-awareness. Even as the drug freed his thoughts, its poisons ravaged his body. Death could overtake him if he forgot to guard his physical health.

The moment when the sorcerers raised power came as an icy chill that flowed the length of Dakar’s spine. The strands became suffused with terrible light, as the Fellowship sought futureward and called forth the events that might occur as a result of the works of two princes from Dascen Elur.

Desh-thiere’s fall became manifest as an explosion of new lines of power. Forests, fields and all of the natural landscape brightened to an ascendence of recovered vigour. The politics of the trade-guilds whipped into kinks of recoil, and a new axis sheared through their sundered town councils: Lysaer, Dakar perceived in wide surprise. The s’Ilessid prince would one day unite the towns, make war to claim all the wildlands for the mayors, and subdue and finally eradicate the barbarian clans. Arithon’s part appeared, not in Rathain, but as a figure of self-contained elegance that flowed from place to place, dedicated wholly to music. Yet the art he created was framed by a backdrop of unprecedented persecution.

The sorcerers’ unadulterated dismay disrupted the flow of probability. Dakar stole the moment to regroup, then scrambled to keep up as, vehemently fast, the strands unreeled to a new sequence. The Fellowship traced out the only alternative at hand to thwart that turn toward disaster: let the Mistwraith’s hold over sky and sun abide unbroken, while the powers that offered its sole downfall, two princes’ inherited gifts of Light and Shadow, became sundered by their hand to preserve the peace.

Shocked through change by a rippling cascade of forecasts, the pattern hardened. The motif that represented the Paravians dimmed to invisibility, then vanished away into darkness.

The spell froze. Stunned shock passed between the sorcerers; the impact of their collective dismay threatened to stop Dakar’s breath.

The disappearance of the old races had been sorrow enough to endure: the potential for their irrevocable extinction became as a tear in the fabric of Ath’s creation, an insupportable loss to any who had known their living presence. Although Dakar had been just a boy when the last of the creatures had vanished, childhood memories of one encounter had left him marked for life. Tears ran unchecked down his face.

That such shining beauty should pass beyond memory into legend could not be borne. Distinct from his own experience, Dakar shared poignant memories from the sorcerers; and the one that cut deepest was that of the solstice dance under starlight in the vale of Caith-al-Caen. The blighted patch of dark amid the strands, that had personified the penultimate grace, warned of a harm beyond healing.

‘So much for allowing events to run their course, untouched,’ snapped a thought from Traithe across silence.

As one, the Fellowship sorcerers rallied crushed hopes. Devastated by necessity, grimly wedded to purpose, they recast an alternative sequence they had earlier hoped to avoid. The strands flickered, interlaced, clean curves and sharp angles reformed to show a coronation at the trade city of Etarra. Charged by the Fellowship to accept Rathain’s crown, Arithon’s line bloomed into a jagged nexus of anguish, that peaked and peaked repeatedly, yet endured; and still the axis of Lysaer’s power roused the townborn to war. A great schism tore the width of the continent, with strife predominant. Yet the cipher that reflected Paravian survival glimmered on wanly, preserved.

Sethvir’s observation cut between. ‘Desh-thiere. The Mistwraith itself lies at the root of this.’ He need not belabour his frustration that the entity inflicted upon Athera by the worlds beyond South Gate could not be directly tracked: as a thing un-Named and foreign in origin, it had no signature energy that could be set into the pattern. The strands could only reflect its effects. As the sorcerers refocused their resolve, Traithe’s face showed a drawn look of anguish.

Again the pattern flowed into change, with discord harrowing all order. Futures in their myriad thousands described a legacy of battle and bloodshed. Dakar stared at violence until his eyes burned, and Kharadmon’s image became partially transparent with negligence. The strands flicked and interwove above the velvet, their motion unbroken but for the split-second needed by the Fellowship to assess the impact of each destiny. And still the patterns forecast war. The room grew stale with pipe smoke. Beyond the window, night gave way to hazy dawn, while the sorcerers pursued cascading trains of circumstance, unsatisfied. Their persistence unveiled no solution. The strands unravelled over and over into strife. Thwarted in their search for a peaceful expedient, the Fellowship sought answer in the far-distant future. Despite the expanded awareness of the tienelle, Dakar was left hopelessly behind.

Midday washed the chamber in dull grey before the strands stilled, freezing to a last blazing pattern that faded away like after-image. Sethvir raised eyes reddened from smoke haze. Kharadmon’s colouring was dimmer and Luhaine had lost detail. No face present escaped the impact of the quandary spelled out in the strands. Dakar tapped ash from his pipe into the lid of the tienelle canister, and as though roused by the sound, the Warden of Althain spoke.

‘Never in memory have the patterns converged so strongly to a path of alternatives this narrow. We are forced to unpleasant choices.’

The strands foretold, unequivocally, that Lysaer and Arithon would oppose, with full and bitter consequences. To strip them of their inborn powers as a deterrent in all cases yielded Desh-thiere’s continued dominance. That in itself promised changes in natural order, none of them to the good; but to deny the vanished Paravians a return to natural sunlight was to take the role of executioner. Men might engender war and suffering, but over the course of ages, even fanatical hatreds must fade. To act for immediate peace was to seal the extinction of a mystery beyond mortal means to restore.

‘If we only knew where they had fled, we might shelter them,’ Traithe said on a clear note of anguish.

‘Desh-thiere caused their disappearance from the continent,’ Luhaine pointed out. ‘If the old races allow themselves to be found at all, the Mistwraith’s fall must come first.’

