Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  Winter Solstice Afternoon 5670

  XV.

  Crucible

  Jasque came to the lady in the late afternoon with soft word that Fionn Areth had awakened. ‘He’s rested, though the abuse he has suffered has left him surly and confused.’

  In sad fact, the young herder’s last recollection had been of a hot meal and a bath. The posset Arithon had mixed to ease pain through the restitching of his torn wrist had blurred any memory he had of being carried to bed.

  ‘Well, he hasn’t been through the most pleasant experience,’ the lady agreed in shared empathy. One candle burned in her tapestried parlor. Set into a scene the golden hue of aged parchment, she sat sewing the yellow ribbon from the market onto one of her lace shawls by touch. Arithon sprawled in a cushioned wing chair, asleep himself, his hands fallen loose and relaxed in his lap, and his head tipped against a tasseled cushion in rare and artless abandon.

  ‘Should I arouse him?’ asked Jasque with a lift of his chin, his query a tentative whisper.

  The lady shook her head, her sparse wisps of white hair pinned like combed shell against the ivory lace of her bonnet. ‘That would demean what I think is a mark of his personal trust. Let his Grace be. No doubt he’ll hear the step on the stair when the young man is ready to come down.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Ever deferent, Jasque retreated again. The door closed, the oiled latch fallen with a respectful click. An interval passed, where naught moved but flame-cast shadows and the lady’s diligent needle. The coals in the grate threw off soporific heat and the aromatic spice of white birch.

  In the chair by the candle, Arithon s’Ffalenn raised his head. His eyes flicked wide open, the transition from sleep accomplished without seam or stray movement.

  Nor was the lady oblivious. As though she had sensed some minute shift of focus, she paused between labored stitches, her needle a scribed line in midair. ‘You’re back with us,’ she observed.

  ‘“Know a man’s truths by his unwatched arrivals,”’ Arithon said in quotation. His good-humored satire derived from a comedy that Jaelot’s theater troop had performed on the green in her young years, when, unscarred and sighted, she had probably entertained suitors.

  But no moment remained for kindly reminiscence. As though summoned on cue, Fionn Areth’s halting step clumped in awkward descent from the stairway.

  ‘No respite from melodrama,’ Arithon quipped, then relapsed back into recitation, ‘“Nor is the hour ever chosen to reveal the true self behind a man’s spun mask of pretense.”’ An oiled silk ripple of movement saw him onto his feet.

  The lady sensed rather than heard his soft footstep as he crossed the thin swath thrown by the candle and closed the few strides to the door. Quieter than Jasque, he reopened the panel to admit the spell-wrought person of his double.

  The contrast between them showed most in that moment, when fate set them again face-to-face. Arithon poised, unthinking in balance as a cat, while the herder boy staggered, his reach for the latch caught unfinished as the panel whisked back and destroyed his last semblance of privacy. Moved to reflexive compassion for the disgruntled injury stamped in a frown of uncanny likeness, Arithon shot out a hand. Unasked, he braced the boy’s halting step, sparing him further indignity.

  Fionn Areth said a rude word in Araethurian dialect that meant scat of a gelded goat.

  Arithon held on through the unsteady aftermath, his equanimity unmoved by the rancor. ‘Freedom has done very little, I see, to improve your civil disposition.’

  Fionn Areth shook off the helping grasp. Dressed in borrowed clothes, stiff-lipped and determined, he completed his marred entrance alone. Though the rich, patterned carpet damped the thump of his limp, the dim lighting withheld its kindness. Each step he took was a tortured achievement that left him drained white and shaking. Annoyed by his audience, and hackled against pity, he caught the arm of the chair that his royal-born double had just vacated. Hands gripped to white knuckles, he lowered himself into the cushions, all elbows and awkward, hard breathing. ‘I’m not running anywhere,’ he announced, his voice a drawn line of defiance.

  ‘For the knee, or straight pride?’ asked Arithon with a delicacy that jabbed. ‘Or shall we consider how the lady would face the fire a second time, when the mayor’s armed guards search house to house, and find her in polite company with a convicted Sorcerer?’

