by Janny Wurts
To a swordless man who harbored an extreme aversion for being touched, the offer meant safety. Korendir stepped back. He perched upon the far cushion of the divan, propped the weapon at his elbow, and tried to peel back the mail. The cuff proved too snug and the setback left him strained. He needed to strip off the armor, and that could not be accomplished without staining a surcoat that at all costs must be returned.
The surly glance he directed toward Ithariel made her laugh in genuine delight. She might have restored his worn tunic, yet chose not to on feminine principle. If he wished to stand on pride, let him continue on penalty of extreme inconvenience. While Korendir slipped the cloak fastenings and wrestled one-handed with laces, she seated herself on his far side, the sword like a warning between.
Her bribe of fine velvets presently lay discarded on the floor. Shimmering dwarf-mail joined them, jingling unceremoniously in a heap that left the fabric crushed flat with wet. Korendir wormed free of the linen gambeson beneath, then shredded the quilted sleeve to use for bandaging. Seeing he would wrap his hurt in damp rags without doctoring, Ithariel fetched him the ewer of water and an herb paste from her chest for a poultice.
Korendir fought back apprehension as she resumed her place beyond the sword. Stripped to the waist, with the brand and the whip marks from the Mhurgai and all of the wounds from past forays written in scars on his flesh, he felt the enchantress's scrutiny like an unwanted physical caress.
"You've led a harsh existence," she observed critically.
Korendir knotted the linen with a savagery held back from his speech. "If you're sorry, don't burden me further."
Absorbed and edgy, his bronze hair left sleeked by the rain, Korendir finished his field bandage. While his attention was marred by the discomfort of his wound, Ithariel stole the interval for study. Her findings startled her. Absent was the reckless ego of the mercenary adventurer she had pictured. In their place, the enchantress read intelligence, sensitivity, and yearning overlaid by desperate control. Though his flesh told a history of strife, nothing else about the man who named himself Whitestorm confirmed the destruction and death that shaped his trade.
As if he sensed her probe, Korendir looked up. He caught her moment of unschooled surprise, then the sharp calculation which followed. Plainly she would set her next snare to find what in the spectrum of human desires might move him.
That above everything he must keep from her. The survival of his integrity depended upon it.
A smile like a twist of bitter iron touched his lips. He owned no defense against magic; trapped without recourse, he resorted to viciousness and tried an unthinkable countermove. When her enchantments reached to pry out his inner secrets, Korendir abandoned resistance.
Ithariel attacked with every power at her disposal sharpened for a fight that never happened.
His barriers against her parted with little else but irony for warning. Backed by full measure of her White Circle powers, her consciousness flung downward into Korendir's mind far deeper than she intended. The spell that should have framed his surface thoughts to reveal what motivated his stubbornness turned like a snare against her.
Instead the conflicts which comprised the man closed like a shackle around her.
Lost beyond all self-awareness, Ithariel plunged into emotional mazes for which magic held no remedy. Lost beyond escape, she cried out; and her scream became that of a boy hammered down by the flat of a blood-crusted cutlass. . . .
* * *
Smoke scorched his nostrils; helplessly he struggled and kicked, but the hands of his enemies dragged him upright. Yapping, guttural victory cries rang in his ears as Mhurgai raiders shoved him between the shoulderblades. He skidded, weeping curses, and sprawled on a carpet sodden scarlet from the slaughter of Shan Rannok's men at arms.
The same hands that had butchered them tied him there, with silken cords torn from the draperies.
"That one's the son, yes?" snapped a swarthy man with slit eyes. He wore diamond earrings, and a robe sewn with peacock's plumes and belted with a crimson sash.
Korendir choked as a kick slammed his belly. Retching, half-killed with misery, he spat bile and found his voice. "Don't listen to what they say. I'm not. Her heir is buried behind the orchard." Another blow smashed his mouth. Through split lips he continued. "Read the stone. Says husband's firstborn. Son."
The man in the sash scowled sourly. "Listen to him, thou!"
