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  ‘You helped tear him from me,’ she shot back, uncowed. ‘What could have changed?’ Her tight smile followed, both poisoned and wry. ‘My oathsworn obedience is not all-encompassing. Life has another facet called choice. You’ll see that girl safe because you cherish Feithan. Is my care as an honest woman no less? Or must one bad thread condemn the whole cloth? Which one of us isn’t embroiled in mankind’s stewpot of intrigue? I’ve been magnanimous,’ Elaira said, stung. ‘For the bitch in blind heat, my balked need’s in plain sight. It’s your mulish candidate for Rathain’s caithdein whose spiteful agenda might fray Arithon’s personal integrity.’

  Sidir fielded her accusation, flat calm. ‘The crown liege whose shoulder I guarded at Vastmark would never abandon his oath of protection, sworn before death to her father.’

  ‘He wouldn’t,’ the mettlesome enchantress agreed. ‘That’s the reason our hopeless mission can’t fail and why you might want to muzzle your next slashing leap for the jugular.’

  Epiphany struck with splintering force. ‘Your orders from Prime Selidie have not been revoked!’ While the sheeting curtains of spray smoked between them, the Companion most renowned for his tact found himself lashed to rare venom. ‘Should you not stay the course and refashion the snare so narrowly thwarted in Halwythwood?’

  Which dart pierced too deeply: Elaira’s caught breath tore a pause.

  Nor would Sidir relent, though she struck him. Not with the last prince of Rathain’s crown lineage become the marked target for Koriani malice. ‘Tell me you don’t endanger all I hold dear!’

  ‘I can’t.’ The enchantress bent her head, hands pressed to her face. Whether she masked agony for the unconsummated love that Sidir had invoked charter law and the help of a Fellowship Sorcerer to thwart, steel honesty would not prevaricate. Elaira had never pretended her passion was not the prime bait in her sisterhood’s bid to seize Arithon.

  Although genteel instinct yearned for reprieve, if only to soften discomfort, Sidir held firm. He carried the charge of an aggrieved mother’s trust, as well as a kingdom laid open through the perils stalking its crown prince.

  ‘I’m duty-bound to keep contact with Arithon’s interests,’ Elaira ventured at last. She rejected bitterness, despite the straits that seized her affection as the killing piece on the political game-board. ‘My Prime’s command leaves me no other path. But, pleas to Ath, I will seek my beloved after I’m certain you’ve secured that young girl from harm’s way. She’s your task, after that. Rope her wildcat fury to heel, then use every persuasion to make sure she wields her feal office from the safety of Halwythwood!’

  Such blistering courage deserved better grace. ‘I don’t like the need,’ Sidir allowed. ‘But I can’t drop my role as the diligent sentry.’

  ‘Don’t neglect the cold fact you’re my enemy?’ This time, Elaira’s sarcasm bit. ‘Then stay at my back. Keep your guard with drawn steel for as long as you think I lack basic human integrity.’

  ‘Your heart’s intent was never distrusted,’ Sidir corrected with stickling firmness. ‘The truth grants no quarter.’ Oathsworn over crystal, the enchantress could not enforce any claim to free will.

  ‘Let me enlarge on your view-point,’ she said. ‘If not me, you would have another Koriathain appointed to your prince’s fate. She would be a huntress, ruled by vicious hate. This was the choice I was given, at Highscarp. When the Prime’s bidding was laid before me, I claimed the burden upon the belief that the precepts of love would not hasten defeat, but instead seek a way to find triumph.’

  ‘A queen of the realm would be as courageous.’ Sidir swept her a bow, moved despite himself. ‘Consider my sword at your back as a friend. Let my stroke fall as Dharkaron’s own Spear and be welcomed, if ever your Prime tries to twist your resolve and enact my liege’s destruction.’

  The tears rose too suddenly. Throughout the brutal rip tide of release, Sidir did not try the demeaning palliative of soothing her anguish. Wise man, he knew which wracking griefs could be tempered and which must abide, unconsoled.

  Nothing was left, except to move on. Elaira turned from the Companion’s staunch calm. Too desolate to indulge her deep sorrows, she knelt on the jumbled rock by the river-course, then rallied her adamant discipline.