The last avenue of debate became Arithon’s royal inheritance. No longer able to follow nuance, Dakar hunched in a stupor in his chair. His head was beginning to pound and his stomach tightened with the first unpleasant symptoms of tienelle withdrawal. Through a haze of mounting discomfort, he gathered the Fellowship inclined toward freeing Arithon from obligation to Rathain’s throne. If schism between the half-brothers must occur, best the powers of sovereignty were not involved. Dakar lost the thread of concentration. Words whirled in and out of his pain-laced thoughts, unheeded. Hounded by rising nausea and dripping poisoned sweat, he knew he should rise and find drinking water. His mouth was bitter with the burnt taste of tienelle; his awareness rolled like a ship on oily billows, jumbled and buffeted by after-visions. No mage in the chamber was more surprised than he when the name of the outcast sorcerer whose works had engendered the rebellion fell through his thoughts like a stone.

Davien.

Dakar shoved straight as his gummy, clogged perception broke before a cold wave of prescience and prophecy claimed his tongue. Though churning sickness tugged at his gut, his words fell in solemn clarity on a sudden, arrested silence.

‘Davien the Betrayer shall hear no reason, nor bow to the Law of the Major Balance; neither shall the Fellowship be restored to Seven until the Black Rose grows wild in the vales of Daon Ramon.’

‘Black Rose!’ Sethvir shot upright, intent as a hunting falcon. ‘But none exists.’

‘There will be one,’ Dakar gasped, slammed by a second precognizance that blazed through him like lightning etched across darkness. ‘The briar will take root on the day that Arithon s’Ffalenn embraces kingship.’

A dismayed round of glances crossed the table; for the strands had not deviated on one point: that if Arithon were left to free will, he would live and die as a bard. Only under duress would he accept the sovereignty of Rathain, and not even then with sincerity.

‘Arithon’s freedom must be sacrificed,’ Traithe said. ‘The choice is a foregone conclusion.’

That moment, amid strained and unsettled apprehension shared between Fellowship sorcerers, Dakar gave way to the sickness brought on by the tienelle. Doubled over with dry heaves, he all but tumbled from his chair. By the time his spasms eased, he retained no memory of the prophecy, and confronted by disappointment at every turn he managed a dogged apology before illness rendered him speechless.

Unlikeliest of benefactors, it was Kharadmon who moved to the Mad Prophet’s side and eased his suffering. As Asandir ushered his ailing apprentice downstairs to bed, the remaining sorcerers grappled with the new prophecy like starving dogs thrown a marrowbone. The judgement and exile of Davien had been their most tragic expedient, and the disappearance of their seventh colleague, Ciladis, in his search for the Paravians had become their most mourned loss. The prophecy entangled with Dakar’s Black Rose offered the first tangible hope that the reverses that had disrupted the Third Age might one day be righted.

Traithe, least likely advocate of individual sacrifice, had spoken rightly. Even without the fates of the two absent sorcerers thrown into jeopardy, the loss of the old races could not be risked. By the time Asandir had returned from seeing Dakar safely settled, several distasteful resolutions had become final.

For the sake of Paravian survival the princes who held Desh-thiere’s bane between them would use their gifts to restore sunlight, regardless of the wars to follow; and Arithon would be crowned High King of Rathain at the trade city of Etarra, to open the channel of probability that gave rise to Dakar’s Black Rose Prophecy.

There remained only the task of setting safeguards, where such could be done, to limit the scope of the damage. If Lysaer went on to claim sovereignty in Tysan, he would act without Fellowship sanction. The townsmen’s loyalty he might win on his own, but that of the clans must be held in reserve, leaving Tysan’s steward, Maenalle, free to safeguard her people as she could. And if the fabric of four realms was to be torn apart by conflict, the fifth must be granted firm leadership.

‘The heir to Havish must be brought out of hiding,’ said Sethvir. ‘He will need to be educated, for the day he comes of age, we must see him securely on his throne.’ In one of the kingdoms, at least, town factions and barbarian clans would not be abandoned to disunity.

Little else was exchanged in speech after that, as the sorcerers divided up the tasks at hand. Bleak as the future might become, the land would not be thrown wholesale to the bloodshed interlinked with Desh-thiere’s defeat.

The Fellowship concluded their conference well past mid-afternoon. Kharadmon was first to depart, his wild laugh and ready smile fading through the casement as he swept south on the desert breeze. Luhaine’s image dissolved in pursuit, a score left to settle concerning his colleague’s cavalier boasts.

Traithe shoved to his feet. His limp pronounced by exhaustion, he descended the stair to guard Dakar through tienelle withdrawal and to offer Lysaer when he woke the hospitality due to a prince.

Left alone with Asandir, Sethvir stood by the opened casement, his eyes veiled in contemplation. The tea mugs he had belatedly arisen to recover stayed empty as he said, ‘We have an immediate problem. The crown jewels of Rathain.’

Asandir sighed. ‘I’d not forgotten.’

The gems included in the heritage of past high kings had been cut by the Paravian artisans of Imarn Adaer, each one a power focus tuned to respond to the descendants of their respective royal lines. But the master’s training given Arithon by Dascen Elur’s mages already enabled his finer perceptions; augmented by the crown jewels’ attributes, his gifts could potentially become unmanageable.

The focusing properties of the stones would not be annulled by re-cutting; future generations would need them, even had the artisans of Imarn Adaer not been long dead, their knowledge gone to dust in the desecration brought by the Curse of Mearth. Sethvir and Asandir instead sought a ward to conceal the stones’ arcane nature from the s’Ffalenn prince who must hold them for the duration of his reign.

The project took the remainder of the day.

Dripping sweat, and tinged greenish by reflections thrown off an untidy hoard of cut emeralds, the two sorcerers locked glances as they emerged from combined trance.

‘Ath Creator,’ the Warden of Althain murmured in disgruntled vehemence. ‘You realize the Teir’s’Ffalenn and his confoundedly sensitive perception has brought us one damnable fix?’

Asandir raked silver hair from his temples. ‘Today I don’t need the reminder. I only hope we set our safeguards deep enough.’

