The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Too readily he recalled the barbs he’d thrown while in the throes of heartbreak, iron thorns he would rather have taken into his own flesh now than aim at her. “You deserved better from me. I regret saying...basically everything I said to you.”

  “I understood your anger. I had betrayed our troth.”

  Ean abruptly drew back from her. “But you didn’t, Isabel.” He took her by the shoulders and bent his head to capture her gaze. “You made a promise to Arion when you bound yourselves, and you made that promise again to me in this life with our binding, only...” he ran his hands along her arms, “only I misunderstood what that meant at the time. Now I know that the promise you and Arion made bound you both to each other, but first and foremost it bound you—us—together to the game.”

  Tears filled Isabel’s eyes.

  “If I had been in that tower with Pelas, I would’ve made the wrong choice, Isabel.” Ean stepped back to stand unarmed before her, made his voice convey everything he felt about himself now—all that he’d learned and seen and come to realize. “I would’ve nobly refused to betray you...and I would’ve lost the game for us in the doing. And Arion—thirteen hells, as Arion, I would’ve refused to accept that there was only one solution. I never would’ve accepted the fact that the effect I intended couldn’t be achieved.”

  Moving back to her, he stroked her shoulders again while she stared at him with crystalline tears streaming down her cheeks. “As Arion, I would’ve refused to take either path from that tower. I would’ve lost everything in pursuit of the effect I intended to create, in my unwillingness to sacrifice the First Law.”

  Ean gently wiped away Isabel’s tears with his thumbs. “Your sacrifice was greater than my sense of betrayal, greater than Arion’s failures; you achieved more than I could have in a lifetime of such choices.”

  A faint smile touched Isabel’s lips. She took his hands from her face and held them between her own. “May I take that to mean that you still desire our binding?”

  Ean gave an incredulous exhale and pressed his forehead against hers. “As I live and breathe, Isabel. If you will still have me.” He drew back to give her a chance to answer.

  She held his gaze with eyes like a glass-calm sea, deeply beautiful. “I believe I can manage.”

  Such relief washed over Ean, he wanted to shout it out to the world. Instead, he drew her against him and closed his mouth over hers.

  In return, Isabel opened her mind to him. Ean felt her presence blossoming, flowering in his thoughts. With his new understanding of Shadow, he saw this unfolding now as an invitation to share her universe, to become part of herself.

  Never before had he recognized what a gift this was, this unconditional invitation into her own conceptual awareness, into the very essence of her being. She was hiding nothing from him, making herself infinitely vulnerable—trusting he would do no harm while treading those fragile and sacred waters. She could offer him no greater gift.

  Now Ean understood so much more deeply of these connections. Now he knew them for the treasures they were.

  Ean stood on the shores of Isabel’s mind, letting the warm waves lap at his consciousness, and invited her to share his thoughts in return. She poured herself into his awareness as light filling a room—visible yet intangible, present yet without palpability. She was the essence of the fourth strand in his thoughts, suffusing and permeating. He could no more contain her than he could hold the light in his hand.

  Only when they were both permeating each other’s minds did Ean allow himself to believe that all was healed between them. Only then did the ache he’d been feeling so desperately and for so long finally dissipate.

  Only then could he begin to look forward and start putting a future there for them to tread together.

  Ean ran his nose along hers again, reveling in the resonance of their bond finding harmony again. “Did you mean what you said about wanting me to take advantage of you?”

  She smiled. “A truthreader cannot lie, my lord. However,” and she ran her finger provocatively along his lips, “a bath might be in order first.”

  Ean gave a low chuckle. “Lead me to it, my lady.”

  She took his hand with a smile and drew him through a curtained partition, past the bedroom and into a bathing chamber beyond. While he stripped out of his clothes, part of him thought back to the moment he’d put them on—the morning of his battle with Shail—while another part of his mind alchemized air into water.

  This process always intrigued him. Fascinating, the amount of air it took to make enough water to fill a tub. Much more than one might imagine. The water was steaming by the time he climbed into it.