  Water with fast-flowing current was never easy to tap in rapport. Most impressionable of the four elements, in liquid state tumbling with gravity, its bonding properties unravelled as bursts of electromagnetics. Such whirlpool turbulence rejected all pattern. Yet that same effervescence, harnessed with skill, might key a scrying that could not be traced. Elaira’s affinity was an inborn gift. She let her active awareness dissolve into the flow of the Arwent.

  An ephemeral thrill raced over her skin, leaving her momentarily deafened and blinded. Then her dissociate senses cleared: she became the black pool, scribed with whirling eddies, and the exuberant splash, necklaced with foam under starlight. She was the rampaging gush through the gorge, then the broad, placid sheet of Daenfal Lake, wind-ruffled and hemmed with plumed reed-beds. The expansion rushed through her, tingling her nerves, as near shore to far, she traced the meandering loops of the outflow, winding away towards the sea.

  Elaira declared her bounds of intent before her reach encompassed the bay, and dispersed in the salt deeps of the ocean. Poised, she became the essence of water, inside a radius of one hundred leagues.

  And water, an impressionably volatile medium, reflected the flows of the lanes, receptive as an echo to the harmonics struck off by human emotion. Awake to such whispers, Elaira could plumb the dreams of sleepers in Daenfal. She sensed the lampsmen and sentries on watch at the walls, and the individual moods of the goatherds encamped in Araethura. The scout patrols and the clan hunters of Halwythwood also were made known to her. Each living presence moved as liquid light, stamped into the streamlets and marshes, with exchanged conversation a subliminal resonance, laced through the underground springs.

  At the cusp where earthly form bordered the mysteries, the innate cry of her hampered spirit burned for sweet return to the linked empathy only Arithon could partner. Elaira checked that yearning flame short. Since his late mission to curb the deadly cult at Etarra, she had promised him solitude for safety’s sake. Though a Sorcerer wearing the form of an eagle had brought word of his triumphant survival, his silence since suggested he was still in healing recovery. Ache though she might to touch his close presence, news of Jeynsa’s escapade would stress him. Elaira would not shake his peace, or breach polite ethic and invade the privacy of strangers. She quested, instead, for the signature presence of Jeynsa s’Valerient. The Fellowship’s marked choice for a caithdein’s inheritance, the girl’s imprint should stand out like a brand.

  Yet no match arose to receive the sought pattern divined through the element. The essence of Water spoke across time. Had Jeynsa died, her passage would have left ranging echoes of the event. Unless she was warded. That thought raised ugly questions.

  What covert motive would drive a candidate whose duty spoke for the law as a crown prince’s conscience?

  Uneasy, Elaira refined her approach, sweeping for the resonant wake left by the girl’s spent emotions.

  Those residual traces emerged, one vivid imprint embedded in Daenfal Lake, stamped just after midnight at the recent dark moon. Jeynsa’s terrified scream had distressed a young waterman and the steersman of the boat that had ferried her south towards Silvermarsh. The nightmare raised by the girl’s Sighted talent now bled through: a vision of the realm’s crown prince, strapped to a stone slab, his bleeding form ringed by tormented ghosts. The bound shades were young girls, wracked women, and boys, entrapped by the practice of necromancy …

  Elaira smothered her visceral outcry. Cut free of gestalt awareness, revolted to nausea, she crouched on her knees and used merciless discipline to smother her stark bolt of fear. This event was the past! Arithon had confided his plan to bait the Kralovir to their downfall; yet his spoken word could never prepare for the impact of the hor
rors just witnessed. Elaira steadied her rattled nerves. Choked back springing tears for the glimpse of a suffering that defied endurance. Beyond sparing Sidir from a hideous explanation, her fierce reaction risked drawing Arithon himself into sympathetic rapport. Such carelessness could disclose Jeynsa’s ill-starred defection and, worse, inflame the fresh scar the traumatic ordeal must have set on his spirit.

  The humid night wrapped the enchantress like a blanket. Plumed spray off the thrashing falls braced her skin. Life’s concert of crickets still pealed from the grasses, small balms to lean on until calm returned and overwrought pulse slowed and settled. Elaira steeled herself to proceed. No way else could she hope to trace past the warding that cloaked Jeynsa’s movement from scryers. Determined, the enchantress plunged back into immersion, aligning her search south and east.