Sethvir arose and scooped the gems into a battered coffer. ‘Take no chances. Set a geas to avert scrutiny when Arithon first sets hand to the royal regalia. If I’m any judge, he’ll notice the resonance of the wards.’

‘I had that hunch,’ Asandir confessed. ‘And I’m still concerned. The man has little vanity. Emeralds by themselves won’t impress him, and would you want to try and convince him that his jewellery shouldn’t be traded for something inherently more practical?’

Sethvir laughed. ‘I should have guessed, when we decided the latent s’Ahelas talents should be trained, that Princess Dari’s descendants might cause us a fearful set of headaches. She argued the entire time I tutored her.’ The Warden of Althain planted the coffer with its irreplaceable contents amid a clutter of unshelved books, then revived the dropped thread of inquiry. ‘I’d much rather brew tea, and challenge you to chess, than persuade any s’Ffalenn prince against his natural inclinations.’

Artifacts

Lysaer burrowed out of a comfortable muddle of bedclothes to find himself in a chamber lamplit against the gloom of falling dusk. The air smelled of sealing wax and parchment. Relieved to be free of open-air campsites and barbarian hospitality, he took in the scholarly clutter of books and pens, the scarlet carpet and the mismatched array of fine furnishings, and decided the pallet where he lay must be inside Althain Tower. The room was not deserted.

By the settle sat a black-clad stranger, his hands busy with awl and waxed thread, mending a broken bridle. A raven perched on his shoulder swung its wedge-shaped head at Lysaer’s movement, ruffled knife-edged feathers and fixed the prince with a gaze of bead-bright intelligence. As though given warning by a sentry, the man stopped stitching and looked up.

Lysaer’s breath caught.

The stranger’s eyes might be soft brown, and his clipped hair silvered with age, but the implacable stamp to his features and the profound stillness about his presence unmistakably marked him as a Fellowship sorcerer. ‘You must be famished,’ he opened kindly. ‘My name is Traithe, and in Sethvir’s stead, I welcome you to Althain Tower.’

Lysaer forced his fingers to release their cramped grip on the blankets. ‘How long have I been here?’

The raven cocked its head; Traithe knotted his last stitch like a farm wife and nipped off the thread with his teeth. ‘Since yesterday evening.’ At Lysaer’s raised brows, he added blandly, ‘You were very tired.’

Discomfited by more than his saddle sores, Lysaer surveyed the form of his half-brother, sprawled on the adjacent pallet in unprecedented and oblivious sleep. Struck that Arithon’s pose seemed less than restful – more a jumble of limbs folded like knucklebones in a quilt – Lysaer turned away. This once determined to keep the edge and not feel pressured to keep pace with his half-brother’s fast perceptions and trained awareness of mages, he slipped clear of the covers and hooked his breeches and shirt from a nearby chair. He dressed with princely unselfconsciousness, inured to the lack of privacy imposed by the lifelong attentions of servants.

The sorcerer in black was too tactful to seem curious in any case. He moved like a swordsman bothered by old injuries as he pushed aside his mending, shed his raven in an indignant flurry of wings onto the settle and rose to build up the fire. As disturbed embers flared to sudden flame, Lysaer glimpsed palms and wrists ridged with scars that would have left a lesser man crippled.

Unable to picture the scope of a calamity that could harm a Fellowship sorcerer, the prince averted his glance and set about lacing his sleeve cuffs. His awkwardness as always caused the ties to knot. Embarrassed that even so simple an act as dressing could still make him ache for the comforts lost with exile, he jerked at the snarl. Rather than succumb to expletives, he wondered if any place existed in this Ath-forsaken land where there was gaiety, laughter, and dancing in streets not guarded by sentries. He missed the gentle company of women, and his betrothed left beyond Worldsend most of all. Pride forbade the weakness of recriminations. Still, mastering self-pity took all the effort of a difficult sword form, or the thorniest problem of state ever assigned to his charge as royal heir.

When the contrary laces were set straight, the prince had recovered his poise. He looked up to find Traithe finished tending the fire. Still as shadow, limned in that indefinable mystery that clung to spirits of power, the sorcerer regarded him intently. His features were less chiselled than marred by hard usage to wrinkles like cracks in fine crystal. Laugh-lines remained, intertwined through others cut by sorrow. As if moved by caprice, Traithe said, ‘We’re not all relentless taskmasters like Asandir, you know.’ He flipped the poker back on its hook with a playful flourish and smiled.

Startled to reckless impulse, Lysaer said, ‘Prove that.’

‘I should have expected you’d ask.’ Traithe turned back, shamefaced as a dog called down for misconduct. ‘The sorcerer to answer should be Kharadmon. But he left this morning, feckless ghost that he is. As fool, I’d make a sorry replacement.’ Betrayed by a weariness that had not at first been apparent, Traithe settled back into his chair. A snap of his fingers invited the raven back to its accustomed perch on his shoulder where, out of habit, he raised a crooked knuckle and stroked its breast. ‘We could mend bridles,’ he suggested hopefully. ‘Enough worn ones are strewn about, though Ath only knows where Sethvir collects them. Unless Asandir or I happen by, the stables here shelter only mice.’

Amazed at how smoothly he had been set at ease, Lysaer gave back the smile he kept practised for difficult ambassadors. ‘I’m a poor hand with a needle.’

‘Any man would be, who’d eaten nearly nothing for a day and a half.’ Traithe pushed back to his feet. He had the build and the balance of a dancer, and the shuffling hesitation in his stride made harsh contrast as he crossed to the doorway. ‘Shall we see what Sethvir has bothered to stock in his pantry?’ He pushed the panel open, and the raven launched off and flew ahead into the torchlit stairwell.

Lysaer set aside the unbuttered sweetroll he had long since lost interest in eating. Across the narrow, cushioned cranny that Sethvir kept for a supper nook, Traithe elbowed his own crumb-littered plate aside.

‘You feel bothered that Arithon should still be asleep,’ he surmised.