  Fionn Areth swiveled and glared back at him, murderous. If his eyes were the same green, his fury was less artfully focused as he conceded in clipped capitulation. ‘The knee. It’s stiffened. I don’t expect it’s going to bear weight, no matter how many men Jaelot sends hounding down your accursed back trail.’

  If Arithon was irritated, he reclosed the door panel with unruffled deliberation. He used the awkward interval that followed to build up the lagging fire. As the herder boy shifted in pained effort to find comfort, no witness could fail to note the stressed joint, poorly concealed beneath the knit hose just bought from Beckburn Market. In fact, the hot swelling had grown markedly worse, the mending Elaira had begun on torn sinews set back by the morning’s rough flight.

  The Master of Shadow knocked the loose ash back into the grate. Without airs or propriety he reclaimed his earlier seat on the hassock beside the lady’s chair, that she not feel edged out of conversation. Then, very calm, he addressed his made double with the unswerving attention that sent Dakar into mute fits of dread.

  ‘Do you want to be healed?’ Delivered with a bard’s incisive clarity, the inquiry cut like a razor. ‘The Koriani sigils to bring regeneration are in fact still in place. With some effort on my part, they can be retuned. Yet the question begs asking: are you ready, Fionn Areth, to stand upon your own two feet? Are you prepared to carry yourself forward from here?’

  All crossed arms and defiance, Fionn Areth glared at the open cuffs of his shirt. The lacings were too short to accommodate the sturdy, herder’s bones of his wrists. He made that his excuse not to have to look up. The miserable awareness rode his tense shoulders, that he was outmatched before he even measured the challenge in the Prince of Rathain’s sovereign stare.

  The greater issue most tactfully unsaid yawned like a pit at his feet. He saw himself stripped by that sorcerer’s regard. What was he but green youth, a bumpkin goatboy whose desires were an undefined snarl of dreams, a grandiose cloth of ideals not yet backed by the tested fiber of character.

  The unbending pressure of the Shadow Master’s quiet became a statement beyond spoken word: that the living continuity of the s’Ffalenn royal line might hang on this hour’s decision. A crown prince’s destiny was entangled with his own. By Koriani machination, their fates had been paired, two lives cast headlong into jeopardy if the coil of an unwanted responsibility was not mastered with mature consideration.

  Nor was the room, with its incense-soaked shadows and patina of wealth, any comfort, despite the fire’s snug warmth. Fionn Areth felt displaced in that setting as a rickle of hay straw and burlap. The Vhalzein pearl-and-lacquer table, the richly dyed tapestries, the untrustworthy, deep pile of the carpets felt unreal, their cosseting beauty a suffocating dream after bleak life on the moorlands.

  ‘No one can speak for you,’ the Teir’s’Ffalenn prompted.

  Fionn Areth unlocked his tense, sweating fingers from the linen that covered his forearms. His discomfort written upon angular features that had never been his born legacy, he stated, ‘I can’t accept your black principles.’

  The corners of Arithon’s mouth flexed and almost broke through to a smile. ‘As the Alliance defines them, neither can I.’ Then his irony gave way to that intent gravity even Fellowship Sorcerers respected. ‘You don’t have to like me. We need only come to a simple agreement. As you wear my face, my enemies become yours. Just cleave to an undisputed common ground whose only shared goal is survival.’

  Frustration peaked, that the dictates of circumstance left no slack at all for refusal. ‘How do I know I’m not being lied to?’

  Forgotten
amid her lace wrapping of shawls, the lady sucked in a fast breath. Braced as though she expected an explosive outburst of fury, she stilled. The volatile seconds crawled past in suspension, while the ribbon and thread that had kept her preoccupied crumpled between the scarred stubs of her fingers.

  But Arithon s’Ffalenn no more than looked down. His recoil masked no act of duplicity, but became stripped response to a startling, deep pain that struck past his kept privacy to witness. ‘Challenge me on even ground,’ he invited the young man ranged like a crouched tiger against him. The schooled temper of his voice for a mercy allowed him the grace to appear conversational. ‘But for your life’s sake, and mine, forgo your hostilities until we’re safely outside Jaelot’s walls and past reach of the Koriani Prime’s plotting.’