  She sounded the bogs and the turbid reed-beds that fringed the lake-shore, into Silvermarsh, and there, detected a dark thread of silence that stitched a straight course through the landscape. A talisman would soak up the natural flow of electromagnetics. Jeynsa’s trail led into Melhalla, where she did not move alone. Elaira’s tuned senses detected a glimmering fan of pack-focused intent closing in on the girl from behind. The pattern fitted a tracker’s array, running dogs for the head-hunters’ league.

  Elaira wrenched out of trance, shoved erect much too fast. Her staggered step encountered Sidir, his alert courtesy charged to alarm by the sight of her stricken face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Just as fast, his bracing grasp steadied her. ‘Has Jieret’s daughter been killed?’

  ‘No.’ The enchantress shivered. ‘Not yet. She’s endangered.’ Displaced senses still reeling, Elaira unburdened. ‘Jeynsa’s already crossed Daenfal Lake. She’s set on the run through the game trails of Silvermarsh, pressed by a bountymen’s ambush.’

  ‘Fatemaster’s mercy!’ Sidir pealed in anguish. His grey eyes held the urgency seen once before, that unthinkable night when he had forced the breach of his crown prince’s intimate privacy. ‘How can I tell her mother we’ve failed? Dharkaron avert the cold hand of necessity! That girl’s got a lead of sixty-five leagues, too far to hope we can help her.’

  ‘Not if we chase her,’ Elaira agreed. ‘She’s ahead of her enemies. She may outwit them. If not, the trackers will haze her into West Halla.’

  ‘Straight into the swords of the Alliance’s muster, by now choking the trade-routes through Pellain!’

  As Sidir loosed his grasp, lashed frantic, Elaira captured his sleeve. ‘Wait. There’s more.’

  Restrained at the edge of explosive impatience, the Companion still listened.

  ‘Jeynsa’s bearing a talisman,’ said Elaira, aggrieved.

  His sharp wit took stock. ‘Then why didn’t Eriegal decide to tell us, since he saw her off back in Halwythwood?’

  Elaira met that probing dissection with silence, reluctant to suggest a conspiracy. Since the man at her side would shatter himself in a doomed attempt to best fate, she strove to avert suicidal disaster.

  ‘I know you’re loath to rely on my trust. But, Sidir, if you ask, I can hasten our journey. Snag a ride on the deck of a trespassing barge, and my resource can buy a swift passage. From Daenfal, we could fare southward by river.’

  ‘You could disguise my origins?’ The clansman’s bleak glance mapped that prospect, displeased. ‘Perish the thought! Far more than my life will reside in your hands.’

  ‘I know.’ Elaira withstood the balked heat of his rage. ‘Dharkaron’s revenge strike me dead if I’m false, since I don’t see a more hopeful recourse.’

  ‘On your head, then,’ snapped Sidir, his staunch courage proof of his iron-heart character.

  No use, to pretend that his stakes were not desperate. For every step taken to speed their pace to Melhalla, the Light’s call to war would raise obstacles. The inns and the roads would be seething with troops. Each officer bearing a stamped requisition would be clamouring for transport, alongside contingents of Sunwheel priests, with the eyes of their zealot examiners. Should her power of arcane concealment fall short, or should her Prime Matriarch’s fickle interests command Sidir’s betrayal, he would be condemned. Clansmen caught inside town precincts were granted no trial. She asked Rathain’s most loyal liegeman to run the risk of a death that began with public dismemberment.

  Late Summer 5671

  Three Riders

  A fast galley from Jaelot docks at Varens, with the Light’s avatar rushed ahead down the trade town to Tirans bearing the shocking news: that the Spinner of Darkness has dared to strike at Etarra’s high council by sorcery, and that the s’Brydion duke at Alestron has betrayed the Alliance in liaison with Shadow; therefore, the citadel and its corrupt defenders must be destroyed for rightful cause and by force of arms …

  Galled from exhaustive days in the saddle, the Mad Prophet spurs through the town gates of Darkling amid the Skyshiel pass, only to find the spectacular demise of the Light’s cult-tainted priest has ignited the troop muster ahead of him, with no horse, no cart, and no transport available to hasten his urgency to reach the Eltair Coast …

  Beset while reforging Scarpdale’s torn grimward, Asandir kneels beside his dying stallion, torn for his dread choice: to consign the burden of his unfinished mission back into Sethvir’s taxed hands, and not leave the beloved horse’s left shade to be subsumed by ravaging chaos; in mourning, he voices the Name for Isfarenn, binding the freed spirit under secure ward for return to Athera’s continuum …

  Late Summer 5671

  II.