  Isabel brought him soap and poured some salts into the bath, so that soon the chamber filled with fragrance. He caught her arm as she was turning away. “Join me?”

  She considered his request for the space of a moment. Ean caught a flicker of uncertainty, but then she was sweeping up her hair and letting her robe slip from her shoulders. He watched her appreciatively as she slipped in between his legs, rested back against his chest and leaned her head into the curve of his shoulder.

  He wrapped his arms around her and asked low in her ear, “When are we going to talk about the patterns that almost killed you today?”

  “Tomorrow,” she said, but her thoughts answered, I would that we never had to speak of them at all.

  Ean had to agree with that sentiment, yet in the brief glimpse he’d gotten of the patterns just then, he’d understood Björn’s caution. These were not idle designs Pelas had drawn into Isabel’s skin. They were patterns of Chaos invested with purpose.

  But what purpose?

  Just seeing the scars roused a visceral sense of fury despite his best attempts to suppress it. Yet he knew that no matter his protest, his anger, his rage at what Pelas had done to the woman he loved—none of these reactions would change the past. But his determination to understand Pelas’s work might change the future.

  It was clear to him that the patterns were summoning the power of Chaos through the tear in T’khendar’s aether and draining Isabel of elae the while, but he knew with certainly that Pelas’s intent in crafting the patterns had not been to destroy Isabel.

  She shifted in his arms and also in his mind, gently prodding him away from a line of questioning that she’d asked him not to dwell upon that night. She said instead, “Tell me about Darshan.”

  Ean inhaled to speak of the binding.

  “From the beginning.”

  He paused mid-inhale and altered what he’d been about to say.

  So it was that he told her everything, from his days of frustration working with Sebastian and Dareios upon the problem of unmaking eidola, to meeting and fighting the mor’alir Adept Sheih in Tambarré, to training with Pelas on that volcanic isle, and finally to his trek through Shadow with Darshan. He left out nothing, even though reliving his choices often made him ache with regret, and his halting confession of his attempt to unmake Pelas left him emotionally raw.

  But revealing everything he’d seen and done, walking her through his thoughts and choices, ultimately letting her share in his journey...how could he deny her such understanding of his growth?

  At some point they moved from bath to bed, so that by the time he described to her the moment when Tanis, Sinárr and Rafael had appeared in Shadow to save them from revenants, he was reclining against the headboard with Isabel enfolded in his arms, much as she had been in the tub. Only now her hair fell in a silken layer across his chest, while his fingers explored the silver tattoo on her left arm, idly tracing its intricate design.

  Her skin had at least healed well. You would hardly have noticed the designs if not for the glow emitting from the patterns.

  “Are you telling me that Darshan’s binding upon you is wholly benevolent?” Isabel shifted against him to better meet his gaze with her own incredulous one.

  Ean smiled, nodded.

  She laid her head back against his chest, radiating wonder. �
�I never imagined...”

  He chuckled. “I thought you said truthreaders couldn’t lie, High Mage.”

  She shifted again to look up at him. “You really think I somehow foresaw Darshanvenkhátraman binding you?”

  “Your choices certainly set him upon that path. Oh, no, High Mage—” he pressed a finger across her lips to silence her protest, “I’ve had nothing but time to ponder this. Had you not given yourself to Darshan at Ivarnen, he never would’ve offered you to Pelas. Had you not helped Pelas escape from that tower, he never would’ve saved Tanis from Shail and Sinárr, or bound himself to our cause. And ever since their binding...”

  Ean shook his head, still marveling at the ramifications. “In the moment Pelas bound with Tanis, Isabel, the Balance turned—I know it did. Pelas’s gravity attracted Darshan’s somehow, and now...” he exhaled a slow breath, thinking of Rafael and Darshan’s planets whirling around on the dark glass lawn. “I don’t know where in all of this Darshan will realign, but he’ll bring no further harm to Alorin. Of this much I’m certain.”

  Isabel laid back against him again, her lips forming a musing smile. “A wise prophet always accepts accolades from the faithful, no matter how groundless and unsubstantiated they might be.”

