Traitor's Knot

by Janny Wurts

  Through the ringing of tone that was not sound, but the after-shock of harmonics strung like cobweb through the charged air, Ellaine realized Verrain was speaking.

  ‘…won’t suffer that sense of spinning disorientation.’ Lined features and wide-lashed brown eyes reflected the spellbinder’s tender concern. ‘Your traverse will take you through by way of the adepts’ sacred grove. As you wish, you can make the crossing in sleep. You’d rest in my arms and feel nothing.’

  Ellaine shivered. While the focus lines flared from blue to deep indigo, then subsided to pearlescent violet, she grappled with her rattled dignity, then set her spine straight and responded. ‘Thank you, but no. If I am to walk through the heart of the mysteries, I’d rather hold on to awareness.’

  ‘Brave one, go in grace. No traveller who enters a mystical grove leaves with the spirit untouched.’ Verrain bowed, then steadied her elbow in the grasp of his dauntless, scarred hand. ‘I bid you farewell. May Ath’s lasting peace shape the change that attends you.’

  Gone, the chance to renounce that decision: Kharadmon’s summons flared out of the flux, and Verrain steered her uncertain step onto the focus.

  Ellaine crossed the scribed circles of runes, undisturbed by uncanny sensation. Only her loose strands of hair snapped with static as she passed over the grand cross at the central axis. There, Verrain’s kiss on her hand bade farewell and framed Methisle’s final remembrance.

  Light sheeted over her senses and form, a white fire that swallowed awareness. Ellaine plunged through a blanket of azure, then indigo, then lost herself into the deepest black-violet, which faded into full dark. A cry like song rushed through the unravelled knit of her form, then consumed her familiar senses. She tumbled, without voice, and for time beyond measure, danced to the mad gyre of a whirlwind.

  Force that was naked power itself cradled her fragmented self. A fleeting recognition informed her that the touch was Kharadmon’s personal signature: a taste like storm lightning, and mercuric space, stitched through by fiercely barbed humour.

  Then awareness of her lost body returned. Ellaine felt her stomach turn over. Pressed downwards, too heavy, she heard running water. Restored to her feet, she found herself standing once more upon firm ground. A streamlet burbled over a bed of white stones, under an ambient twilight. Stately trees twined a leafy roof overhead. Their crowns soared upwards, enfolding a nightingale’s song, while a horned owl preened on a branch, yellow eyes wide in the half-light. A deer grazed on the dew-drenched carpet of grasses, while a fluttering snow-storm of tiny white moths dipped over the cups of pale flowers. Ellaine stared in wonderment. Her very skin appeared remade from silk, ablaze with the ghost gleam of spangles.

  ‘Where am I?’ she gasped, amazed. Her tissue of clothing seemed stuff spun from dream, shot through the mist of a milk-warm, midsummer evening.

  Kharadmon’s presence still remained at her back. Here, the vortex that defined his being was not cold but fierce as a fire upon her.

  ‘You are in the grove of the hostels, a place never found on a mapmaker’s chart.’ The Sorcerer’s words seemed to strike the taut air, percussive as a hawk’s feathered wing-beats. ‘One will come to guide you the rest of the way. He will be the spirit who answers your soul. Be patient. Stay still. Let him hear you.’

  She did not see him enter.

  Whether he had emerged through the leaf-filtered quiet, or if he arrived through a gateway punched out of the void, the princess heard no whisper of footsteps. Only the voice that murmured her name and shattered the locked vault of her memory.

  ‘No!’ Ellaine’s pulse all but stopped. Breath unreeled and froze. Disbelief tore past numbness. Then resurgent grief ripped her open and bared the deep pain that had wounded her life beyond healing. ‘Spare my mind, I can’t bear this!’

  But the young man’s warm fingers laced into hers, alive and exquisitely tender. ‘Ellaine, my mother, be welcome.’

  ‘Ath, oh Ath, Kevor!’ Tear-blinded, she stumbled to meet him.

  His strength caught her close. Standing whole, without blemish, her lost son embraced her. The uncanny shimmer of what he had become soothed the last of her wrenching distress.

  Joy followed. Ellaine buried her face into his white-clad shoulder and wept out the crest of the storm. Unseated, unstrung, she ached for her answered longing, and also for love that could not be assuaged. Her tears unchained torrents of silenced rage, instilled by the imprisoning years of her marriage. Lysaer’s chill indifference, and two brutal nights given over to his harsh handling had left scars. The ache of mute hurt and stark isolation burst every wall of restraint. Ellaine acknowledged the self she had discarded with an inward honesty that stripped to the bone.

