by Janny Wurts
He could not turn back. The last days in the battle to contain the Mistwraith unfolded, inexorable, the glass edge of danger braided through the close-woven thorns of a jagged despair. Each step unwound time; carried him closer to his accession at Etarra, and the horrific reckoning meted out on the banks of Tal Quorin.
Arithon plowed ahead. His progress was accomplished by ingrained determination, and the steel-cased awareness that to stop, or to languish, would buy him no grace of relief. Davien's web of spellcraft held no mercy for the man who could not face his actions head-on. Past the harrowing hour of Desh-thiere's captivity, Arithon endured his ceremonial presentation as the Fellowship-sanctioned crown heir. Again, he knelt in the chilly spring earth of a rose garden to receive affirmed right of succession from Asandir.
The antagonistic hatred and distrust of the townsmen surrounded him like a caul, day and night. He breathed and moved through their webworks of intrigue, slept and walked under strong wardfields entrained to deflect the knives of their covert assassins. Hampered in strangling cords of obligation, Arithon traversed the last days leading up to his disrupted coronation. Hindsight let him see the Fellowship's tension; telltale signs embedded in words, and in the consummate handling of masked reactions. The Sorcerers had been forewarned of a reckoning to come on that fateful day in Etarra.
Freely sweating, arms crossed tight at his chest as though mortal strength could restrain the cry of his captive heart, Arithon made his way forward. By the cascading complexity of his emotions, Elaira saw how the Fellowship's awareness cast disturbing, fresh light over the shape of events yet to come. The Sorcerers had known, and not acted. The reason for such a momentous betrayal stayed maddeningly veiled beyond reach. In pursuit of that mystery with all his sharp wit, Arithon reached the inevitable crux of the hour he became cursed by Desh-thiere.
Elaira sensed his shrinking trepidation. Beside him, she experienced the blackout dread that threatened to sap his fixed will.
Here lay the dire crossroad. The next step forward must retire the moment that had fully and finally unstrung the course of his life.
Arithon's whispered cry of appeal was addressed to his absent grandfather. 'Mak, when I said I could not accomplish what's asked, you told me, by all means, start dying at once.'
'Shrink yourself down to a shadow, a ghost, because you fear to make a mistake? Mistakes are life, boy! They teach strength and character. Back down from the contest, and you cast to the winds the best part of your given potential.'
But had Rauven's high mage ever foreseen such a challenge as Desh-thiere's stroke of revenge?
Elaira held fast, pressed to uttermost sorrow, as Arithon s'Ffalenn mustered his courage. She heard him speak the forlorn phrase in Paravian, 'lei drien i cadiad duerung undai sied ffaelient,' meaning, 'Light for the path leading into rank darkness.' Then he gathered himself and stepped unresistingly forward.
Again he was fleeing through packed throngs of people, seeking Fellowship assistance, and again, the hands of two merchants detained him with self-righteous force. His half brother's cast light bolt arced over the packed square, with himself held as captive target. Arithon had no time, no chance for evasion. Traithe's raven, extended in flight overhead, became his sole hope to draw help. In his desperate fear, he ripped his right wrist from the townsmen's encumbering grasp. Only one split second of freedom, and one narrow opening for choice: he had snapped off a shadow laced through with spells to protect the Sorcerer's winged messenger.
Elaira gasped, knowing as Arithon had, that the brunt of Lysaer's offensive must now strike his naked hand.
At the crux of reliving, he had curbed all fear. Yet his past grounds for trust became poisoned, in hindsight: that his trained talent and his skilled handling of darkness could still intercede and effect a recovery after the moment of impact.
Superbly prepared, his balanced mind braced to withstand searing pain, he turned his palm upward. By the first jolt of contact, he had already engaged shadow. The lethal force of wrought light was strained off on effortless reflex. Then the stunning, stark horror that served warning, too late: as a power embedded within the assault burst through his defenses unblunted. Spiraled energies pierced through his wards in a half twist, and wrapped his exposed flesh like hot wire.
Arithon screamed. Wrenched out of mental alignment, he was slammed to his knees by a blistering influx of agony. His torment was not born of blinding light, nor charring heat, but the cleaving bite of spellcraft aligned with devastating thrust to cause harm. The construct was not random. Its design had been specifically tempered to access the range of his shortfalls. In one stabbing thrust, weeks past, at Ithamon, the Mistwraith had mapped out this strategically tailored attack.