Unsettled enough without having the thoughts in his head voiced outright, Lysaer flinched. His bread knife clashed against the china and startled the raven on the sorcerer’s shoulder to a flurried flap of wings. While Traithe reached up to soothe it, Lysaer looked down and away, anywhere but toward the whitened scars that criss-crossed the sorcerer’s knuckles. The nook might be cozy and the cutlery rich enough for a king’s boards, but the cruciform openings in the walls had originally been cut as arrowslits. The drafts through the openings were icy, the view beyond drab grey. Civilized, sunlit comforts heretofore taken for granted seemed unreachable as marvels in a child’s tale in this world of unending mists and bleak minds schooled to mysteries.

‘We’ve been here since nightfall yesterday.’ Princely manners showed a hint of acid as Lysaer challenged, ‘You don’t find it strange that a man should still be abed after twenty-four hours of rest?’ Particularly one like the Master who tended to recoil out of nerves from his blankets at every two point shift in the wind.

Traithe showed no break in affability as he hissed at the raven which edged down his sleeve toward the table, its sidewards tipped eye greedily fixed on the butter. Careful to turn his disfigurements from the prince’s angle of view, he shoved the candle stand between the bird and temptation. Through haloes of disturbed flamelight, he regarded the s’Ilessid half-brother. ‘Had Arithon been unwell, your concern would be shared by the Fellowship.’

The black-clad sorcerer volunteered nothing else; but his easy manner invited questions.

Lysaer gave rein to curiosity. ‘Would you mind telling me what happened?’

Traithe shrugged. ‘An outbreak of poisonous serpents in the kingdom of Shand took a forceful show of sorcery to eradicate.’

The last was understatement, Lysaer determined, since the mage’s expression was suddenly inscrutable as his raven’s. Piqued to be left out when momentous matters were afoot, he said, ‘I might have liked to help.’

‘Your half-brother was used,’ Traithe stated baldly. ‘His power was channelled from him like wine from a vessel of sacrifice. When he recovers enough to reawaken, he’ll retain no memory of the event.’ Mindful of this prince’s staunch loyalty, the sorcerer added, ‘Arithon volunteered, at the outset.’

The raven chose that moment to try a furtive sidle toward the butter. Traithe batted it aside without ceremony. Through its outraged croak and the breeze fanned up by its wing beats, he said, ‘Has no one ever thought to school you to understand your birth-given gift of light?’

Touched on a life-long source of bitterness, Lysaer spoke fast to keep from hitting something. ‘No one considered it necessary.’

The raven retreated to the top of the door jamb and alit on a gargoyle crownpiece.

‘Ah.’ Traithe set his chin on his fist. ‘For a prince in direct line for a crown, such judgement was probably sound. But you’ve been brought here to battle a Mistwraith. That alters the outlook somewhat.’

But Lysaer worried at his hurt with the persistence of an embedded thorn. ‘Why did Asandir not suggest it?’

Traithe chuckled. ‘Did you think any one of us is omnipotent? Asandir has Dakar for an apprentice. Teaching that scatterbrain anything would frustrate the patience of bedrock.’ The sorcerer pushed out of the windowseat. ‘I’ve an errand to complete in the storerooms. Perhaps you’d care to come along?’

Lysaer brightened and stood. ‘I’d welcome the chance.’

He trailed Traithe through the pantry, while at their backs, the raven swooped to the tabletop, folded wings like a furtive scholar, and hopped on the plates to scavenge crumbs.

‘Sethvir lets the butter go rancid in the larder, anyway,’ Traithe confided as he let himself into the stairwell. ‘He thinks eating a bother, but run out of tea and he’s desolate.’

Not eased to learn that mages seemed heir to human foibles, Lysaer followed his host into the tower’s lower levels. Even without arcane perception, Althain’s starkly plain construction and rough-cut granite bespoke haste and stop-gap desperation.

The air smelled of books, wet firewood and an indefinable tang left over from spellcraft. Somewhere high above the wind jostled a shutter against its pins. Lysaer found himself wondering whose feet had rubbed the edges from these stairs, and the hands of which crowned rulers had polished the axe-hewn oak rail. He had heard Asandir’s reverence for the old races; yet in this place, under low, vaulted roofbeams blackened by centuries of torch-smoke, there lingered only a forlorn sense of ending. Any past enshrined within Althain seemed faded to desolation and a haunting resonance of perished hope.

The mist beyond the arrowslits concealed the view that might indicate the storey of the threshold where Traithe finally stopped. He unlatched a crude door and disappeared into total darkness. ‘Use your gift to light your way,’ he suggested to the prince who hesitated at his heels. ‘Sethvir is haphazard about candles, always. I might need a moment to find one.’

Self-conscious as he had not been while rising from bed stark naked, Lysaer engaged his powers. Not easily, and not without trepidation, he summoned a silvery spark; but if the sorcerer thought his method crude, no comment was given on the matter.

The chamber revealed by the witch-light was larger than its doorway suggested. Timber racks lined walls that curved into shadow, crates piled in tiers picked out by the glint of hobnail studded leather or brass hasps. The stores reeked of oil and old dust, yet when the sorcerer touched flame to the torch in the wall sconce, the pitch-soaked rags caught and unveiled a clean-swept stone floor and shelving kept clear of cobwebs. The stores had been tended unstintingly, except for labels. Those bales and boxes that were catalogued bore crumbling tags marked in antique script that time had faded illegible.

Traithe paused in the centre of the chamber, rapt in manner as his raven. ‘I doubt much has changed since the Paravians left.’

Intrigued beyond awkwardness, Lysaer said, ‘What are we looking for?’

‘Sethvir could have described which of the twenty odd coffers on the third shelf by the north wall, at least.’ Stirred from vexation, Traithe gave a rueful smile. ‘We’re looking for rubies, and the circlet worn by the princes of Havish in ceremonial affirmation of their rights of succession.’