  Ean kissed her neck. “And you are a very wise prophet.” He continued trailing kisses down to her shoulder. The languor of the bath had worn off, giving rise to other hungers, but his mind remained as yet afield of his body. He couldn’t stop following that twisting pattern of consequence back towards the origin of its design.

  “We could trace it back farther if we wanted,” he murmured against her skin, “to Kjieran van Stone first going to the Temple in Tambarré, or earlier still, to Radov’s plot against the val Lorian line and my brother Trell’s subsequent arrival in Duan’Bai, which newly drew your brother’s eye to my family.”

  He kissed back up her neck again, feeling her shifting beneath him, her body deliciously waking to his touch. “Or might we look back farther still? To Phaedor bringing Tanis forward to this time and age. Yet, if we trace the pattern that far, we must necessarily take the leap back to the moment when you looked down Arion’s path and saw his death looming beyond the branching of a choice you knew Arion would never forego.”

  Ean smiled and shook his head. “But that’s how patterns of consequence are in the end, aren’t they, Renaii? You look back upon them and realize the design couldn’t have happened any other way.”

  Isabel stilled in his arms.

  He looked back to find her staring at him with tears in her eyes. Ean brushed one of them gently away as it fell. “What is it?”

  She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

  There was something so fragile, yet so profoundly miraculous about her in that moment...she burned as brightly as she ever had on the currents, a vision of perpetually morphing light, a nexus of four strands.

  Isabel was her own node point of the lifeforce. How could he possibly deserve such an incomparable woman?

  Ean cupped her face gently. “Isabel, do not be alarmed.” He shifted out from beneath her. “I’m going to take you now, and there’s nothing you can do or say to prevent that.”

  Her colorless gaze held a marveling wonder. “I wouldn’t dream of it, Ean.”

  “Good,” he gathered her hands into his, “because I’ve been dreaming about doing this for a very long time.”

  Twenty-one

  “Oh, gods—that men should curse that which is their own

  salvation! That for purity of purpose

  I should become the beast!”

  –The Adept wielder Malachai ap’Kalien

  Trell sank back in his chair and pressed his middle finger and thumb to the bridge of his nose. His all-night vigil with Loukas had left him drained physically, while the warlord’s brutal message scribed in blood and flesh upon the walls of the fortress had left him drained emotionally.

  And Gideon’s tantrum wasn’t helping.

  Trell didn’t begrudge the Dannish captain his fury. The men upon those walls most assuredly weren’t from among the stock of missing Abu’dhani villagers. Gideon’s spyglass had shown him the same view as Trell’s: that the men whose blood was staining those walls had the look of Dannym about them, even in death. It took no great feat of logic to deduce their origins.

  No...where logic came into play was why. This was the path Gideon’s anger had failed to notice in its mad rush to vent itself in Trell’s chambers.

  “...whole day of doing nothing!” Gideon turned and stalked back the way he’d come, pacing a rut before the folding camp table Trell used as a desk. “All day they sit upon their walls and leer at us while you’ve forbidden so much as a siege engine to be constructed! Your Highness, I cannot stand by while that bastard slaughters my own countrymen!” He spun to face Trell, his eyes fierce and his countenance darkened by fury. “By all the gods in the known—how can you?”

  “All the gods in the known can doubtless hear you, Gideon val Mallonwey,” said Lazar hal’Hamaadi suddenly from the curtained doorway. “Perhaps you should ask them yourself.”

  Trell glanced under his hand to see the al-Amir standing between the parted drapes.

  “Forgive my interruption, Trell of the Tides, but you can hear the captain’s braying three camps away.”

  Gideon’s blue eyes flashed. There was no love lost between the two men, who’d once filled the roles of captive and captor. “And you thought to add your howl to the clamor? Take a number, hal’Hamaadi.”

  “Nay, val Mallonwey, I came to save you from turning a grave error into a fatal one.” Lazar’s dark stare tracked Gideon’s movements as the captain continued to pace. “The A’dal saved your life and that of your men. He’s attempting to save the lives of these men, also.”

