Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon (The Wars of Light and Shadow, Book 10)

by Janny Wurts

  “The glamour on the woman might be excessive,” the scryer suggests, her temerity scorned when the Prime Matriarch laughs: “Quite the contrary! If the changeling imprint taken from Elaira fails to conceive a child suitable for my succession, Arithon’s avoidance of Vivet’s charms will seek solace in solitude and increase our chance to destroy him …”

  Fey eyes distant with vision, Siantra shudders with the echoed after-shock seeded by Vivet’s unnatural lust, and in a frightened conference with Tarens admits, “I know why she matters. The glamour frames an insidious trap, unimaginably dangerous! In spite of the storms that mire the passes, you must risk taking immediate action on Arithon’s behalf …”

  Early Winter 5923–Spring 5924

  VI. Interval

  The black chill before dawn seized the world with a cruelty to suck marrow from bone and curdle moist breath into steam, which pale plume flagged the outlander’s presence behind the smoke-house. Doubly annoyed and almost too late, Tanuay Daldari kindled a torch and collared his evasive target, whose furtive activity centred upon his reclaimed drag sledge.

  “You meant to sneak off with no one the wiser,” Vivet’s brother accosted, braced for a caustic retort.

  Drenched in sulphurous light as the oiled rags flared, the disreputable canvas coat flapped to its owner’s shrug. “The tame ass upbraiding the obstinate donkey? Don’t think I’ll be haltered to braying conformity.” Bare head a blot of spilled ink where he knelt, Arin blew on his fingers and secured the ties holding a parcel bundled in blankets: the lyranthe acquired on his venture outside since no sober household had use for the frivolous instrument. Rightfully, he refused to entrust his frail possession to the winter exodus, jumbled among Vivet’s kettles and furnishings.

  Tanuay’s resentment poisoned the air without any further word spoken.

  His irritant target refused to cringe but finished the knots and straightened up with unhurried forbearance. “Ah, don’t bother to bristle! The badgering thrust to your chin says your hate’s large enough to rub shoulders with a pariah. Why tinker with truce on the pretence?”

  “The elders sent me.” Tanuay squared off, hostile eyes gimlet-bright. “I’m meant to suggest they may have misappraised your intent to shirk Vivet’s upkeep.”

  The outlander returned stare for stare, his sardonic expectancy self-contained as a provocation. “You look stiff as the nipple on Teeah’s divine tits. The brute reflex of chill, not the blush of seduction. Tell me, what flings a hypocrite’s mealy-mouthed peace at the feet of the unregenerate?”

  The blasphemy sparked a brief, vicious pause, while Tanuay gripped rowelled nerves in rank bitterness. “Your champion is the Daldari granddame, who suggested that highly skilled music is not the pursuit of a layabout. She’s also acknowledged you could contribute to the common weal through your trapping. For the family’s benefit, therefore, I’ve brought you some fur boots, and hide mittens lined with knit wool.”

  “After all, I can’t serve Vivet’s needy child if I’m crippled from frost-bite?” But the scorched bite of satire was eased by a smile of gratitude.

  The genuine reverse threw Tanuay aback. “What perversity rides you? Why should your cavalier treatment of my sister mock even the pretence of affection?” Chiselled with reflection, the brother’s hawk glare awaited an honest reaction. When his polite question earned no response, Tanuay gouged for the viscera. “If her child is not your regrettable by-blow, what do you gain? Did Vivet never warn you? Any standing she once had became forfeit when she left for her feckless adventure down country.”

  “If she held my esteem, and if her offspring owns even a wishful tie to my name, be certain if I’d known your ways in advance, I’d have counselled her to forsake your people. What sort of family treats daughters like chattel? Or exposes a naked newborn to die? I have no shame?” The outlander’s wide-lashed regard showed astonishment. “Dare to say again that your sister deserves contempt, and I will turn my back on this festering place. Vivet may stay on as she chooses. But for kindness, I will take her child away to be raised in free air without prejudice.”

  Tanuay bridled. “Roaco will never—”

  Retort sheared his protest. “Dharkaron’s black vengeance strike your vile shamans! And any man here who cages strangers and justifies the slaughter of blameless infants. Don’t try the mistake. I will draw blood without remorse and pitch the murderous lot unrepentant to Sithaer.”