But the raider captain was not cowed. He pressed his boot on the boy's face to crush back the words that discredited him before his overlord. "This is the heir, Lord Exalted. A bastard, to the widow's shame. We tortured a serving maid to find out."
The boy wrenched his head to one side. He coughed blood. "Delia lies."
"Not with her belly slit open and the first marshal raping her silly, she would not." The Mhurga captain grinned. "She screamed plenty, and she talked, while he spilled her soft guts round her thighs."
"She did not speak truth," said a clear woman's voice from one corner. An aged lady sat there, with straight features and a straighter back, and eyes that stared only ahead. She was blind. "The boy you abuse is no bastard of mine, but a fosterling."
Korendir groaned. He tried weakly to push to his feet, but the seamen who had beaten him pinioned his wrists.
The man with the crimson sash regarded the lady and smiled. "Bastard or not, pretty grandmother, we're going to make him watch. Thine heir must learn what thy husband would not: Mhurgai never fail to exact reprisal for attacks upon our homeland."
Korendir screamed in animal rage and tried to rise from the floor. His captors called more men to hold him, and though he closed his eyes and threw up and bit the fingers which forced his bleeding head straight, still he failed to escape.
The sounds of shredding cloth and the screams of the widow who had raised him tore into his ears and brought madness. . . .
Madness which had no ending, only memories like doors that opened on unmitigated horror.
* * *
Korendir's intent had been that the violence in his past would repulse the enchantress's invasion of his mind. For that he had yielded to insanity, and for that purpose only had he unleashed his recall of the obliterating defeat at Shan Rannok. But the effort backlashed, frighteningly; the event served only to wrench Ithariel's spellcraft from control. Overwhelmed, unable to separate herself from her victim's awareness, she became helplessly entangled in memories that savaged her like nightmares. . . .
* * *
Korendir was ten. He punched a rough boy who called the lady street names, and claimed that a stablehand was her lover, his father, and his birth a shame that a lady's charitable ways could never absolve. The brute said this of the widow, faded to gentleness by her sorrows, who grew flowers in a hothouse for the grave of her departed husband; the same lord who left to fight Mhurgai and returned to Shan Rannok within a sack, in pieces.
While Korendir and his tormentor pummelled each other with brute determination, the enspelled spark of consciousness that was Ithariel twisted this way and that, blind as a fish in a net. She lashed out and evaded the episode but did not recover herself.
Instead she reeled on to another place of black leaves and moonlight; felt his hand on a knife, while hot blood coursed in a gush that meant death over his knuckles that must not shake. The victim beneath the blade was a gut-wounded farmer whose family would not see him home from the woods. Three daughters named Mallie, Nessie, and Tesh; and Korendir's tearing anguish and awe of a dead man's courage that humbled him helplessly to tears. He could not do as Vwern, not ever in life risk his safety with pretty young children dependent. . . .
And yet he killed; fast and ugly, mostly, because he could not endure to witness pain.
The Mhurgai had scarred him that way: the widow who had raised him, tormented to her death in old age, forced by an evil sea raider to partner an act shared only in love with her husband. And then that same act repeated, with the blade of a Mhurga knife. Her screams and her
agony, and the flames and the screams of ten thousand warriors tortured Korendir's days, unrelenting. Because suffering itself was unthinkable; thumbless, tongueless slaves and babies feeding vultures on battlements were unthinkable, and so the Datha burned. Perhaps the widows who survived after conquest might raise sons who would never again inflict atrocities upon others.
The sequence of memories seemed unending and every one of them lacerated.
A duke defied for the sake of an infant in peril; another, a tavern girl with large hands he had left, because she had tempted him with sweet innocence and a trust that made him sick with the resurgence of fear. Terror founded the worst of his faults, made him flee to fight wereleopards. Because death by fey killers alone in the dark was easier, easier, than loving a girl without any wall to defend her.
There were no safe havens, no crannies of conscience that did not sting. Carralin died in his bed, in his absence, her hopes ripped out with her throat. Korendir had survived the brother's vengeance in the caves of Ellgol, because in pitting his sword against wereleopards, he did not have to think; each cat slain meant one more frightened girl might be spared.
