Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  ‘You remember that much?’ Jieret cast down the stick as the pot spat steam and started to boil.

  ‘Not me.’ Braggen shrugged. ‘My old uncle sat with his Grace after the fight at Tal Quorin. That’s where he said he picked up his best collection of insults.’ His teeth flashed and vanished into shadow as he rose. ‘I’ll leave you like the hawk set to brood on the snake. Don’t expect you’re not going to get bitten.’

  Jieret gave back a choked snort of laughter. ‘Ath grant you’re wrong. If not, you owe me a fox tail as fine as the ones Theirid ties in his clan braid.’

  Caught aback, Braggen poised in the cleft where the wind shrilled and sighed between boulders. ‘You’d wear that?’

  ‘Me?’ Appalled, Jieret fumbled the tied packets of herbs borrowed from Arithon’s saddle pack. ‘Sithaer’s howling furies, no. I promised I’d bring one for Jeynsa.’

  ‘Well, she’ll need more than fox tails to fill your boots, brother.’ Despite his gruff humor, the worry leaked through as Braggen hitched his strapping bulk through the exit. ‘Be sure you make time to sleep for yourself. We don’t need you thickheaded and stupid on the hour we bearbait that daisy-faced godling’s new army.’

  * * *

  Restored to safe solitude, Jieret kept his hands busy, nursing his small clutch of charcoal. He boiled the crusted rags of old bandages, then soaked them in an infusion of sweet herbs and tallow soap. He swabbed out the dirt ingrained in chapped skin, bathed and untangled the unkempt black hair. Nor did he stop there, but turned back the bearskin and cleansed everything else not strapped in dressings or poultices. Last of all, he honed his knife and gently commenced on the neglected tasks of shaving and trimming.

  ‘Ath’s blinding glory!’ Theirid’s awed comment sniped from the shadows. ‘Were his Grace wakeful, he’d have some choice thing to say, if not use that wee blade to gut you.’

  Jieret whirled face about, the raised steel in his hand no less than rock steady for his startlement. ‘Damn you, I know that. Do you always have to sneak up on a man like you’re hunting?’

  Indistinct in the darkness fronting the entry, Theirid shrugged. ‘Just checking up. Didn’t think I’d catch you playing nursemaid.’

  The Earl of the North resettled himself, exasperation and challenge in the set of his shoulders as he clipped another shoulder-length lock of dark hair. ‘He can’t do this himself without wetting the fresh dressings I’ve set on his injured hand. Nor can he very well wash his own clothes when we have to be moving by dawn.’ Jieret’s gray hazel eyes snagged the reflected flash off of the steel’s wicked gleam. ‘Look there.’ He nodded to an unkempt pile of cloth, stitched through its grime with the odd satin facing, and the crimped gleam of abused silver ribbon. ‘You’re assigned, for impertinence. Take the good balsam soap. There’s a break in the ice at the verge of the river and no lack of stones to pound laundry.’

  Theirid opened his mouth, cut off from protest by his clan chieftain’s snap of authority. ‘His Grace kept us alive at Tal Quorin. His works since that day have come to spare every one of Tysan’s clan bloodlines. We’ll wash his soiled shirts, and resharpen his knives, and take pride in the hour we die for him!’

  ‘Which won’t ease your hurt in the least,’ Theirid said, touched by impulse and wounding sympathy. He bent without rancor, his stalker’s quiet displaced as he scooped up the ruckle of clothing. ‘You’re dreading the moment you’ll send his Grace on, with no man at his shoulder to guard him.’

  Jieret’s knife jerked, rinsed bloody red by the embers. ‘Fiends plague, man! Your stalking ways are quite wretched enough without picking fights with my state of mind.’

  ‘Companion, Caithdein,’ Theirid rebuked as he shouldered his load and edged toward the recess to depart. ‘You don’t stand by yourself. Each of us feels the same way.’

  Then Theirid was gone, with no snatched chance for rejoinder to lighten the ache that rode on the heels of cold truth. Clansmen by nature did not indulge grief; attachments to sentiment too often abraded the inborn will to survive. Ruggedly stoic, Earl Jieret resumed his quiet work. For a brief, settled interval, rare for its intimacy, he applied his steady knife and large hands to barbering the damp strands of Prince Arithon’s hair.