  As though the vitriolic boast was not madness, the outlander sat on the sledge. He removed his inadequate, patched summer boots, then donned the greased sheepskin replacements one foot at a time, just like any man. The shadows cast by the torch carved his slender build into a child’s, vulnerable under his cross-belted knife and the bulky, rag-market coat.

  “Don’t tangle further with Roaco,” Tanuay blurted, wrenched to unwonted pity.

  Animosity could not dismiss, quite, those exquisite hands, coarsely muffled in mittens. The foreigner had raised no unjust complaint: clearly he had proved his claim to an honourable livelihood. Ettinmere’s virtues dismissed refined music. The Daldari elders lacked the background to grasp the gifts of the minstrel thrust into their midst. Until tonight’s performance exposed that mistake, the slighted voice of an astonishing talent made Tanuay cringe with embarrassment.

  Which pinprick of conscience found no relief, except to break the frozen silence. “The shamans’ power is unspeakably dangerous. You have earned their undying fury by crossing them. Flaunt your contempt, and they have no other recourse except to destroy you.”

  The outlander fastened the wrist loops on the mittens before he responded. “I’ve found them overbearing, disrespectful of anything outside their stultified briar patch.”

  “We are not insular without reason. At your peril, continue to mock us as bumbling fools.” Tanuay recoiled upon surly dignity, his hatchet nose fogged by a huffed breath. “The shamans’ tradition protects an ancient secret with dangerous roots. Wisest for you not to trifle with matters outside your experience.”

  Restored to combative humour, the outlander’s retort shamed the weasel. “I care for nothing beyond the survival of Vivet’s infant. Since I won’t endorse murder, beware of the thicket and thorn. If Roaco’s familiars and everyone else honours my obligation, nobody needs to end up licking wounds.” Coarsely gloved, the deceptive foreigner gathered the sledge straps and harnessed them crosswise over his shoulders. “Please pass along my regard to your granddame. Tell her in nice language I’ll return before the last wagon is packed for the exodus, and by all means, go on and keep blinding yourself, post-sitting that useless torch.”

  Finished with discourse, the outlander went, his huge coat swallowed into the tar-pit of night. Tanuay frowned, flummoxed, until the gad-fly sting behind Arin’s last rejoinder struck home: the crude sledge had no socket to secure a cresset. Whoever the man had been, whatever background he came from, his mockery implied the uncanny vision possessed by initiate mages. Whether his brazen hint was made for intimidation or the cock-sure warning of frightening strength, he ventured the hazards of the mountain wilds without need to carry a light.

  Elaira aroused to Sethvir’s warm clasp on her shoulder. Fallen into tranced vision beside the snuffed candle, her cheek pillowed on an open book, she refocused under the Sorcerer’s touch, her wandered spirit eased back into breathing flesh. The pre-dawn chill in the Storlains receded, the pitch tang of balsam replaced by the fust of antique parchment and ink. Althain Tower’s mighty defences embraced her, cased in the shelved silence of historical record and the bulwarked endurance of centaur masonry. The stone tower constantly whispered and rang, singing to the tide of the flux under starlight, and the charged pulse of Paravian wards.

  “The hearth-fire’s burned out,” Althain’s Warden said gently. His will sparked the dribbled candle stub back into wavering flame. “I suggest a warmer setting downstairs might ease the ache in your ankle?”

  “Thank you.” Mending bone twinged as the enchantress arose
. She winced, braced against the obsidian table. “Another storm is sweeping off the north heath?”

  Sethvir’s glance was lucent as dawn sky. “More than one.” But the earth-sensed perception behind that oblique comment stayed vague as he offered his hand.

  Elaira accepted the gallantry, dumb-struck again by the strength self-contained behind his bird-boned frailty. She walked in the presence of quiescent peril. Framed in frangible flesh, the vast reach of an ageless spirit almost appeared tamed: until the moment that harmless, human warmth felt like staring unblinkered into the sun. “How dangerous are the Ettinmere shamans?”

  Sethvir peered down his long nose. “Did you know,” he remarked in congenial obfuscation, “that after Kharadmon became discorporate, research posed him an obdurate nuisance?”

  “That spirit doesn’t deflate his annoyances,” Elaira agreed with a grin. “What happened?”