‘You have a surviving heir?’ Lysaer inquired, starved for information on Athera’s royal lines.

‘Tucked away in the hut of a hermit who dyes wool, yes.’ Traithe sighed. ‘The boy’s just twelve, and about to learn there’s more to life than bartering for alum to colour fleeces.’

Lysaer fingered an intricate pattern of vine leaves tooled into what looked like a high-born lady’s dower chest. ‘Where do we start?’

‘Here, I think.’ The sorcerer singled out two boxes and a crate stamped with a hawk sigil that might in years past have been red. ‘I would at least expect to find the regalia of the kings of Havish in a chest with the royal seal.’

Lysaer offered his assistance and found himself handed the smaller crate. As his hands closed over ancient wood, he shivered in anticipation. His forebears had ruled a high kingdom: piqued by the thought that relics of his own heritage might be cached here with the antiquities, Lysaer unlatched heavy bronze catches that slid easily despite heavy dents from rough usage. The Warden of Althain had not been lax in his care, for the hinges also turned without a creak.

The odour of leather and parchment immediately identified the contents: document scrolls looped in musty ribbons, and books with illuminated bindings and titles inscribed in the old tongue. The covers were not jewelled or clasped with gold, but darkened and scuffed with age. Regretful the words between lay beyond his schooling, Lysaer fingered the pages in fascination.

‘The packages we’re looking for won’t seem very interesting,’ Traithe said, his features eclipsed by the dome of the adjacent trunk. ‘You’d best check beneath those journals before you go any further.’

Lysaer closed a rust flocked cover. ‘What are these?’

‘Ancestral records that trace the line of the kings of Havish back to the founder, Bwin Evoc s’Lommein.’ Yet if the sorcerer meant to elucidate, a shuffling step and a carping voice interrupted from outside the doorway.

‘Did you have to set that raven loose to rampage through the butter?’ Green-faced and suffering what looked to be a punishing hangover, the Mad Prophet traipsed into the storeroom.

Traithe barely spared him a glance. ‘I’m encouraged to see you’ve recovered enough to have an appetite.’

‘I woke up because I was starving.’ Dakar fumbled with the strap of his belt, which was buckled but not tucked in its keepers, and immediately resumed accusations. ‘Sethvir’s too lazy to stock much beyond plain tea.’ The Mad Prophet winced, abandoned the particulars of his clothing and cradled his brow as the echoes of his own vehemence played havoc with his sore head. ‘And olives preserved in oil sit poorly on a queasy stomach.’

Busy unfurling an object swathed in linen, Traithe was cheerfully unsympathetic. ‘That didn’t keep you from eating them, I see.’

Dakar clammed up rather than admit culpability. Neither did the misery of his bellyache stop him from quartering the chamber, randomly fingering the varied contents of the shelves. ‘Sethvir chose like a ragpicker, when he decided what should be salvaged.’ A bored gesture encompassed a lumpish bundle wrapped in leather tied with twine.

‘I wouldn’t handle that,’ Traithe warned, already too late.

The Mad Prophet’s meddlesome fingers triggered a burst of blue-violet light. A crack shocked the air, capped by Dakar’s yell of pain. He recoiled, still howling, while the bundle he had disarranged rolled precipitately off the shelf.

It struck the floor with a note like sheared glass and another blinding flash seared away the leather wrappings. Blinking through a veil of afterimage and an acrid puff of ash, Lysaer saw a melon-sized violet jewel bounce and roll across the flags. The facets blazed and fountained sparks at each contact with the stone.

‘Fiends plague it!’ Dakar licked smarting knuckles and turned a baleful glare upon Traithe. ‘That’s the Waystone of the Koriathain!’

‘Obviously so.’ Shadows swooped in the flamelight as the sorcerer pushed aside his opened chest, leaned down and matter-of-factly fielded the rolling crystal. The sparks died. No punitive sting met his touch.

‘Morriel would sell her virginity to know where that thing went!’ Mollified, Dakar added, ‘She and her pack of witches have been searching for centuries, and Sethvir’s kept her Waystone here, hidden all this time?’

Traithe turned the huge amethyst in his hands, absorbed by the captured light that spiked through its purple-black depths. ‘Since nobody asked your crude opinion, I shall tell you once: the Prime Enchantress had only to inquire after the Waystone’s location.’ His eyes flicked up, piercingly sharp. ‘Naught but Morriel’s stubborn pride kept the jewel at Althain.’

But nuance was wasted upon Dakar, who loosed a boyish whistle. ‘The bitches will be hot, when they learn.’

The prospect of a scandal none but a fool would precipitate spurred Traithe to reproach. ‘We would all be better served if you would go and ask Sethvir for scrap leather that would do for replacement wrappings.’

Too wily to cross a sorcerer who used that tone of voice, Dakar departed grumbling obscenities. Left in the company of an undesirably curious prince, Traithe made an end of the matter. ‘The Waystone was mislaid during the rebellion. As you observed, it is perilously warded. The Koriani Senior Circle was negligent to leave so powerful a talisman unguarded.’

Traithe did not add that the loss of their great focus had also curtailed the order’s propensity for interfering in affairs beyond their understanding. Sethvir was unlikely to volunteer the Waystone’s location to the Prime Circle that craved its recovery. The Warden of Althain could be guileful as Davien the Betrayer when he chose; never mind that he appeared as honest as a clear glass of water.

Traithe fixed Lysaer with a gaze impenetrable as ink. ‘If you’ll finish unwrapping this bundle, I think you’ll find what we came for.’ He set aside the Great Waystone and tossed across one of two items half-swaddled on the lid of the trunk.

Lysaer caught the packet and stripped off the final layers of linen to bare a thin gold circlet, unornamented beyond a thready, age-worn line of runes. The smaller item undone by Traithe proved to be a hexagonal tortoiseshell box. Inside, nested in sheepskin, sparkled a matched collection of rubies.