  Peace reigned for an hour, gentled by the popping whistle of hot embers and the thrumming refrain of the winds. Jieret finished his trimming, wiped and sheathed his fine knife. While the stars above Daon Ramon wheeled and crossed a meridian masked under snowstorm at midnight, he leaned forward to discard the stray clippings in the fire.

  ‘Save those, they’ll be needed.’ The acid instruction arose from the sleeper arranged in the bearskin.

  Jieret jerked, startled, now watched by green eyes alert with disturbing lucidity. ‘You shouldn’t be wakeful. I gave you a dose of valerian strong enough to drop a young horse for a gelding.’

  Arithon pushed to sit up, discovered his flesh naked, and swore with inventive irritation. He bundled his bare shoulders in cinnamon fur, then jackknifed his torso erect against the smoothed sandstone behind him. ‘Mage training taught how to transmute certain poisons. In the case of soporifics, the response can become ingrained reflex.’ Returned to the awkward subject of clippings, he added, ‘You should mask those in silk.’

  ‘You weren’t conscious,’ Jieret insisted, emphatically unwilling to be sidetracked as he folded the loose hair into a rag and weighted the packet under a rock. ‘How much should I worry?’ Dakar had once warned that the spurious resurgence of Arithon’s talent might be provoked by Desh-thiere’s curse.

  ‘Always.’ That kernel of honesty delivered, Arithon refused elaboration, but probed the new wrapping over a hand that certainly pained him like wildfire. ‘Thank you,’ he said through the ghost of a wince. ‘I see you’ve been thorough. Maybe this time the injury can be given the chance to close over.’

  No complaint, for the heartache of his spoiled music; just acceptance flat and hammered as lead, that spurred Jieret’s concern worse than anything. Unswerving despite the smooth effort of evasion, he pressed, ‘You know Lysaer’s marching.’

  The affirmation, too calm, ‘I feel him. Northwest of here, and pressing ever closer as we speak.’

  ‘Moving?’ Jieret probed the shadowed, green eyes, alarmed as he sought the first warning of trouble. ‘Not at night, surely?’

  ‘Do you want reassurance?’ Arithon as always cut past surface meaning, his head tipped to wearied rest against rippled striations of sandstone. ‘We’re not talking good judgment, but the drive of a curse that won’t rest until one of us crosses Fate’s Wheel.’ An infinitesimal, strained pause, filled by the pop of an ember. A flurry of small sparks rode the draft in gyration, then snuffed into smothering gloom. ‘You can’t trust my intentions. I daresay that’s why you’re holding my sword and every last stitch of my clothing?’

  Unable to soften that self-wounding analysis, Jieret bristled. ‘You don’t need your sword while mine’s here to guard you, and your clothes, I might add, were offensive. A Companion’s at the riverside, washing them as we speak.’

  But the stakes were driven too high and too deep to retreat for a kindly meant platitude. ‘Jieret, Caolle died because all the safeguards broke down.’ Arithon’s left hand clamped taut in the bearskin, the surreal, refined beauty of each rigid finger demarked by the hard gleam of bone through the skin. ‘Don’t ask me to take the same risks with your life! Here and now, I’m going to refuse them.’

  ‘What will you do, then? Ride out buck naked? Let the Mistwraith’s curse take you, alone against Lysaer’s Alliance?’ Jieret grinned. ‘I don’t think so. To leave this grotto, you’d first have to kill me. If you managed that much without use of your sword hand, you’re a fool. Your style with a main gauche cannot defeat the best fighting blood of my war band.’

  A dangerous, sheared glitter awoke in green eyes. ‘Jieret. Don’t provoke me. Desh-thiere’s curse isn’t malleable.’ As though each word was drawn, white-hot, from a forge flame, Arithon
forced through the finish. ‘When you threaten to stand between me and my half brother, you make yourself into a nameless obstacle that exists to be struck down. With Lysaer this close, I can hold self-restraint for only so long. Don’t spark the fell fire that burns me.’

  Jieret found the good grace to break that locked stare first. Though his instinct, his love, and the yoke of ancestral duty rebelled from the pitiless fact, he affirmed the unpleasant necessity. ‘I don’t disagree. You will ride alone. Our task is to buy you the distance you need to stay sane as you bolt for the mountains.’