  “Chaos.” Sethvir’s sidewise glance sparkled with glee. “He laid a wee cantrip onto the library, an animate working responsive to thought. The invocation summoned the volumes he required without any need to search for them by hand. We had books scuttling hither and yon like singed cats, until Luhaine’s miffed complaints over damages called for a stay of restraint.” The Warden paused, nonplussed as a book toppled from the upper shelf and smacked onto the floor, pages riffling.

  Sethvir peered down at the windfall, and mused, “Apparently under certain, particular circumstance, the feckless construct still functions.”

  Elaira eyed the wayward volume with alarm. “What’s changed? Does Asandir’s oath of nonintervention no longer apply to Prince Arithon’s fate?”

  “Assuredly, your Prime’s restriction still hobbles our Fellowship’s choice in full force.” Sethvir shrugged, his sly gaze direct. “But the walls here are shielded by Paravian wards, under the command of a spirit that’s dangerously sentient. The binding that marshals the books in this case was engaged by Shehane Althain. If the Koriani Matriarch wishes to challenge this tower’s primary guardian? Purely for the mayhem, I’d escort her over the threshold myself.”

  Reassured by the Sorcerer’s daft humour, Elaira pounced on the gift and translated the faded ink of the chapter’s caption. “A list of hostels maintained by Ath’s Adepts, circa Third Age 1450. That’s curious.”

  Sethvir’s triangular smile peeped through the cumulus cloud of his beard. “Isn’t it?” His chuckle echoed through the hiss of oiled hinges as he flung open the iron-bound postern. “Mind the hazard, my dear. Plagued by Kharadmon’s erratic phenomenon, you don’t want to trip.”

  Elaira yelped in delight, marked the page with her finger, and gimped at the Sorcerer’s heels down the draughty stairwell.

  The chapter contained an entry for Ettinmere, by then established for a thousand years as a White Brotherhood hostel. Training as a Koriani healer at Forthmark gave Elaira a first-hand appreciation of the reactive power endowed in such sites, even though the adepts had abandoned their tenancy. A prepotent resonance lingered in the stones that enhanced spellcraft long after the rituals sealed off the portals to access the mysteries from their inner sanctuaries.

  Elaira parked the leather-bound tome in her lap, cold despite the guest suite’s exquisite coverlet. A severance by the white brotherhood was never made without exigent forethought: always they disabled the ephemeral forces entrained by their arts before they departed.

  Yet, what if Ettinmere proved the exception?

  Her stay at Whitehaven had revealed the huge reservoir held under a brotherhood enclave’s command. She had crossed the guarded threshold and experienced the volatile intersection of living potential and individual consciousness. The instantaneously translated response, where mortal thoughts quickened virgin energy had personified wilful intent with ruthless precision. Nurtured under the farsighted wisdom of the adepts’ active stewardship, those hostels in current use contained uncanny pathways through the half-world of dreams. They cultivated whole existences spun from the banked flame of pooled power, called down from the purity of the prime source, then held in latent potential.

  The mere possibility Ettinmere’s hostel may have been wrested from the Brotherhood’s vigilance upset her peace of mind and murdered the prospect of sleep. Elaira shoved off the blankets and pulled on chilled clothes. Past the slit window, the light-print on snow cast from an illumined arrow-slit above suggested Althain’s Warden remained wakeful over who knew what greater conundrum. Elaira sparked the candle on the pricket. She left the guest suite and mounted the icy, dark stair, while the moan of the draughts frayed the flame sheltered behind her cupped palm.

  Six floors above, she combed the catalogued archives for entries referenced to Ettinmere. If no volume fell at her feet, two drawers that indexed the Third Age at the turn of the fifth millennium, and another, three thousand years earlier, flopped open to cogent suggestions. She thanked Shehane Althain under her breath, refreshed her taper, and repaired to the upstairs stacks for the prompted titles.

  When dawn brightened the chunk glass leaded into the arrow-slit, Elaira confronted the evidence that the Ettin hostel of Ath’s adepts indeed had revoked the precepts of their tradition.

  She stewed over the reason until the next day, when an aumbry door unlatched by itself and creaked open. A book thumped out, barely missing her wrist as she ransacked Sethvir’s untidy baskets for heavy waxed thread. The open page scribed in Paravian runes bespoke the pen of a centaur guardian. Ripped leathers forgotten, Elaira sat. Light filtered through the eider-down snow on the sill exposed her crestfallen frustration.