Ithariel sampled the bitterness, the futile grief, and every step made in purest terror. She shared Korendir's split knuckles as he dressed gray granite into blocks for the bastions at Whitestorm. She lived his dreams, and could not endure them. Left no awareness beyond an agonized instinct to flee, she doubled back to seek harbor in the eddyless oblivion of the womb.
There, tucked like a frightened rabbit in the heart of a half-formed fetus, she remembered her one true name.
Control returned to her scourged and battered spirit. Her magic was blunted with weariness, and drained spells clung like cobwebs over her innermind. Yet before she engaged the sequence that would key her back to consciousness, her detached enchantress's intuition uncovered a thing unknown to the man himself.
She saw a forgotten place from his infancy, bleak with smoke and battle and the shadowed, hideous shapes of creatures never born upon Aerith. There a man in bleeding armor handed an infant wrapped in blankets to a servant poised by a postern.
"Take him, and swear to me, swear! Never tell anyone who his parents are. If you do, that knowledge will bring his death."
The servant reached out, weeping as though his heart would break. And as the father handed over the bundle that wrapped his son, his face showed briefly by lantern light. Gray eyes, he had, and russet hair; Ithariel saw the device on his surcoat, and recognized at once who he was.
Then the man stepped back into darkness. "Go," he said gruffly to the servant. "Keep faith, and may the blessing of my gratitude reward you for as long as our lives may last."
XVII. Majaxin's Revenge
Ithariel fought through exhaustion and found the spark of conscious will needed to disperse her misfired spell. She opened her eyes to the chamber she had always known as home, but which would never again seem the same.
Her eyes streamed tears. The pins had somehow slipped from her hair, and the russet length of her braid unwound itself over her back. She had sought the key to a man's will, and instead, become heir to suffering which shattered peace. Comfort did not exist to ease the scars of such experience; the memory could only be abided.
She wondered whether she would scream, as Korendir continually feared he might, when the nightmares broke her dreams as she slept.
Her shoulders shook with emotions she could not escape. Never until now had she guessed how perfectly suited this adventurer was for the task she had chosen him to undertake. The irony cut that she might have spared herself pain and asked openly, and won his willing assistance. Now simplicity became complicated by the haunted turn of mind that made him stubborn; also, though he could not know, by the stolen secret of his paternity.
Ithariel of the White Circle wept, having tasted his measure of despair.
That moment, she noticed the hands that steadied her; their warmth cradled her back and one pearl-draped, silk-clad shoulder. At some point, the black sword had gone; he had set it aside to rise and stand by her. She looked up into eyes that mirrored all the horrors of hell, and in them found a compassion that against all credibility still endured.
The shock of discovery undid her; in all the Kingdoms of Aerith, he alone could count her sorrows, both those newly inherited, and ones of her past she had summoned him in hope to absolve. Ithariel bent her head and collapsed, tear-blind against the hollow of his throat. "Cruel man, what have you done?"
His arms moved, folded her into an embrace that promised the patience of ages. "Compounded an error of judgment, it would seem." He worked a twist from her braid and smoothed down the loosened ends. "I intended no worse than to keep your spells from my mind."
Not to have forced her to share every waking horror he had meticulously kept hidden from every man, Ithariel knew too well. She had seen behind his reserve; his present calm was possible only because he had nothing in him left to hide. She had sounded his depths and partaken of the sick fear that drove him repeatedly into risk. Limp against him, her cheek pressed to scars left by swordcuts and slave whips, she listened to the beat of his heart. Korendir's hands on her back were steadier by far than his nerves.
For all that, he was first to ask his will of her. "Ithariel, return me to the duke."
His resumption of a principle that could only end by killing him bespoke something deeper than obstinacy. Disrupted from pursuit of understanding by a surprising sting of resentment, Ithariel pulled back from his touch. "Did you think I called you without purpose?"
He sat back on his heels, hands draped lightly over his thighs. The motive behind his insistence by now lay hidden as he said, "Whatever it is, I must refuse."