  Some of the cruel tension left Arithon then. Under the snugged bearskin, his shoulders eased slightly. While the wind off the barrens fluttered the failing flame of the lamp, the rare, wry smile reserved for close friends turned the firm line of his mouth. ‘I forget, you’re not Dakar, but Steiven’s grown son, with Dania’s sharp mind to grasp nuance. This much you can trust, on my word as your crown prince. Against pride, against preference, I must accept the opening for survival you offer. You’ll have my cooperation. Even if I wasn’t bound by a blood oath to the Fellowship Sorcerers, Caolle’s life left a debt I will honor. While in my right mind, I won’t squander the s’Ffalenn lineage he spared to restore a crown presence in Rathain.’

  The released surge of hope blazed too blindingly bright. Jieret shut his eyes to stem his shocked tears of relief. ‘Thank you for that promise. Might I ask, will you marry?’ The plea was ripe folly, an impulse regretted as he braced for a scalding rebuttal.

  But the letdown came gentle from Arithon, this night; as ominous an admission, that this meeting between friends might very well be the last. ‘Fionn Areth’s ill usage at Jaelot should show you my reason why not.’

  The chill in that moment bit to the bone, breathed in through the cleft off the winter white hills, where Paravians had not danced for five centuries; and perhaps, never would, in the course of an unstable future. Jieret laced chapped knuckles over his bent knee, resigned to his prince’s harsh reasoning. Unthinkable, the prospect that a blood s’Ffalenn heir might be taken and used as the pawn of political expedience. For as long as Desh-thiere’s curse fed the fervor of townbred hatreds, no babe born of Torbrand’s lineage could grow to adulthood in safety. Fionn Areth’s chance likeness had proved beyond doubt: Arithon of Rathain had too many enemies seeking just such sure leverage to entrap him.

  ‘Any child of yours could invoke Fellowship protection,’ Jieret burst out as, again, his raw longing outpaced prudent thought.

  ‘With his fate proscribed, as a virtual prisoner!’ Since his nakedness canceled the grace of retreat, Arithon used rage to buy distance. ‘I’ll have no get of mine entangled by the dictates of kingship and destiny. Not for a land torn to arms by the Mistwaith’s cursed war, not even for the needs of the Sorcerers’ compact, to save what remains of the order the Betrayer’s rebellion pulled down.’

  In the dim, enclosed grotto, frozen silence remained, a misery beyond the suffering imposed by the brutality of the season. Painted in the carmine glow thrown off the embers, the caithdein of Rathain faced his prince. ‘Even so. Or else tomorrow our shed blood will come to mean nothing.’

  ‘Ath Creator show mercy, Jieret!’ Raked on the exposed nerve of his helplessness, Arithon gave back his very self. ‘I’m a man, heart and mind, not a vessel begotten to reseed the Fellowship’s tailor-made bloodline. If I ever breed heirs, they will grow up in love. Sons or daughters, I would see them raised by their mother, cherished and protected by my right arm, and the guaranteed trust of my sanity.’

  ‘Then you’ll answer to Jeynsa,’ Jieret flared, as the bared vulnerability of that naked confidence backlashed against his sworn duty to Rathain. ‘Don’t expect my apology, for hoping her children won’t have to suffer their whole lives under threat of persecution by headhunters.’

  But Arithon rejected argument, the flash burn of his fury broken to nettled impatience. ‘My clothes will stay wet at least until dawn? Then we have that long to design precise tactics. I won’t see you martyred. Not while there’s one chance to foil the Alliance’s field troops and keep you and your war band alive.’

  Caught openmouthed, his adrenaline raised for a murderous row, Jieret felt as though a huge hand slapped the air clean out of his chest. From any other man, that brash-handed statement would have been needling arrogance.

  Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn glared back from wrapped fur, his fox features stamped by razor-edged exasperation.

  Jieret quashed the piqued reflex to scoff in disbelief. He dragged in a deep breath; cooled his boiling temper. Repossessed of his caithdein’s dignity, he regarded his prince long enough to unravel the lacerating entreaty twisted through the coils of s’Ffalenn conscience. He shook his head, aching. ‘Caolle died, believe me, I know how that hurts.’

  Arithon turned his face, the scraped shreds of his anguish buried behind the left fist still clenched in a wadded bastion of damp bearskin. ‘You aren’t listening.’

  Chilled to a stalker’s caution, Jieret tested the unspoken long shot. ‘You have a plan that can save us, and still mire the Alliance advance long enough to win your clean escape?’

  Still bent away, the royal profile of his ancestors all struck angles against the encroaching dark, Arithon shivered. As though weariness and uncertainty lashed a small storm through his flesh, he said, ‘One chance. Not a good one. But worth giving serious thought.’