At least a dozen in number, the set was cut to a perfection beyond reach of mortal artisans. The gems required no setting to impress; their depth of colour glinted like live fire in the flare of the torch by the doorway. Lysaer gasped, dazzled by the legacy that awaited the dyer’s lad soon to be unveiled as the crown prince of Havish.

‘The regalia was melted down for bounty gold,’ Traithe remarked sadly. For an instant he seemed less than wizard, and more a lame, very worn old sword-captain lost in reminiscence of ill times. ‘The desecration was a great pity. But Telmandir was the first of the royal seats to be sacked and set to the torch. Only the jewels and the king’s youngest child could be saved.’

Lysaer noted the sorcerer’s regret, but only distantly. Stark though the circlet in his hands might be it was old; its nicks and dents bespoke modest origins. Diminished to realize how very ancient were the high kingdoms of Athera, and given sense of the wide span of generations the blood lines hand-picked by the Fellowship must have ruled, Lysaer was moved to awe.

The battered circlet of the Princes of Havish, and the rubies torn at need from a regalia whose magnificence could only be imagined implied a stability shattered wholesale; and sacrifice akin to the straits that had caused the Paravians to build Althain Tower in the bleak hills of a wilderness to safeguard an irreplaceable tradition. Lysaer felt humbled.

His inheritance as s’Ilessid on Athera was vast in comparison to the tiny island kingdom left behind on the world of his birth.

The pomp, the wealth, every ceremonial pageantry that had seemed part and parcel of kingship was abruptly rendered meaningless: he perceived how narrow was his experience and how limited his vision. The presumption shamed him, that he had dared to set judgement on the lives of the Camris barbarians. Their plight must be better understood to be fairly handled; a stricture that must start with rebuilding trust with his half-brother. Brought to painful self-honesty, Lysaer realized that to do right by the kingdom of Tysan, he must embrace a new concept of justice. The tinker’s workmanship in the old circlet and the uncanny loveliness of Havish’s crown jewels compelled a cold and difficult review of his mortal strengths and talent.

Lysaer returned the artifact to Traithe, gentled by diffidence he had shown no one living. ‘I’m thankful for your offer to school my gift of light. But I see very clearly: a mage’s training is not my course to pursue. My part in confronting the Mistwraith is but the prelude to healing the rift between townborn and clansman. The greater good of Tysan must demand my total dedication.’

Struck by the depths of sincerity that prompted this prince’s self-sacrifice, Traithe closed his hands, quenching the blood-fire of the rubies. His sorrows as sorcerer compounded with fierce foreboding for the future spelled out by the strands. Like the Great Waystone the Koriani enchantresses ached to recover, the cache of sapphires that were the crown jewels of Tysan must remain in Sethvir’s trust at Althain. That this gently-reared descendant of Tysan’s kings, whose shining talent was inspired rule, should one day through the Mistwraith’s machination refute the fine intentions that now moved his mind and heart seemed an impossibly cruel twist of fate.

Harbingers

In the cold light of dawn, a dark horse with a black-clad rider canters south, for Ghent in the kingdom of Havish; beneath the hunting bow and traplines of a forester’s trade, he bears a concealed set of rubies and a circlet, while a raven swoops on a following breeze over his silver-banded hat…

High above land, outside even the coiling fogs of Desh-thiere, the discorporate sorcerer Kharadmon arrows east on the winds of high altitude, his intent to measure and map the power base of the governor’s council of Etarra…

Too obdurately frugal to hurry, Luhaine drifts west into Camris, bearing tidings and grave portents for Maenalle, Steward of Tysan…

X. DAON RAMON BARRENS

For a confirmed hedonist and established late riser, Dakar climbed Althain Tower’s central stair in suspiciously buoyant spirits. Enjoying the early hour without a hangover, he barged into the room where the half-brothers slept with a clang of the bar, and a shove that swung the oaken door to a thunderous boom against the stops.

The racket rivalled the impact of a siege-engine.

Accustomed to solicitude, courtly deference and a chamber valet selected for quiet habits, Lysaer squinted through a hurtful flare of torch-flame. He buried his face in his pillow, nettled enough to curse when rude hands grasped his shoulder and shook him.

The assault on his person ended with a raw hoot of laughter. Lysaer faced around. He endured the ache until his eyes adjusted to the sudden fullness of light and made out the form of his tormentor. Bent double and gripping his belly as if he hurt, Dakar wore a shirt that needed washing, a leather tunic ripped ragged at the hem and a plaid sash so sunfaded the only recognizable colour was grey. The glare of princely displeasure left his paroxysms unfazed.

Lysaer propped himself on one elbow. Made aware as he flicked back tangled hair that the view beyond the shutter was night black, he said, ‘I don’t see any humour in being wakened before dawn by a maniac.’

Dakar sat on the adjacent cot. The frame gave a squeal of leather and wood at the load, and the mattress canted. Its slumbering occupant slid like a dropped puppet in the direction gravity dictated. Blocked from tumbling to the floor by the planted bulk of Dakar, Arithon showed no sign of awakening.

‘Well?’ Lysaer fixed glacial eyes upon the Mad Prophet. ‘Are you going to share your joke?’

‘Joke?’ Dakar hiccuped and looked aggrieved. ‘I made none. But I’ll bet you never used that many filthy words in one breath before.’

‘Meaning I forgot my manners.’ Recovered enough to find tolerance, Lysaer gave back a wicked grin. ‘My reputation’s hardly spoiled. You don’t look to me like a lady I need to impress.’ Before Dakar could throw back rejoinder, he added, ‘Try that last move on the Master and see what sort of words he uses.’

‘Oh?’ Dakar twisted, reached out and pinched Arithon’s cheek, but failed to raise any response. Arithon never twitched an eyelid. Prosaically, the Mad Prophet said, ‘Won’t be waking up this morning, not at all. Too used up still, and better so. Asandir wants him napping.’