  The archaic writing was beyond her knowledge to translate.

  “Deathless havoc!” she swore. “Where under sky can I garner the resource?”

  The shout echoed off stone. Brushed by an inchoate shudder of dread, Elaira prickled with the dreadful suspicion she was no longer alone. Too late, primal fear screamed in warning of a wakened power beyond her imagining.

  Then a diamantine blast of fire exploded across her awareness. Dazzled out of her senses, all but deaf and blind, she glimpsed the impression of a massive, antlered form looming over her. The unknowable presence blurred, wrapped in radiance and sound pure enough to pulverize flesh. The resonance tapped bone and burst mortal heart-strings. Smashed like glass by the chime of ecstatic joy, Elaira reeled as a lifetime’s discipline shredded away. She did not hear Sethvir arrive at a run, or feel his arms catch her fall. Subsumed by the mighty surfeit of grace, she plunged into black-out unconsciousness.

  Elaira awakened, harrowed by amplified senses. The roaring hiss of a nearby candleflame deafened her with the force of a gale-wind, and the weave of the bed-linens branded her skin with the imprint of every loomed thread. Bewildered sight shimmered, with everyday objects rainbowed by dazzling haloes.

  Her alarmed outcry raised hurtful echoes, until someone’s masterful word quelled the storm. Peace wrapped her. A Sorcerer’s ephemeral touch stroked her lids closed, then cupped her cheek tenderly as a moth’s wing until her overcharged nerves settled out of revolt.

  “What happened?” she asked, and winced at the thunder of her own voice.

  “Be still. All is well.” Sethvir’s response disturbed nothing, silent as a transmitted thought. “You are not sick or damaged. Only ridden by a natural back-lash from being touched by the tower’s guardian spirit.”

  “Shehane Althain?” Her whisper reverberated like a dropped cymbal. “I transgressed?”

  “Certainly not!” Sethvir’s reassurance soothed her with amusement. “Your spontaneous craving for knowledge was answered. Though just now, the result may not feel like a gift. You’ll need time to adjust.”

  Elaira shifted, her limbs unwieldy as lichened granite.

  “Sleep will speed your recovery,” Sethvir advised. “Might you allow me?”

  Her grateful assent melted her into a dreamless rest.

  Hunger roused her. Elaira opened her eyes to bright sunlight, reflected off snowfall and sliced keen as a knife-cut across the c
ounterpane. Althain Tower’s guest suite surrounded her, its antique tapestries woven with trees, and Narms carpet patterned in aqua and gold spread across the slate floor. A birch fire burned in the hearth, and a tray on the brass-cornered chest at the bedside held cream, an unlikely bowl of summer blackberries, and fragrant tea, buttered honey, and toast.

  The commingled barrage of fragrances transported her senses.

  Elaira ate, astonished first by her steady hands, then startled to delight. Food had never tasted so glorious, the flavours enhanced to marvellous complexity. An enriched perception remade everything with the zest of a renewed experience. She attacked her meal, famished, then lay back on the pillows, replete.

  Inevitably, then, her reverie turned inward. Cognizance encountered the scope of the knowledge delivered by Shehane Althain. Nor was she alone when the impact of epiphany broke her illusion of peace.

  Althain’s Warden sat by the hearth, arrived like an uncanny secret. He had lurked without notice for quite some time: one of her stockings lay draped on his knee, the frayed knit seamlessly darned.

  “Mending your clothes is a poor consolation,” he remarked with apology. Clad in maroon wool with black-velvet interlace at cuffs and shoulders, Sethvir looked tired, eyes of faded turquoise couched in deep lines by two ages of tribulation.

  Before Elaira shoved upright, he objected. “Be still!”

  Flattened by vertigo, Elaira let fly, “I feel like my skull’s been turned to tapped glass and shaken to splitting. How do you live here without going mad?”

  Sethvir’s features crinkled with laughter. “Luhaine always claimed I’ve been moonstruck.” Paused, his head tipped askance, his mild regard became piercing. “Shehane Althain never reacts without purpose.” The Sorcerer’s survey peeled through her uncertainty and finished with an arched eyebrow. “If my preference mattered, I would count your comfort above everything else.”