  Gideon rounded on him. “I’ve seen nothing to prove that! I’ve only the word of a prince mysteriously returned from the dead that he’s here with His Majesty’s sanction at all!”

  Well, it was out there now—Gideon’s true thoughts, his deepest fears.

  In the uncomfortable silence that followed this outburst, while Trell massaged his forehead and Lazar posed an immobile pillar of reason in the doorway, the captain seemed to finally realize himself.

  Abruptly, he dropped to one knee and bowed his head, his expression wrenched by horror. “Your Highness,” he managed in a choked voice, “...forgive me.”

  “Now he goes quiet,” said an entering Rolan, who slipped in around Lazar’s broad form. “I sent that boy of yours to get you some dinner, A’dal. Someone’s got to mind these things on your behalf. The River Goddess might subsist on praise and flattery, but her chosen ones still need actual food for sustenance, or so I’ve heard.” He threw himself into a low-slung camp chair and crossed his booted feet, looking ready to enjoy the entertainment.

  Trell settled a pained gaze on the kneeling captain. “Gideon, get up.”

  The captain reluctantly did so.

  “You want to have him flogged, Trell of the Tides?” Lazar pinned the captain beneath a censorious stare.

  “Any officer who cares so deeply for his men is valuable to our efforts,” Trell told Gideon and Lazar equally, whereupon Gideon shot the Nadoriin a vengeful glare. “If our situations were reversed, Gideon, I would likely feel the same as you. But there’s no surer way to walk into this madman’s hands than to let our anger lead us. He wants us in a frenzy.”

  Gideon dropped his gaze to his hands. “My insubordination is unforgivable, Your Highness.”

  Lazar grunted his agreement. “You should have him flogged, Trell of the Tides. He’d feel better for it in the end.”

  “There will be no flogging.”

  “There could be some flogging,” Lazar persisted. “I could easily arrange it.”

  “Perhaps the al-Amir can’t understand loyalty to one’s own.” Gideon was still staring hard at his boots, but he somehow managed to cast a spear of reproach through Lazar all the same.

  �
�I’ve lost men aplenty to this bastard,” the al-Amir growled.

  Gideon spun to him, hissing, “Then you’re hardly one to lecture me about how to deal with him!”

  “That’s mighty high talk from a man who, a moon ago, couldn’t even piss without someone holding his cock for him!”

  Trell lifted a pleading hand to Lazar. “Thank you, al-Amir. I’ll take things from here.”

  Lazar nodded and ducked a retreat, but not before arrowing an I’ll-be-watching-you stare at Gideon.

  Round and round and round they went...

  If it wasn’t Rolan at Lazar’s throat, it was Lazar at Gideon’s, or Raegus at Tannour’s...how was he ever going to get them all working together, not just as separate entities marching under the same banner?

  Trell looked to the Dannish captain. “Gideon, I understand your frustration. I don’t want to see my father’s men strung up to serve this lunatic’s malice, but there’s more going on here than a simple siege. For now, the safest thing we can do is to keep the warlord guessing at what we intend to do.”

  Rolan perked up. “Did I read you wrong just now, A’dal, or do you already know what the warlord’s planning?”

  Trell met Rolan’s gaze.

  The question was why. Not why had his father’s soldiers been strung up on the walls—that was obvious—but why was it so important to the warlord to send these messages-in-human-flesh to Trell?

  He hadn’t stopped thinking about the words written in blood among that forest of burned bodies—DEPTHS TO DIE PRIN—which had struck such a disharmonic chord of ill memory. He hadn’t stopped trying to fill in the missing letters of the cryptic phrase.

  The more Trell studied the puzzle formed by his opponents, the more he began to feel that by taking Khor Taran, he’d advanced to a new level of the Mage’s game, and now the stakes—and the danger—had exponentially increased.

  Of one thing Trell was certain: whatever Player stood behind the warlord, he was a good deal more dangerous than Viernan hal’Jaitar, and a lot more devious.

  Trell focused back on Rolan. “Know is too strong a word. I have a hunch, though.”