Warned by a hint of recalcitrance that purpose underlay Dakar’s remark, Lysaer got up and reached for his breeches and shirt. ‘We’re leaving Althain today?’

‘Tonight. The sun’s not up yet.’ All cow-eyed innocence, Dakar heaved off the cot. He regarded his knuckles, still nicked with scabs since his encounter with the door panel stuck shut by Kharadmon. ‘We go within the hour. But against any natural inclination, we won’t be making passage across Instrell Bay by boat. The sorcerers have decided we’re in a rush.’

Lysaer measured his shirt laces against each other to even them up for tying. ‘Why?’

Transparently reluctant to answer, Dakar crooked a finger in an end of his tangled beard and shrugged. ‘Daelion Fatemaster himself couldn’t fathom ways of the Fellowship.’ Impelled to neglected duty, he abandoned his affectations and launched off toward a nearby chest and scooped up Arithon’s clothing. Onto the heap, he tossed boots, hose, cloak, and belatedly, the sword Alithiel, which still lay naked against the table. ‘Didn’t this come with a scabbard?’

Lysaer unhooked the Master’s baldric, which hung in plain sight from a chair back, and handed it over without comment.

Still grumbling, Dakar shed his armload of garments onto Arithon’s chest. He then sheathed the blade, dumped that on top, and announced, ‘Right now I’ve got other problems, like lugging your bastard brother down five courses of stairs.’

‘Half-brother,’ Lysaer corrected. Regarding the Mad Prophet’s ministrations askance, he retrieved his weapons and cloak from the armoire. ‘I’m not so befuddled I don’t recall we’re only four flights above ground level.’

Nonplussed, Dakar said, ‘I can count properly when I’m sober. We aren’t leaving by the gate. Sethvir’s got a third lane focus pattern in his dungeon, and Asandir’s of a mind to hurry.’

By now acquainted with Athera’s geography through Sethvir’s collection of charts, Lysaer paused in the act of fastening his baldric: the distance inferred was well over two hundred leagues, with a span of open water in between. ‘We’re travelling on to Daon Ramon Barrens by sorcery?’

Dakar smiled, mooncalf features all innocence. ‘You’re going to witness wonders. That is, unless you get disoriented and lose your breakfast on the way. Personally, I find lane transfers across latitude nearly as dismal as sailing. But then my stomach tries to get seasick in a bathtub.’ A last, hasty inspection showed nothing indispensable had been forgotten from his collection of Arithon’s things; the Mad Prophet in prosaic efficiency rolled both Shadow Master and belongings up in the blankets he slept on.

As Lysaer took station at the foot of the cot to help lift the inert body, Dakar confided, ‘Our boy here’s going to be mad as blazes when he finally does wake up.’ A pause ensued as prophet and prince hefted their load and shuffled out of step around Sethvir’s clutter toward the doorway. Dakar elbowed the panel aside, backed through and cheerfully began the descent. ‘Angry as a rock-bashed snake.’

‘Maybe that has something to do with Asandir’s sudden haste?’ Lysaer suggested, hoping to pry loose explanation.

‘All of that.’ Dakar grinned, perversely uninformative. ‘Your half-brother’s going to be furious.’

Lysaer shifted grip on the blankets, which were an impractical way to handle a comatose body down a stairwell. Past the first landing, the draft swirled unpleasantly across his shoulders; and somewhere a loosened shutter grated sullenly in the wind. The steepness of the risers stalled conversation until something Dakar saw as he rounded the bend doused his overweening smugness.

Caught on the uphill end of a precarious and unwieldy load, Lysaer discovered in embarrassment that Sethvir stood on the landing, the voluminous cuffs of his sleeves for once shaken clean of dust.

Sight of the Teir’s’Ffalenn trussed in his bedclothes caused the Warden of Althain to blink like an owl exposed to sunlight. ‘I asked you to bring him down,’ he murmured in vague reproof. ‘Did you have to bundle him up like stolen goods in a carpet?’

‘Next time, you carry him,’ the Mad Prophet retorted between wheezes.

Sethvir hurried ahead down the corridor, maroon robes flapping around feet tucked hoseless into ridiculously oversized fur bushkins. His reply trailed back with all the daft overtones of a hermit caught talking to himself. ‘Teirain’s’Ffalenn are well able to right their own injustices, this one better than most. He’s Torbrand’s descendant, after all, every inch of him touchy. You’re welcome to his revenge by yourself, fool Prophet.’

To this Dakar spoke phrases that cast biological doubt upon Arithon’s already illegitimate ancestry. Sethvir gave back a blank glance and passed ahead into darkness. Their course meandered, stopped, backtracked and circled between ranks of Paravian statuary faintly visible as sparkles of gold-weave and gemstones caught glancing torchlight from the stairwell. Lysaer lost count of how many times he stubbed toes or whacked his elbows and shins; the muscles of his arms and shoulders ached unmercifully. That his discomforts might have been staged as a lesson did not dawn, until the sorcerer paused and without any fumbling, hooked an inset steel ring in the floor. A counterweighted trapdoor sprang open and raw light flooded upward to show features as blithe as a pixie’s. Lysaer recalled with a snap of annoyance that mages saw perfectly in the dark.

Sethvir’s blue-green eyes held a twinkle. ‘Go ahead. Asandir has the horses waiting below.’

‘Horses!’ Lysaer eyed the narrow stairwell that spiralled downward toward a glow too steady to be lamplight. His skin crept, even as the nuance of his gift confirmed the play of unnatural energies. ‘How did he ever get them down here?’

Dismissing the question as irrelevant, Sethvir beckoned prince and prophet and the unconscious bundle carried between them on ahead. ‘Where you’re going, you’ll be glad not to walk.’ He closed the trap door after himself with barely a whisper of a creak.