Beyond help, the shocked victim discerned his misjudgment. Lysaer's light bolt had been no more than the carrier to enact Desh-thiere's vengeful malice.
Arithon fought, wrung breathless as the jagging, red coils of the curse closed over him, mind, heart, and spirit. His banishing wards were deflected straight back at him. He dodged, and encountered the vibration of Name, his own image the raised snare to entrap him. The Mistwraith's incursion ripped viciously inward. He felt its prongs pierce his inviolate core and invade, threading an inextricable geas of compulsion: for as long as he held to life and breath, he would seek to destroy his half brother. Arithon contested each coil of the pattern. His countermeasures met defeat. All his raised barriers crumbled. As a whole being, he could not be divided against himself. Yet to thwart Desh-thiere, he must try. A string of laid snares anticipated, then blocked his attempt to cut away the taint entwined with his essence. The Mistwraith had learned guile. The innovation that once had saved Traithe from possession became most cruelly forestalled. Not even self-destruction could wrest back the firm ground for Arithon to seize back his will and stay free.
Rathain's prince sensed the moment as his doom settled over him. Conquered from within as though self-betrayed, he set his last resource to mitigate a defeat that lay beyond reach of salvage. As Desh-thiere's core hatred supplanted his will, he applied his whole being to thwart its directive and to resist its rank clamor for bloodshed. The backwash of shed energies hurled down the merchants. They died where they fell at his feet. Arithon snatched up his dropped sword. Even as the Mistwraith's curse wakened the scalding desire to kill, he stretched ingenuity to maintain his denial. Mage-trained to full mastery, he knew how to govern the templates of mind and emotion. Destructive thoughts could be bent onto tangents. The venom of murderous intent could be stalled, outwilled through doubleblind logic and feint. Arithon chose a strategic retreat and unleashed his power of darkness over Etarra. Against that apparent capitulation, he thrust the sealed rune of limitation. Shadow descended, dense enough to blinder his enemies' vision, but reined short of the freezing blanket that might inflict lethal harm.
A shuddering half instant of recoil ensued, as the curse slackened slightly, appeased by his hedging subterfuge. Arithon snatched back initiative and took flight. Lashed to blind pain, he could do nothing else but impel himself from Lysaer's presence.
His crazed dash to the stables, the soft warmth of his horse, then his ill-starred effort to release the clan children enslaved by the knackers - the reliving passed in a blur of ripped motion and noise. Holding the curse's directive at bay was like treading live coals, possible if he kept moving. If he thought about anything else, the raging urge to slay Lysaer could be checked and redirected into manageable bounds.
Arithon had schooled for long years at Rauven to instill the discipline required by grand conjury. That endowment alone let him find Etarra's gate. He managed to ride out, through a scattered lack of planning. Distance bought him a measure of reprieve. The curse lost full strength the farther he moved away from Lysaer's proximity.
He chose the north road because he had been driven, and because south, there lay only Ithamon . . .
Early Spring 5670
Tal Quorin
The copper brown bed of last au
tumn's beech leaves felt no less damp in the reliving invoked by the Maze of Davien. Once again, Arithon s'Ffalenn poised on bent knee under the dappling gold of spring sunlight. On that past day, a hawk had flown, crying, and he had been chilled through and shivering. Just as before, he spoke the oath that affirmed him as sanctioned crown prince. 'I pledge myself, body, mind, and heart to serve Rathain, to guard, to hold unified, and to deliver justice according to Ath's law. If the land knows peace, I preserve her; war, I defend. Through hardship, famine, or plague, I suffer no less than my sworn companions. In war, peace, and strife, I bind myself to the charter of the land, as given by the Fellowship of Seven. Strike me dead should I fail to uphold for all people the rights stated therein. Dharkaron witness.'
A binding promise made to a kingdom whose honesty he would see broken; he was curse-flawed. Worse loomed than dishonor. Ahead, he would face the betrayal of self. The legacy of his mage-trained talent must pitch him into inevitable conflict under the shadow of coming war. Imprisoned in vision, he felt reviled, never so aware of the caithdein standing guard at his back, the naked length of Alithiel unsheathed in a trusting and steadfast hand.