  ‘Then do your work,’ Fionn Areth said through locked teeth. He leaned forward, his rebound into eagerness transparent. ‘On those terms, I would have my knee whole again.’

  He would walk unsupported, if only to claim that later opportunity to enact the role of judge and savior. If a sorcerer’s glib tongue spoke him false promise, there would be redress. For the deaths at the Havens, and Dier Kenton Vale, and Tal Quorin, his young arm was prepared to strike for the Light. In the name of Lysaer s’Ilessid and the Alliance, he vowed he would rise to his chance to deliver the Spinner of Darkness to his long-overdue date with justice.

  In frank unconcern for the watershed just crossed, Arithon arose from the hassock. The etched planes of his face stayed serene, and his temper, disarmingly content not to quibble with impassioned fancy and flawed idealism. He gave his neat bow to the lady as though she had not been maimed or blinded. On that moment, only a mage-trained perception might have guessed the degree of trepidation he held shielded behind genteel manners and clasped hands.

  ‘You asked me for music,’ he opened to honor her earlier request. ‘As Masterbard, I am bound to repay the grace of your hospitality. Take this song as my gift. Though made to accomplish Fionn Areth’s healing, in every way known, its artistry springs from my heart.’

  Unable to plumb the veiled depths his performance might come to reveal, the lady set aside her mangled sewing. All innocent expectation, she spoke her permission for the musician to proceed at his pleasure.

  Arithon bowed again, then faced the chair where Fionn Areth feigned gruff indifference. ‘Are you ready?’

  A curt nod. ‘Sooner started, sooner finished. Will I need to remove my hose?’

  ‘That’s not necessary.’ Arithon knelt. The opulent magnificence of the carpet framed him, rough-clad as a commoner, his carriage too unprepossessing to suggest his reputation as a killer who sent armies to wholesale doom. Settled on the floor at the young man’s stockinged feet, he finished his unvarnished explanation. ‘Sound transmits itself through all things of substance. Plain cloth will pose no impediment.’

  Unselfconscious on his knees, he seemed too slight a presence to bear sanction as crown prince; too unimposing for a criminal sorcerer; too meanly appointed for the title of Masterbard he had just made flat claim was his right.

  And yet, there were depths not apparent to the eye. Despite all appearance, he was not detached. Some held, inner tension seemed to shimmer beneath his seamless veneer of calm presence. His green eyes stayed clear. No tremor marred his raised hands. The fingers were longer and slimmer than the herder’s, tanned and well weathered from seafaring. Nor were the fine knuckles any less marked with abrasions from the morning’s flight across rooftops. He sketched no arcane passes, fashioned no seals to wake magecraft, but only cupped his palms in the air on either side of Fionn Areth’s wrapped knee.

  His voice as he spoke seemed to jar the taut stillness wrapped at the hidden core of him. ‘By tonal harmonics, I’ll try to refire the Koriani sigils of healing. You may feel sensation, but I promise, there won’t be any pain.’

  Fionn Areth looked away, all but shrugged his nonchalance. Constrained by his inexperience and countrybred dignity, he strove to behave as if the trial to come was not cut from the cloth of the terrifying unknown.

  Arithon angled his head to one side. The listening quiet he sustained while measuring the needs of an audience by its nature left him exposed. He must abandon self-command, lay bare the vulnerability that opened him to his talent. This time, as he let those inner barriers fall away, he sighed in soft surrender, conflicted by a queer, longing tenderness that made the very blood in his veins seem to burn.

  As though air itself spoke a language he knew, the mild frown eased from his forehead. He captured a breath; hesitated. Suspended on the precipice of a step he knew must carry hard consequences, he engaged his will and let go.

  In irrevocable commitment, he lowered poised hands, rested palms and fingertips against the hot, swollen flesh of Fionn Areth’s torn knee. The touch was less substantial than the brush of a swan’s feather, fallen. No force and no mystery resided in the contact. Yet as though an unseen dialogue had opened, Arithon flushed with a passion too forceful to bridle. A frisson ripped through him. As swiftly, he spent his reserves and contained it, though not without snapping his web of false peace to a turmoil akin to anguish. The flooding color ebbed from his face, until tensioned pallor described every angle of bone that stamped his ancestral bloodline.