  She stayed unaware, though her adept son marked the moment that her Fellowship escort departed.

  Kevor wrapped her in patience more steadfast than time, until her wracked anguish ran dry. She remained, no more separate. Rejoined to herself, surrounded in calm, she refounded her being in the trickle of water, singing over white stones. As pure were the robes of Ath’s adept: the son who clasped her in reunion.

  Unafraid now, assured that he was real, Ellaine finally dared raise her eyes. His face was so changed! Her pulse missed a beat. Happiness rekindled. She indulged her pleased urge to examine him.

  Kevor still wore the mantle of youth. Yet there, all trace of the boy he had been fell away, strained like dross from a crucible. He stood and breathed with an unearthly peace, bone and muscle and flesh realigned, a sculpture refigured to manifest beauty that scalded the senses to witness.

  The unmarked blue eyes did not see as a man, but as a creature lifted beyond earthly clay to a vantage that conquered mortality.

  ‘You will not return,’ Ellaine ventured at last.

  Kevor’s smile moved her to wonder like a touch made direct to the heart. ‘Stay, instead,’ he invited, and raised her chilled palm to a cheek that was golden, and bearded.

  The rightness of that choice at last eased her being. The mystical quiet in the grove heard her need and moved something sacred inside her. Whole in herself for the first moment since she had wept in the trammelled sheets of her marriage bed, Ellaine passed beyond pain. She laughed and stood tall, though she knew not where the unknown future might lead her.

  Late Spring 5671

  Infamy at Innish

  The plan would have proceeded with no hitch at all, had the driver who provided the teams not yoked them with several bull oxen. Surly at best during this time of year, the creatures still had the spring rut in their blood. Rivalry lit their rolling, dark eyes. Sullen temperament made them paw dust. They bumped fractious shoulders and swiped their capped horns to gore the least hint of movement about them.

  The slight-boned filthy boy sent to handle their nose-rings was of desert stock, and a mute. At each jostling challenge, the rank creatures all but lifted him off his bare feet. Outfaced, he wrestled to stem the libido that threatened to wreak a disaster.

  Alerted to the draft beasts’ wrangling pull by each straining grunt from the boy, Kyrialt rapidly knotted the lines to secure the filled barrels stacked in the adjacent dray. The manoeuvring animals forced him, again, to snap his toe clear of a wheel-rim.

  ‘Dharkaron geld those damned bullocks!’ he swore, then turned a peevish glance through the gloom that fore-ran the hour of dawn. A blurred form in grey mist, the boy glowered back through his veil. The dust-faded cloth worn by Sanpashir’s tribes masked his hair and obscured his features. Kyrialt’s glare encountered dark eye-slits. ‘You sure you’ve the muscle to manage those beasts?’

  The grunt, this time, scaled into a shriek of soprano frustration. ‘No!’

  Slim hands loosed the straps of the lead team’s nose-rings, then clawed the head-gear away from lips that were shapely and full, and no mute’s. ‘No! Damn their ornery hides straight to Sithaer!’

  Kyrialt turned his head, dropped his jaw, and stopped breathing.

  ‘No,’ repeated his wife, looking
hot. She seized back the straps, tugged in tardy response as the left-facing bull lashed its head and tore through the hem of her tunic. ‘Piss on your mother!’ she shrilled into its ear. ‘Try that again, I’ll rip off your bollocks if I have to use my damned teeth!’

  ‘Glendien!’ Kyrialt gasped, all but strangled.

  He jettisoned the trailing ends of his rope, sprinted eight steps, and jerked the harness straps out of his wife’s inept hand. His heave bent the offending bullock’s neck and brought his eyes level with its foamed muzzle and heaving nostrils. ‘What on the soil of Ath’s earth possessed you!’ he shouted in savage astonishment.

  ‘That cow, in the wheel-trace,’ Glendien stated. ‘She’s in squirting heat.’ Nonplussed, red hair uncrimped in damp waves down her back, she rubbed her raw palm on her breeches. Her two-fisted chop on the second bull’s strap dealt its nose a clouting shove sidewards. ‘None of that, randy boy! Your sweetheart’s off-limits as long as you’re shackled in harness.’