The Maze of Davien showed no mercy, in hindsight. This hour's raw grief tasted bitter as poison, with suffering and bloodshed looming; a stamped record of atrocity unsoftened by years, that far exceeded the past's nerve-wound mantle of unformed, anxious foreboding.
Wracked in mind, sore of heart, the invested prince who lived then reenacted his royal blessing over each clansman's offered pledge of sword or dagger. On his feet in Kewar Tunnel, his tears of remorse ran unchecked, while in Deshir's greenwood, under stainless spring sunshine, the ancient ritual ended. The last weapon was duly returned.
In reliving, Rathain's crown prince arose. He received back the cold grip of his Paravian blade from Steiven s'Valerient's hand.
'My first act,' he said then, 'will be the rending of that oath.' For in fact, on that hour, he still planned to abandon the burdensome legacy of his ancestry. No imaginable cause might justify the peril of risking his mage talents to the compulsion of Desh-thiere's curse. The ethical simplicity of that past resolve now returned to haunt him unbearably. Then, Arithon could not bear to meet Earl Steiven's eyes, dead set as he was to enact the part of the craven, leaving Deshir's clans with the lesser betrayal of facing entrenched feud with Etarra. War and death, please Ath! An ugly enough future, but one kept untainted by the warped evil ruled by the Mistwraith's design. Let his name be accursed by man, woman, and child, before he risked a whole people to usage as the weapon of geas-bent enmity.
S'Ffalenn compassion could weep for the doomed; yet s'Ahelas farsight and the obligations of crown oath demanded one last step. Arithon would shoulder the task of scrying the future to test his decision for surety.
In Kewar, his beloved marked his care for integrity. Wrapped under sealed wards, Elaira endured in silenced misery as she matched the bias of actualized circumstance with the wrenching confession Arithon had once cast at her feet in the night solace of a tropical greenwood. He had made passing mention of a cast augury. Now, she saw the enactment revealed, and the shock of full clarity harrowed her.
Rathain's invested crown prince slipped away from his oathtaking. As a master of magecraft, the most assiduous trial he could bring to bear upon his planned course to break faith would be the prescient vision born out of a tienelle trance. Dangerous work, since the narcotic herb used to open the mind was also a fatal poison.
In solitude, standing on unwarded ground, the perils that Arithon shouldered entailed a frightful array of sharp risk.
Touched by shrinking terror, Elaira realized too late that the vigil she kept might leave her overfaced. Nor was Arithon scatheless. She tasted his fear, felt the clammy kiss of sweat at his temples. Firsthand, she experienced his ironclad resolve as he forced his mind steady, then packed the stone pipe he had filched from the stores in Sethvir's satchel. One with her beloved, Elaira partnered that bleak night's forecast, an agonized search through alternate futures that traversed the landscape of nightmare. She saw death, and death again, horrific visions of unrequited human suffering. The shock did not lessen, for the thousand desecrations of the body brought down untimely by weapons of war. With Arithon, weeping, she witnessed atrocity, repeated with brutal invention, as each thread of happenstance revealed Deshir's clans massacred to the last man. And not only men, but children, young boys, cut down by steel and arrow, and worse: the executioner's clotted blade in the packed public square in Etarra.
Elaira understood, as never before, the net of dilemma that had closed down on that lonely night in the glen of a northland forest. Arithon had languished, his sensitized nerves unstrung, against the trunk of an ancient oak. No ghostly twist of imaging had prepared for the scale of disaster unveiled by his augury. He had waited in forced patience, while the lingering aftertides of drug-induced vision subsided. In strict solitude, he sifted the spurts of hazed fantasy from the unpleasant bones of hard evidence. He could still run, leaving Steiven's staunch clansmen to die. Or he could stay, wield his talent in killing defense, and face the brazen risk of Desh-thiere's curse. Perhaps, given no unseen turn of ill fortune, he might keep a third of them living . . .
The toll of mute slain would burden his conscience, whichever choice he enacted.