  From that moment, the room might as well have ceased to exist.

  Become the tuned instrument of his high art, Arithon saw wholly inward, mind and talent aligned to a lens of absolute clarity. No man, now, but Masterbard, he gave over his whole being as sounding board for the frequencies sealed in the chained sigils a Koriani enchantress had left imprinted under his hands.

  The seals were, heart and mind, the work of Elaira. Her signature rang through like dark water and moonlight, an essence of womanly mystery that transfixed his spirit and raised a cry all the hours of eternity could not answer. She was the one love he could never embrace; not without breaking her vow to the Koriani Order, which cold binding would bring her destruction.

  Nor could he retreat, not now. Once before, Arithon s’Ffalenn had partnered her efforts to accomplish a difficult healing. The fusion of sound and spelled magic had left a link beyond time to erase. As his sensitized skill traced the map of the sigils that underpinned her fine spellcraft, stark dismay plucked his nerves like a dousing chill. No touch of his could be stealthy enough not to arouse her awareness. She knew him too well. Her song partnered his in a union that held the same need as life and breath. From the first instant Arithon touched her linked spellcraft, Elaira was simply there in his mind.

  Nor could he spare her his pain in return, as the instinctive welcome that surged in response was jangled to recoiling fear, then a desolate, shared understanding. She knew why he must act. Once again his free choice, and hers, must become the string-tied puppet of circumstance.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the words spoken, unthinking, aloud. His agonized headshake whipsawed the silence. ‘Beloved, forgive me. May you be somewhere far removed from Jaelot, in a haven both sheltered and private.’

  For a boy’s life relied upon their paired talents. Fionn Areth’s survival perforce must take precedence over the fury and blind pain, that the cast lot of fate forced them separate.

  Then the agony, redoubled by the gift of her gratitude, that he had not been too proud to reach out, and ask help from her strength out of principle. Her love became the more poignant in renewal, for his trust, that she would not, now or ever, stint the needful burden of sacrifice.

  ‘Oh beloved.’ There were tears in his words, a bitterness of brine where the touch of her should have been honey.

  Arithon wrenched in a shuddering breath. All the while, his hands had not shifted position. They trembled only slightly as he completed his mental sounding to find the tonal frequencies of the magelight that bound each drawn sigil to its chain of harnessed energy. That signature chord, lowered the exacting, requisite octaves, became accessible as sound he could replicate with the instrument of his voice. His whole body sheathed in the
discipline of his art, he opened his throat and sang the first pure note to initiate the succession.

  The lusterless sigil under his hands reawakened and warmed with shared resonance. He shifted the pitch, a sweet, gliding rapture of tuned force that spoke, and refigured the ritual magics which called primal power from the elements. Nor was that bright forging recaptured on a surgically precise intonation. His own vital humanity could do no less than color the pitch with emotion. His love for Elaira was caught like spun gold in the exacting grace of execution. His unadulterated regard, and its twin partner in pain, for the passion unshared between them, framed a tangible force. Melody poured from his heart, blazing and bright as the fractured light trapped in the planes of cut diamond: agony and joy that knew no limits, twined as one inseparable thread.

  Arithon sang. His art was his master. He gave himself over to the demands of the moment, yielding and clear as a stream of fresh water poured formless, out of a jar. The notes of his making cascaded in phrases of a cappella simplicity, a beauty of sound shot warp through weft with words phrased in lyric Paravian. All over again, as he had once done in Merior, he became voice and instrument for the loom of Elaira’s spellcraft.

  The union this time came bittersweet with foreknowledge that consummation could not follow. Every tie they had ever held between them remained, renewed on this hour, reinforced. She was his, and he, hers, and no other’s, no matter the obstacles between them.

  His tempered voice broke the limits of passion and held strong, sustained, locked to the parameters of Fionn Areth’s healing.