  Recoil

  On the day that event struck the anvil of fate, the ambassadorial courier from Varens rode into the trade town of Tirans. He came in the company of four mounted men and passed under the northern gate of the teeming, walled rise that guarded the industrious hub of East Halla’s peninsula. Amid summer haze, the carnelian brick watchtowers arose, sturdy and square, gold-rimmed against an egg-shell sky. Beneath, the dust stirred up by labouring caravans spread a choking, alkali cloud.

  The lumbering farm wagons emptied since dawn crowded past eight-in-hand ox teams, hauling inbound drays from the coast. Wedged in the crush, the sweating courier glanced sidelong at the rider clad in sweat rag and hat and anonymous leathers beside him. ‘You were mad to come here without a state retinue.’

  The shaded face turned. Fair-skinned, handsome features wore the same grime that coated all summer travellers. A haggard expression bespoke the rigors of three harried days in the saddle. Yet the glint in those wide-opened eyes stayed as steel, struck off azure ice. ‘So we’ll see.’

  Turned forward again, Lysaer s’Ilessid never acknowledged the anxious men-at-arms paired at his back. His magisterial manner also refused to draw rein for the tender young talent who straggled behind: today’s royal page was the gawky get of a Korias crofter. He still showed his plough-boy’s fist on the reins, more at ease with a scythe than a weapon. If the Light’s Lord Commander might have bade to correct the appalling lapse in formal panoply, Sulfin Evend was at large to muster the southcoast. His absence left the daunted dismay of his overruled, second-string officers.

  The Blessed Prince remained unfazed. He surveyed the jostling backs of the draught teams, then the craft quarter shop-fronts with their gaudy signs. Adroit, he avoided the flower seller’s child, darting to hawk posies to the silk-clad matrons in their parked carriages. Tirans’ three-storied mansions framed the scene with established elegance, from door-sills agleam with new paint, to the carvings on marble cornices. A balladeer’s notes braved the hubbub. The civil ized populace adorned their dwellings with statuary, while the potted ivy and gardenia trailing from the upper galleries trumpeted nonchalant affluence.

  Against the courier’s outspoken concern, Lysaer observed, ‘After all, we’re not visiting a den of barbarians.’

  His informants’ reports had not been remiss: unlike the seaports, this town’s ruling council had yet to embrace the cause of Avenor’s Alliance. If the merchants and well-set craftsmen w
ere aligned with the leanings of trade, Tirans supported no head-hunters’ league. Her standing garrison did not chafe to impinge on the designate bounds of the free wilds. The canny mayor reigned without jostling to upset traditional diplomacy. Here, at the core of East Halla’s prosperity, a frail-but-established truce had held sway since the downfall of Melhalla’s crown. Charter law still kept tenuous influence.

  Atwood’s clans were too powerfully placed, allied as they were in tight interest with the warmongering s’Brydion dukes. Which stew of old order and defiant town enterprise primed the stage for an uncivil welcome.

  The men-at-arms and the page trailed Lysaer’s horse with closed mouths and inflexible orders. The Light’s avatar had declared war against Shadow. Independent or not, Tirans’ citizens soon would be commanded to muster. No town-born adult might resist that decision, not if he expected to thrive.

  Therefore, the five riders on their lathered mounts breasted the moil at the main cross-road. They parted ways with the laden carts serving the craft quarter market, joining the smart, lighter vehicles and lackeys bound on genteel business uptown. As the press slackened, the Varens courier slapped the dust from his blazoned jacket. He assayed a sly glance. The expression under Lysaer’s felt hat appeared reasonable enough to try a last appeal. ‘The mayor’s played fire with politics for more years than I’ve been alive. Blessed Light, Lord, you cannot expect your grand cause to be served by a routine man bearing dispatches!’

  ‘I expect you to deliver my sealed writ, nothing more.’ Lysaer tipped a nod to acknowledge his two armsmen, then gave an encouraging smile to ease the fresh nerves of his page-boy. ‘That inn, the Flocked Starling, should do very well. My company stops there for a bath and a meal, followed up by a change of clothing.’