Paths of Alir (A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book 3)

by Melissa McPhail

  Phaedor arched a sardonic brow. “It might be now.”

  To which allusion Tanis saw the High Lord veritably grinding his teeth.

  The silence that followed turned deep and forceful. For many minutes, the only sounds Tanis heard were the splash of the hull through the waves, the creak of masts and rigging, and the wind in the sails. Then Tanis could stand no more the feeling of hopelessness radiating off the High Lord. The words came into his head almost as if planted there by someone else.

  “All isn’t yet lost, Your Grace,” Tanis posed into the quiet of Phaedor’s wind. “Perhaps such time will come again when men may study the fifth in safety in the east and those of the west might once again learn from maestros who do not fear its use.”

  Marius shot him a startled look. He opened his mouth to reply and abruptly shut it again. He searched Tanis’s colorless eyes with a look of wonder and finally replied, “The Empress has expressed the same sentiment, Tanis of Giverny.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t born in Giverny, Your Grace,” Tanis corrected, not really paying attention to what he was saying, for his own thoughts were ranging far in the future, drawn there as if his prophetic words were carrying him swiftly down the strands of time. “I was born here, in Agasan.”

  “Tanis,” the zanthyr cautioned, giving him a look of warning.

  Tanis roused from his musing to find Marius staring hard at him. “You are one of the Empress’s subjects?”

  “The boy is subject to no one.” Phaedor took Tanis by the shoulder and marched them away from the bow, and that marked the end of all conversation with the High Lord Marius di L'Arlesé.

  Twenty-Seven

  “Gods have their own moral code.”

  – Morin d’Hain, Spymaster

  Ean sat up as the sun was setting. He felt odd, disoriented. He pushed palms to his eyes, which didn’t seem much restored for having rested for several hours, and looked to his brother, who’d been laid out prone beside him with a cloth draping his hips. Isabel had made strides in healing his back, but his arms and shoulders sat oddly, and his poor hands clearly had not yet been tended to, beyond being immobilized around a simple splint.

  “I’ve bound him into unconsciousness until we can help him further.”

  Ean turned to find Isabel standing between the open flaps of the tent. His gaze softened to see her. “Thank you.” He looked down at Sebastian again, and concern marred his brow. “What of his hands, Isabel?”

  She shook her head. “Every bone in both hands is shattered. He’ll need to be in a stable place before I reset and heal them all, for he cannot be moved after that for several days.” She brushed a stray strand of dark hair from her face, and her brow pinched slightly, perhaps in concern, certainly with sympathy. “It will be the work of more than one Healer to set him to rights, Ean. I know where to go to see to his welfare, but it will take too long overland. You must make a bridge.”

  Ean closed his eyes and stifled a groan. The thought of making another of those bridges, and the feeling he’d experienced afterwards… Resigning himself to doing whatever she asked of him, Ean looked back to her and noticed the expression on her face. “Isabel…” He climbed to his feet and went immediately to take her shoulders in his hands. “What is it?”

  She turned from him and moved out of the tent. Puzzled, he followed her in silence, away from camp and to the very edge of the canyon. Sunset flamed the broad sky and painted the rock towers in variegated shadows, but Ean saw only the shadows upon Isabel’s brow.

  He took her by the shoulders again and turned her to face him. “Whatever is bothering you…” he searched her face with his gaze, wishing for the thousandth time that he might look into her eyes instead of at the fold of silk that forever shut him out—Arion had not been so denied. “Isabel…please tell me.”

  Silence lengthened between them, and both the mystery and the perception of her inner turmoil gave vent to his own fears, but then her brow relaxed somewhat, as if with resignation.

  “To know one’s future is to become the effect of it,” she told him quietly. “This is a proven fact. You saw today how deadly bright shines the sun of foretelling, and you experienced but a fraction of its power reflected from my thoughts, many times diluted.” She turned slightly away from his gaze to face the vista again, but at the same time she leaned into his embrace, so he would know she wasn’t denying him.