The air radiated a tang like a blacksmith’s forge intermixed with the charge of inbound storms. Lysaer checked, while behind him, Dakar snarled in annoyance that princely fainthearted hesitation was going to wind up tripping him.

Lysaer sucked a quick breath and pressed ahead into burgeoning light. Assured by now that the Fellowship’s grand magics would not harm him, his reluctance stemmed as much from indignity. Accustomed to responsibility as a king’s heir, he found the sorcerer’s secretive authority deeply irritating. Had he been apprised of their plans one step beyond the immediate, or been granted some insight to their motivations, he might have felt less unnerved. Traithe alone had addressed this need; but the black-garbed mage had ridden off to tutor the heir to Havish, and some event since arrival at Althain had turned Asandir bleak as chipped granite.

The stair ended. Circular and doorless as a vault, the deepest chamber of Althain Tower was incised into seamless white marble. A floor of polished onyx held eight leering gargoyle sconces arrayed on pedestals at the compass points. No torches burned in their sockets; the light emanated from a webwork of lines scribed across a wide, bowl-shaped depression. The patterning shaped three concentric circles, edged in Paravian runes and centred by an intricate, looping interlace that hurt the eyes to follow. Asandir waited in the middle on a starburst formed by the intersection of five axes, his shadow merged in the silhouette of a massive, high-wheeled mason’s dray. Dakar’s paint mare was harnessed between the shafts and the other mounts tied to the tailboards stamped and blew in nervous snorts. The rap and clang of shod hooves raised no echoes in that windowless, enclosed space, and for all that hellish glare the air retained no warmth. The draft that wafted off the pattern was charged with unnatural, arctic cold.

Touched to spine-tingling uneasiness and soaked in icy sweat, Lysaer shivered. He started at a touch on his shoulder and spun around to meet the myopic, inquiring eyes of Sethvir.

‘You’re looking at a power focus, charged and enabled with the natural forces that flow in lines across the earth,’ said the Warden of Althain in measured reassurance. ‘The energies gathered here will allow Asandir to effect a direct transfer to the ruins west of Daon Ramon Barrens.’

Lysaer shut his eyes against patterns that glared and sparked like fireworks against enigmatic black stone. Through an odd and unpleasant ringing in his ears, he heard Dakar’s petulant interruption. ‘Why not go straight to the focus at Ithamon?’

Sethvir replied, unperturbed. ‘For Arithon’s sake, you’ll travel overland from the focus at Caith-al-Caen.’

‘The Vale of Shadows!’ As if the translation thrust home a violation of something sacred, Dakar cried, ‘Why protect him?’ He rounded in disgust on Sethvir. ‘Arithon showed you how lightly he regards your commitment to Rathain. After his insolence at the summons, do you think he gives a damn for your solicitude?’

‘Suppose with all his heart that he wished he did not?’ Sethvir interjected. To Lysaer, who listened in confusion from the lip of the bottom stair, the sorcerer added, ‘The floor is solid, and certainly safe to step on.’

The oblique shift in subject silenced Dakar. Since Arithon’s dead weight had long since tired his arms and shoulders, Lysaer proceeded forward. For all his apprehension, the pattern’s burning lines caused no sensation beyond a queer tingle as he stepped over and around them. Dakar of necessity straggled after, muttering mutinous curses that attributed Ath’s angels to acts of scatological impossibility.

Still by the stair, Sethvir said nothing.

Asandir was less restrained, when the pair with their burden slung between them crossed the last circle of the focus. Eyes bright and ruthless as sword steel flicked over blankets, belongings and the head that dangled backward, black hair trailing within inches of the rune-scribed floor. ‘Lay the Teir’s’Ffalenn behind the buckboard and see him comfortably arranged. No reason this side of the Wheel can excuse the extra care you should have taken to fix a litter.’

‘I’d sooner coddle a viper,’ the Mad Prophet unwisely retorted. ‘Why rush to stir up disaster?’

‘Arithon gave his trust into your hands without terms the other night,’ Asandir snapped back. ‘Is that how you thank him?’ Low-voiced, he added something else that made Dakar cringe like a kicked dog.

Then the sorcerer’s glance snapped to Lysaer, driving home a rebuke not solely directed elsewhere. Stung for his lapse into pettiness, Lysaer hefted Arithon into the dray. He attended his half-brother’s needs with a servant’s humility, while around him the vault became preternaturally quiet. The horses stopped sidling and stood glassy-eyed, their ears and tails hanging limp. The pattern in the floor began to sing in a tone just outside of hearing and the air gained a charge that lifted the hairs on their backs.

‘Get into the wagon and hold on,’ Asandir commanded.

Dakar leaped the buckboard and scrambled to snatch up the reins. Lysaer scrambled over the high sides behind the wheel, while the sorcerer strode forward, grasped the paint’s bridle, and positioned his feet precisely upon the nexus of the focus.

Sethvir called out in farewell and the vault burst asunder in an explosion of unbearable blue light.

Darkness ripped down hard after, relentless as the void between the Veil. If Lysaer cried out, his ears recorded no sound. His senses overturned, as if he, the rough wood he sat on, even the horses tied by their bridle reins overturned in a gut-twisting series of somersaults. Too late he recalled Dakar’s flippant comment: but having no breakfast in him to lose, only bile burned the back of his throat.

Thrilled and frightened by the pull of forces beyond understanding, Lysaer clung to fast-fraying shreds of self-control.

Then a jolt slammed the boards beneath his body. Wind compressed from his lungs and his stomach plummeted back into his middle in a wrench fit to tear a gut. The unsprung dray hit earth with a crash that jarred the supplies in the back, Arithon’s limp form and everyone else’s teeth with undivided viciousness. Pebbles spanged out from under the iron-rimmed wheels, and with an appalling creak and a clatter of hooves from panicked horses, the vehicle lurched and rolled as natural order intended.