  Kyrialt swiped off a stringer of slobber. Struck at once by the jiggle of breasts pressed under his wife’s noisome tunic: how had he missed that? And those curved hips—even in the near darkness, clad in boy’s clothing, the woman could fire his blood. ‘Glendien! Damn your brass! What are you doing here?’

  Finished maligning the amorous bull, his bride of two months glanced sidelong through her tumble of hair. ‘Picking posies, of course.’ She smiled. ‘Where’s the fun, staying home? I’m not sick or pregnant.’

  If not for the need to restrain the crazed beast bawling into his ear-drum, Kyrialt might well have thrashed her. ‘You can’t go to Innish!’

  A flounce of scarlet locks, then, ‘Why not? Two wagons, two teams, each one yoked with bullocks. You’ll drive both wains? Or no. I see! Which can you leave? This one with the gin, or that, with the white silk? Your liege’s plot fails, one without the other.’ Warned by Kyrialt’s thunderous pause, Glendien stood straight, the bull’s strap tapping her buskins. ‘I wanted to meet Fiark,’ she admitted point-blank.

  Kyrialt forcibly reined in his temper. ‘As Arithon’s town factor? You’ll go nowhere near him!’ He knew his wife; loved her spirit, none better. He also understood the futility of wasting his breath with any attempt to upbraid her. Whatever had happened that day in the glen, Glendien’s private audience with the Prince of Rathain had stoked her insatiable curiosity. Such whims always drove her with juggernaut force. A man learned to bend, if he hoped to harness the surge of the tides, or the weather.

  ‘Pass me that strap,’ Kyrialt snapped, resigned. Ahead, he foresaw the need for fast talk and a feckless turn of invention. No way else could he hope to coerce the hired men to let him stay through the last phase of Arithon’s tightly planned strategy. Which meant, damn the wife! he must undertake the foolhardy risk of entering town with the wagons.

  His exasperation bordered on fury as he snatched up the tossed rag from the trampled ground. ‘Here, minx. Stuff your insolent face in this head-cloth before I tumble you here for a kiss.’

  Glendien flashed him a grin, doused at once beneath crumpled fabric. ‘Later, rude man,’ she declared, ‘the ginger-coat cow won’t say no.’

  Kyrialt seized the reins of the recalcitrant bulls, moved to irrepressible laughter. Like his father, he revelled in dangerous by-play and women with claws and hot temperament. In fact, he looked forward to winning the match, for the only way to swerve Glendien’s interest was to accompany the madcap venture to Innish and keep her too busy to bid for the end game.

  An hour past sunrise, the two drays trundled into the thick stream of traffic jammed under the wall by the trade gate. Steaming under the mist where the Ippash delta met the southern sea, the port-town of Innish already teemed. Past the slack season that followed the thaws, the galley trade surged through the brief months of calm that preceded the squall lines of summer. Dust raised by caravans curtained the air. Short-tempered carters hastened to finish their commerce before the heat baked the wharves to a sultry inferno.

  By now, the paired ox drays crept with the press, steered by two competent drivers. Despite virulent objections, they still bore their intrusive pair of clan passengers: a slender, boy mute and a strapping young man whose taut build and fierce eyes were no tradesman’s. The unrest in Shand’s wilds had tightened the check-points. Both carters stewed in their uneasy sweat, while the mute was passed by, and official scrutiny measured the swordsman’s build of his fellow. Folded into a tattered tarp, the barbarian sneezed in the face of the guards, then croaked his answers through the faked onset of a perishing sore throat.

  Relieved to be hustled ahead through the arch, the nervous lead driver let fly. ‘Catch yourselves short on this idiot escapade, my back will get flensed on the gibbet. Did you know,’ he ran on, incensed, as he steered through the jam packing the turn towards the harbour, ‘the sharp dirk you wear at your hip is no use? Not here, within walls, while there’s piracy rampant. I’d cry you down for the bounty myself, except that my cousin was burned by examiners. I found that I hated sunwheels worse than all of you slinking clan animals.’

  Kyrialt coughed, forced helplessly silent as a belled trollop swayed past, suggestively teasing the tarp that covered his ankle. While Glendien grinned behind her sour face-cloth, the drays trundled into the ramshackle maze of by-lanes lining the water-front. There, the larger one bearing the barrels split off to park in the shade in a dead end, under a gallery. Its driver lounged next to the laundry-house well, to all appearance a man with the itch to bed with a two-silver whore.