  “When a man is told the path of his future, he nearly always falls prey to it. He sets it in stone with his will, with his belief, even unwittingly so. But the future is not set. Our paths are not laid in stone, and though their overall direction isn’t easily shifted, a man changing his mind at any point can alter his path.”

  “I understand this, Isabel.”

  She turned to him. “Do you?” She exhaled her dubiety and looked back to the view. “All paths are not created equally, nor are all players in the game of equal value to the achievement of the goal. Only certain threads in the tapestry suggest its design. There are many ancillary players, many pawns on both sides, many threads that merely fill the tapestry’s open spaces. These pawns, these minor threads, are still valuable to the whole, but a loss of one, a misstep of one, doesn’t change the shape of things.”

  She leaned more closely against him and he wrapped both arms around her, though he felt less protective than desperately possessive, and he wondered at the sudden premonition that brought such uneasy feelings to mind.

  “Then there are those whose every choice weaves its thread through the pattern, the great tapestry that is my brother’s game. Your choices, my choices…our strands are thick, Ean. We bind many, many threads to us.”

  Ean pressed his lips to her hair. “Please just tell me what you fear, Isabel.”

  She shook her head and sighed, and he both felt and heard a terrible uncertainty in her exhalation. “I fear that my path is influencing yours.”

  This is what he’d been sensing in her, why he clung to her with such instinctive desperation. “What are you saying?”

  “I fear that my brother was right. I fear if we continue forth together, my path will too strongly influence your thread.”

  “No.” Ean spun her to face him. “I won’t believe that.”

  She removed his arms from her shoulders and stood her ground. “We were in a remote fortress, yet you crossed the path of a Malorin’athgul.” The name came out in a hiss.

  Ean pushed both hands through his hair, frustrated, not understanding why she kept insisting on this point. “But they lie upon my path, Isabel—”

  “Not Pelas.”

  Ean dropped his arms and stared at her. “Then whose path does he cross?” He saw it in her expression then—or at least perceived it in the shadows of her thoughts. His heart became a sudden lump in his chest. “…Yours?”

  She held him fixedly in her hidden, yet somehow scouring, gaze. “The point is that Pelas should not have crossed your path, Ean. Not yet, in any case.”

  Rising protest made Ean’s breath come faster. He searched his mind for any rationale—anything to explain the day’s events and make her see what folly she suggested to ever think of leaving his side. “You said…” he threw out a hand, searching for the words, “you said every choice changes a man’s path. Couldn’t Pelas have recently chosen—”

  “Yes, choice is central to Pelas’s path,” she cut him off tersely. “I know your mind, Ean, what you would propose to me: that there is merit in your actions, that Pelas helped us—indeed that the currents proved him an ally, at least for today. And you would be correct in all of this.”

  She turned and walked a few paces away to stand with her arms crossed and her back to him. “Yet this being is not our ally…not yet, if ever,” she added, “and while it is valuable to put a face and name to another of our enemies, it is of the utmost urgency that your paths not cross again.” She turned a look at him over her shoulder.

  Ean refused to face the truth she was presenting him, so he asked instead, “Immanuel—Pel
as…he isn’t like the others, is he?”

  “Yes and no.” She exhaled forcefully and looked back to the view. “Today I saw his path for the first time—that is, what one can see of its potential, for these creatures are not made within Alorin’s fabric. Their paths are as fluid as the sea.” She pursed her lips in a tight line, her brow furrowed. Then she shook her head and turned to face him. “We must go. Even now the line of men approaches.”

  The prince saw beyond her then, saw what she’d been observing: a cloud of dust rose along the distant ridge—men on horseback.

  He took her arm as she moved to depart. He felt naked without her, so he spoke with the same honesty. “Don’t leave me, Isabel. I’m not whole without you.”

  Her brow softened, and she rose to plant a soft kiss on his lips. “We are bound, you and I.” She paused with her lips close, letting her breath mingle with his own. “You will never be without me.”