Ithariel rose. Hair fell dark as poured wine over her collarbones as she stepped on light feet to the candlestand. There, with her hands braced on cold iron and the eyes he could not see closed to dam a desperate flood of tears, she spoke. "Would you go without hearing my terms?" And she named them, though to do so was crudest betrayal.
"Korendir of Whitestorm, undertake a single task for me, and I will grant the capstone of tallix crystal you desire to complete your stronghold. The ward imprinted within shall hold your granite firm through battle, quake, flood, and fire, even should the sea rise up, or the sun change course from west to east. That is the prize for my contract. Will you accept?"
Ithariel sensed movement, but dared not look around. His boots clicked deliberately on stone floor, one step, two; then she heard nothing at all. She need not see his face to know the intense, ungovernable longing her offer had loosed in his heart. The capstone he had dreamed of could only be obtained through an appeal to the White Circle; a boon for which no coin might bargain. Now the vision he had labored, killed, and nearly lost his mind to achieve was being offered in reward for a single service.
The silence stretched on. The musty wool smell of tapestries hung on the eddyless air. "What do you ask of me?" Korendir's voice sounded lifeless, resigned to inevitable surrender.
Ithariel tightened her grip until wrought-iron ridged her palms and every knuckle went white. She took a breath. Candleflame shimmered in reflection over the pearls at her neck as she said, "Destroy Tir Amindel and the ward crystal you desire is yours."
Without warning his hard fingers caught her. He broke her hold and spun her around in a whirl of fallen hair. She glimpsed ice in his eyes before her last loop of braid slipped free and veiled her vision. But his rage remained evident in his speech, threatening as steel across whetstone.
"Am I a child, to be coaxed with a promise of bright stones? Destroy Tir Amindel! Gut the fairest work of architecture in all of Aerith in trade for the immortality of my miserable refuge? Lady, I have a price, but none great enough to buy that feat. Return me to the duke. Better I die for his wretched pride than perpetuate the brutality that burned Shan Rannok."
Ithariel did not answer; could not, for the measure of his sacrifice ceded to her the most deeply dishonorable choic
e.
The man she had outraged could not know this. He shook her, not gently, and her hair flung back to reveal tears that had nothing to do with the pain in him. She understood, to a fine point, precisely what she had asked; she also had her reason. "Who was the builder of Tir Amindel?" she demanded with sudden sharpness.
Taken aback, Korendir regarded her. "The sorcerer, Majaxin, if the King of Faen Hallir's archives say truly." His hands bit a shade less harshly into her flesh. "But the transgressions of major enchanters are not the concerns of a man. Let the White Circle attend to their own."
The rage in him remained; his eyes stayed guarded and his mouth turned down like a cleft chiseled into rock. He would see his dream die before he changed his mind, Ithariel understood. She had no avenue left except to appeal to his integrity, and that was going to cost.
"White Circle enchanters are the only powers on Aerith who are incapable," she said on a note of regret. She moved against the pressure of his hold and this time he let her go. "Have you ever heard of the Six Great Banes?"
Korendir backed off. He set his shoulders against the wall in a gap between paired tapestries. On his left, an armored knight addressed a lady veiled in sorrow; to his right, a hunter pursued a wounded stag. If he played the part of the deer, Ithariel reflected, the images were apt; his nature was his weakness. At some point, he had recovered the black sword. It rested in the sheath at his hip, and his hand traced the grip as if each passing minute abraded his nerves, but he was listening. "You'd better explain."
The fate of the moment was upon her; too late the enchantress wished she could back away. "What I'm about to relate is unknown beyond the White Circle."
Ithariel paced to the opposite side of the chamber, opened a drape, and stared beyond at the night sky and stars. Her voice resumed, deadened by the hangings. "You're a well-read man, but the Banes of the mages are not written out in any archive. They are spoken by rote only, and they name the perils that enchanters cannot encounter without ruin, Three reside within Aerith, and three within the otherworld of Alhaerie."