  The yoked team with the cow lumbered ahead to the docks. In snorting, minced steps, the oxen were goaded to back the wagon down to the quay-side.

  By then, the early mist had burned off. Across the scintillant dazzle of water, surf creamed on the reefs at the mouth of the cove and jetted the decks of an out-bound galley, skimming away with the tide. Tattooed longshoremen lounged by her discharged cargo of packing-crates stacked on the dock. They teased the boy and chaffed at Kyrialt’s silence, each tense minute the haulage was loaded. A hawker sold lemons in the open street. While idle deck-hands strolled past, hooting catcalls at strutting harlots, the hustling factors of Innish pursued what began as a normal day.

  The last crate was hefted, the tail-gate chained up, and the dock-crew paid off for their labour. The carter slapped his oxen awake. While the yoked team lumbered on its unhurried way past the sagging eaves of the tenements, Kyrialt shot a hard glance towards his wife’s insouciant head-cloth. ‘Dharkaron avenge! I was moonstruck. Far better we both had not come here.’

  ‘Did I wed to be left stretching hides back in camp?’ Glendien flipped him an insolent gesture between the knees of her soiled trousers. ‘Sneeze. You’re being sized up by a doxie, and the man wasn’t born who could cage me.’

  They trundled past the blind alley. The parked dray’s attendant was absent, apparently strayed to indulge himself in the sheets. The amorous bullock still pawed in the yoke. Winding the pungent scent of the cow, it lowed with frustration, then shouldered its team-mates into the lane, hell-bent to challenge its rival.

  The dray rolled, unobstructed, its negligent driver having forgotten to set the brake on the wheels.

  Unaware of the bovine trouble that ambled behind, the leading dray with its boxes and silk pressed on with its scheduled errands. The brand-marked crates were left as a gift to the woman renowned as the queen of the Innish brothels. Wrapped in beads and feathers, she looked askance at the boxes piled on her dyed carpet, then beckoned for muscled assistance. The shave-headed brute who ejected rough clients shortly pried off the lids. A single glance at the tissue-wrapped contents raised a cackle of evil delight.

  ‘Ladies!’ The madam shouted upstairs, ‘Come down! The hand of fate has dealt us the trump to enact Dharkaron’s sweet vengeance!’

  Outside, in accord with Arithon’s scripted plan, the driverless wain with the lust-driven bull and the barrels now careened through the sea-quarter market. Traffic suffered. The
town watchmen, absorbed in their dice, dropped their game as two on-coming wagons swerved into collision. The crash and the shouting compounded the trouble. The loose team of oxen panicked. Tails curled, they charged, pounding through the rowed stalls with the levelling force of a battering ram. Baskets flew air-borne. Fruit and wares crashed and burst. Cries of outrage followed the beasts’ zigzagged course, then outbreaks of curse-ridden screaming. A wealthy merchant’s carriage was wrecked. Trailing peacock-fans and strings of glass beads, the yoked oxen galloped amok. Citrus crates squashed. Poultry flew squawking. Iron-rimmed wheels smashed crockery. More stalls were swiped flat. A livestock man’s string of young horses tore loose, and the tumult gained force like the tumbling thrash of an avalanche.

  By the time the rampaging team was waylaid, the authorities yelled to make themselves heard through the irate howls of the vendors. Footmen from the splintered carriage pushed in to fight for their master’s claim to charge damages. No teamster appeared to collect his marauding beasts or set right the offending wagon. Which faced the Innish town-guard with a choice: they could draw steel, or assess the dray’s contents before the brangle devolved into fisticuffs and knifing bloodshed.

  One gin barrel was broached to cool ragged tempers. Since no one seemed interested in resuming business over their torn tarps and splinters, a second cask was opened as consolation, then a third, for sheer joy and devilment. An impromptu holiday bloomed on the spot, as the crowd in the market immersed itself in jocular commiseration.

  The celebration was just reaching stride when the unloaded dray with its two unscheduled passengers ground away from the Bower of Bliss. Turned downhill again, it creaked through the sea-quarter tenements and briefly stopped in another by-lane. There, the errant driver made rendezvous. He climbed aboard, emerged from the arms of his trollop with cleaned hair and fresh clothes, and equipped with a satchel bearing the respectable tools of a tailor.