  Ean frowned as she withdrew, for her words held dual meaning, depending which word one emphasized. He chose the optimistic interpretation and followed her back to camp.

  They made their way to the node they’d first arrived on in their initial chase after Dore Madden, when Ean had still been unconscious in the Labyrinth. Though the men from Tal’Afaq surely pursued them, they rode with care to protect Sebastian, whom Dorn carried before him on his mount even as the zanthyr had once carried Ean.

  All the while, the prince brooded over Isabel’s words, wondering if he cared at all to exist in the world without her. He might’ve put the time to more productive use, but his brain seemed incapable of any other thoughts.

  The node lay amid a crumbling temple on a hill overlooking the ruins of an ancient city. It had probably been a place of great beauty during the Cyrene empire’s heyday, but the temple’s once-lustrous marble had grown dull and pocked with age, and the nodecourt had become little more than a repository for rubble. Yet the node functioned the same whether decorated with the ornate temples of civilization or marked with a single stone, or none at all.

  While Lem held the horses at the ready, Isabel drew Ean to the edge of the node. Splintered columns surrounded the nodecourt like the teeth of an ancient beast, giving Ean the uncomfortable sensation of walking into its maw. He’d been unconscious when Isabel had first brought them through the node, and he admitted a certain distraction at seeing the skeletal ruins of the city, which spread below and around them brokenly, ringed by the rib bones of city walls.

  “Ean, we haven’t much time,” Isabel said, recalling his attention from the graveyard view. “The men of Tal’Afaq will doubtless pursue us here.”

  He looked to her, still feeling the echo of his fears. They lingered in the back of his mind with a heavy sort of dullness, like the morning after too much drink. “What is your will, my lady?”

  “Take my hand,” she offered, extending it to him, “and I’ll show you.”

  Ean entwined his fingers within hers and brought her arm close, drawing her hand up against his chest where he might brush his lips against it. Through this tactile connection, Isabel shared her vision—imposed it, rather, upon his consciousness.

  Ean no longer saw the nodecourt but a geospatial rendering of the Pattern of the World. The entire spherical grid of the Greater Reticulation glowed before him, ley lines connecting to nodepoints and welds forming a complex geometric solid.

  “We stand at this nodepoint,” Isabel said, making one point glow more brightly than the others, “and we need to reach this one.” Another point, not connected to the first via any of the intersecting lines, also glowed. “We haven’t time to travel overland from node to node. You must bridge them to take us in a single step.”

  Ean frowned. She made it sound so simple, but instinct told him it would be simple in the way the Esoterics were simple—broad statements about hugely complex topics, reduced to their axiomatic essentials and then generalized from there. As in, not the least bit simple.

  Yet all he said was, “How do I do this, Isabel?”

  “You must stand upon the Pattern of the World and bridge these points with your mind. You must use the second strand, not the fifth, for it is kinetic energy, not raw elements, that connects these points on the grid of the world; yet you’ll find a certain affinity in the kinetic energy of the second strand because you’re an Adept of the fifth. The pattern won’t reject you as it would another.” She pointed to the connecting lines in her illusion. “The ley lines are magnetized to polarities—but you don’t need to understand the properties of inductance and magnetic fields. All you must know is that to bridge one node to another, a conductor must exist—you. The resulting induction from existing fields will pull us across.”

  “The essence of simplicity,” he muttered.

  She squeezed his hand. “You once crafted welds whole cloth out of the ether. You and Malachai and my brother built T’khendar’s magnetic grid. You can do this, Ean. Do not let the idea of it daunt you. Any nodefinder with his second ring can do this.”

  Ean’s mind remained a blank. “But I have no rings.”

  She dropped the illusion of the grid and turned to stand before him. “Arion had twenty.”

  Ean clenched his jaw. It was always Arion whose name returned to haunt him. “If he was so magnificent, how did he fail so utterly?”

  Isabel caught her breath sharply. Ean sensed an immediate change in her manner. “This is why the veil remains closed to you.” Her whispered words announced her sudden understanding. “Whatever happened on Tiern’aval, you think you failed.”