  His burden of pain stayed written in silence, that too many lives had been sacrificed since the hour he had given his crown oath in Strakewood. Another friend’s loss would not be endured without willful protest and fight. While the keening draw of air through hot embers scribed the midnight quiet, Jieret waited. The depths of this quandary lay outside his experience. He had no Fellowship Sorcerer at hand, to ask if his prince’s reticence was straight fear, or how much was provoked by berserker’s rage, that would cast away prudence before bending pride to embrace the cold wall of futility. Touched by a prickling stir of unease, he kept a cast-iron grip on his patience.

  Tradition bound them. Caithdeinen gave their lives in the testing of princes, if no other means lay at hand.

  Nor was Arithon sanguine, as he wrestled a glaring reluctance to finish. ‘You are gifted with Sight. That implies birth-born talent.’ The level, green eyes lifted, the dread in them unflinching. ‘We might try to waken that latent potential. If we can, I haven’t forgotten my training. A few simple cantrips my grandfather taught me might serve to offset the Alliance advantage of numbers.’

  ‘Wield sorcery? Me?’ Jieret shot to his feet, slammed his head on low rock, and swore as the pain whirled him dizzy.

  ‘For your life, and the safeguard of your war band,’ said Arithon, no whit complaisant, but cornered by grief, that a friend must weigh such a wild-card decision. His stripped apprehension matched the horror in the red-bearded chieftain who towered over him; who, as a boy of eleven years, had been bound by a sorcerer’s oath to be spared from the slaughter at Tal Quorin. Twice since that day, he had stood down the brunt of the Mistwraith’s possession, when Desh-thiere’s curse had overwhelmed his prince.

  The passage of time had not loosened that bonding. To the grown man, the sovereign prince gave his honesty, delivered with personal care and sincerity few spirits alive ever witnessed. ‘No choice to make lightly. If we try this, and by sheer courage we prevail, the end play will still carry terrible risks. Not least, you could find yourself burned for black spellcraft on some crown examiner’s pile of faggots. I might be oathbound to Asandir to use every means to survive. But Dharkaron stand witness, in this, I can’t speak as your crown prince. First, as my friend, you would have to be willing. I won’t undertake the first step of initiation without your wholehearted consent.’

  Jieret swallowed, resisting the battlefield impulse to suck on a pebble to dampen a mouth dry with fear. He looked at his hands, well taught by Caolle to wield honest steel, and thickened with callus from rough, outdoor living. ‘It’s a difficult service I hav
e of you, prince.’

  Arithon’s mouth flexed with the rueful trace of a smile. ‘You’ll recall, at the outset, I tried to avoid it.’

  But Jieret found no refuge in banter. A practical man who respected his own limits, his courage was defined by self-confidence. At home in the wilds that framed his domain, he towered like rooted oak, unbowed by grief or adversity. The sure carriage and maturity earned through a lifetime of sound leadership came undone in that moment. Dreadful uncertainty creased new lines in his windburned face, while a gust through the defile fanned the gray streaks at his temples. Hung on the cusp of grave responsibility and a hope strung on madness and folly, he measured the chasm that yawned at his feet.

  He must not tread the abyss without thought, though at Traithe’s behest, in behalf of this prince, he had experienced arcane powers once before. ‘I don’t regret any day in your company. On the contrary. You’ve always done right by my trust. Do you have any sureties to offer me?’

  ‘None at all.’ Arithon absorbed the recoil that shocked through the glance held between them. ‘To awaken your talents, we would first invoke chaos. Break down the mental patterns of resistance, lose the ties to your flesh, until you had no equilibrium left to perceive without taking charge of your talent. True Sight is the conscious landscape of dream. An awareness read by the inward eye, not the dense illusion that governs the outer. You would be cast adrift to unriddle the mysteries. All power moves through the higher vibrations, past reach of the physical senses. But the lowest of frequencies by their physical nature always invoke the higher harmonics. I’d give you my music to guide you.’

  A ribbon of sweat licked down Jieret’s neck. ‘Unlike my father, I haven’t been shown the day and the hour of my death.’ He braced through a moment of wrenching uncertainty, then made his resolve with the same rugged character that had sustained the hard years of his chieftainship. ‘I will shoulder the risk for the lives of my war band, and for my daughter, Jeynsa. Let her not swear her caithdein’s oath to Rathain ahead of her twentieth birthday.’