In the night clearing, while grief and dire poisons cramped his wracked body with sickness, Elaira shared Arithon's heartrending vigil. She felt every shiver course through him, as he agonized over his future.. This was not Karthan, where restored peace could be bought through the healing of salt-ravaged fields. Here, in Athera, the burdens of crown oath were most likely to entangle his integrity with the direct violation of killing. Desh-thiere's curse forged that high probability into near-devastating certainty. Etarra's armed host would be marching already. Prince, or mage, which facet of self to betray? And what savage reckoning would remain to be paid on a field ruled by feud, if the flaw in his being wrought by enspelled vengeance overwhelmed his restraint and claimed triumph?
The safest course, damnably, was to tuck tail and run. Self-contempt seemed cheap coin to deter the Mistwraith's unclean design. Leave Deshir, reject royal heritage, and never look back, and he might escape being the string-puppet tool to wreak murder upon a blood kinsman.
Yet whether Arithon could have cast off his doom, if he might have seized one last opening to reshape the coil that bound him, his birth-born legacy of compassion undid him. The reliving unspooled with damning, bright clarity and exposed the moment the snare had snapped shut.
Again, young Jieret s'Valerient invaded his solitude, and triggered the fateful precognizance: the vivid image of Deshir's women and girls lying slaughtered in the moss by Tal Quorin.
Ath, oh Ath!' Elaira gasped, stormed and shattered by rending pity. 'Cry mercy, beloved, you could not let them go!' The brutal exposure of Arithon's trial broke her heart and her mind, the grievous awareness lent bitter edge, since the tragedy he would have stayed to avert already lay beyond salvage. The stark echo of her pain, matched to his, remained warded. Nor was the past walked in lockstep with Arithon's in any one facet still mutable. Tal Quorin's massacre must be reenacted. The powers of the maze would spin out the events with detailed and hideous ferocity. Arithon was foredoomed to feel each death singly, retracing the course of his footsteps.
Trapped in the cognizant, shocked mind of the present, Arithon relived the hour he had weighed the untenable horror of girls and women, torn bloody and violated. He could not turn aside. Just as he had been unable to suffer the widows left weeping in Karthan, he took willful charge. He would stay on to brave every vile consequence, and stand to Deshir's defense.
Arithon s'Ffalenn sustained the nerve-stripping distress. He stepped forward, consumed by the colossal irony, that his sacrifice would be made futile. At Merior he had spoken his inadequate summary, a trusted confidence given to Elaira as he struggled to reconcile the damning pain of the aftermath: 'More than two hundred clansmen surv
ived the fight at Tal Quorin. But there is no settlement to be found in such victory. I can't sort past the deaths and the bloodshed to say if their lives matched the cost.'
Alone in Kewar Tunnel, he would plumb the vested truth of that statement: he would know in full measure the savage impact of the choice he had taken, the torment and loss of eight thousand dead played through on his living flesh.
'Cry mercy,' Elaira whispered. She choked down the sympathy that urged her to let down her barriers. To watch was unbearable, a violation of all of a man's guarded privacy. Yet in love, for survival, she must hold fast. Stilled to awestruck silence, she watched Arithon measure the abyss and muster the rags of his courage.
Eyes shut, he trembled. Sweat sprang and rolled down his temples. This is not punishment, but knowledge of what a man, a woman, a child have all borne,' he entreated in ragged unsteadiness. In anguished effort to brace up his nerve, he exhorted in the musical cadence of Paravian, 'Anient fferet i on arith,' the broken phrase meaning, 'All action must beget consequence.'
At Tal Quorin, his hand had shaped spells that killed. He had wielded a sword and done murder. Fear strangled resolve, for the reckoning the maze would mete out, a lash to inflame the already bleeding wound of s'Ffalenn conscience. Compassion could never be reconciled with suffering. Reluctance became weakness that threatened to unman him, and for one dire moment, he faltered.
The embedded power of the maze reacted.
Arithon's form shuddered, shimmered, lost definition at the edges. Through a second of suspension, Elaira beheld his fractured being, split off into alternate images: the past self, which had no other choice but move forward, and the present, ripped out of itself by remorse, that shrank back from owning the burden of an unbearable destiny.
Koriani awareness awoke the shrill instinct of danger. Elaira fought panic, well aware that such separation must open Arithon's defenses. Divided against himself, he would face annihilation. Anything less than whole being would rend his awareness into fragments that could not sustain breathing life. He would perish, tormented as his ancestor Kamridian, first condemned, and then shredded apart by the poisoned storm of his self-hatred.