  Ean gazed at her in frustrated silence. I did fail! He knew this with every fiber of his being, though he had no idea what he’d failed in.

  He saw a crease form between her brows. “Arion was my brother’s closest friend. Björn confided in him, he taught him things no one else knows. You must remember this knowledge, Ean.”

  Ean dropped his chin to his chest. “I want to, Isabel. I’m trying—I don’t know why it won’t come.”

  “Because you clearly fear the truth of Tiern’aval and cannot forgive yourself for it.”

  The blunt declaration hit Ean like a slap to his face. He clenched his teeth, knowing that sting of truth even if he understood nothing else. He lifted his gaze back to her. “Then what really happened?”

  Isabel’s frown deepened, so also her impatience to be away, but Ean couldn’t get past it—something in this area of his past concealed a truth that plugged all memory beyond it. He knew he’d not find the knowledge she required of him without this answer.

  Isabel placed both of her hands on his chest and turned her hidden gaze up to him. “Ean…don’t you see…you’re the only one who knows.”

  His mouth went dry with sudden foreboding. “…What do you mean?”

  She smoothed the suede of his coat with one hand while the lines of concern marring her brow grew longer. “My brother claimed responsibility for the deaths of the Citadel Mages, but their blood stains others’ hands.”

  Ean took a reflexive step backwards. “What are you saying—that…” thirteen hells! “…that I killed them all?” He felt suddenly unstable on his feet and stumbled a few steps away to brace himself against a fallen column. He hung his head between his arms then and tried to stave off the swarming feeling in his skull, but his breath came too shallowly, and the world continued its sideways skid.

  “The battle at the Citadel began with a failed coup,” Isabel said quietly, compassion and concern adding a blue tinge to her tone of blackest regret, “surely this memory has returned to you by now…”

  Ean remembered—first the memory he’d regained in the Labyrinth, then that of his dream from months before, where he’d stood in that cavernous hall holding a bloodied sword beneath the dome he’d shattered, facing a pair of gilded doors but seeing only the faceless forms of traitors hiding beyond them. And he recalled…

  “You took those who were loyal to you,” he murmured, recalling it as truth now instead of just a dream, “and I went int
o the hall to bring lasting justice to Dore Madden and the other men—Mages—responsible.”

  “Yes.”

  Ean straightened and turned to her. “What happened?

  Isabel was hugging her chest with one hand pressed over her heart. “When the battle was finally done and Illume Belliel’s Paladin Knights had been vanquished, my brother went in search of you. He found the bodies of the traitor Mages…” and here she caught her bottom lip between her teeth, her brow furrowed with an eternal sorrow, “…but of Arion, he found no sign. Ean—” She approached and took both of his hands firmly in her own, looking up into his eyes. “Whatever truth there is to be uncovered, it lies upon your path. You’re the only one who knows what happened in that room.”

  Ean stared at her while feelings, impressions…perceptions fluttered through his mind, memories as birds trapped in a windowless chamber, seeking desperate escape. He saw himself in battle, saw the faces of his vengeance take form, saw his dark blade flashing through veils of the fifth…and finally a face—the face from his many earlier dreams, ones that had come during his Awakening…a face he’d tried to forget.

  And throughout all of this—regret…regret…regret. It rang in these impressions as if a canon against which he’d measured all action.

  “Arion didn’t die on Tiern’aval.” He heard himself confess these words, though his breath seemed too thin to support speech. This memory had come to him more recently, when he’d faced the doors of Tyr’kharta’s hall and seen the Citadel’s doors instead. With both images superimposed, so had returned the knowledge that Tiern’aval hadn’t been Arion’s end. Yet…where had Arion died? This truth still hid from him.

  Isabel pressed a hand to his cheek, and he lifted an agonized gaze to her. “Memory will come in time. Let it come, when it does. But for now we must away. I can feel Dore’s men nearing, but more importantly, your brother needs Healing, and it cannot be done here.”