by Janny Wurts
Which tacit confidence confirmed that the stone-graven oath at Whitehold hobbled his might. Brutal stakes attended the burden laid on Elaira. Sethvir waited with riveted patience, while she weighed the appalling degree of Arithon’s peril, subject to Ettinmere’s shamans.
For history’s tap-root ran deeper than the records of the Third Age. The rogue enclave had not revoked their White Brotherhood’s precepts at whim. Long before the original hostel’s foundation, the volatile flux in the Storlains had been imbalanced by a drake war. Stabilized since by Athera’s Paravians, Sunchildren and centaur guardians, both, had mitigated the stress that collided at the intersection of the continent’s major fault-lines. When the old races faded, Ettin’s adepts had to choose whether to uphold the passive tenet of their order or to shoulder the worldly burden. If no steadfast power acted, the unmanaged release of tectonic forces might shatter the backbone of the five kingdoms.
Brows tucked, the enchantress voiced her concern. “Arithon must realize the arcana those shamans wield is no trifle.” Though rapport could not inform him directly through Elaira’s experience, mage-sighted awareness should recognize a power not sourced by Athera’s flux. Surely that detail ought to make him chary. “Unless he exposes their cabal’s secret, he likely can’t guess the reservoir hoarded by the ancients is limited.”
“Don’t misjudge Torbrand’s temper,” Sethvir warned. “Caution won’t curb his Grace’s fury against them. Under a crown prince’s ethic, he can’t, if the shamans should cross the grain of the s’Ffalenn royal gift.”
Elaira grasped that appalling peril. “If Arithon’s provoked into an open contest, or if he stumbles through their protections and encounters the site of the original hostel, you believe they’ll defend their ground at the cost of his life?”
For the derelict sanctuary had been sealed off by the brotherhood’s adepts to preserve the sanctity of their network from the rogue faction. The severance of the etheric portals had doomed the fair works of millennia to attrition, a thunder-clap echo that yet resounded through Sethvir’s presentday earth-sense.
“My dear,” the Sorcerer allowed with regret, “the choice to leave your beloved at risk must rest in your hands alone.”
“Perhaps,” said Elaira. “But the Ettinfolk don’t realize whom they shelter.”
Sethvir answered without reassurance. “The heirloom sword his Grace bears would be recognized, should the weapon fall under scrutiny.” Constraint forbade him from the disclosure of royal identity’s advantage or detriment. “Should your prince come to grips, if he isn’t killed outright, he would assuredly rattle far worse than the branch that harbours their hornets’ nest.”
Elaira weighed the oblique implications, pinned under Sethvir’s expressionless regard in the ice-fall of light through the casement. “And if Ettin fails?” She skirted the precipice, “If the shamans’ remnant legacy breaks under Arithon’s will, you infer the subsequent, untamed release may cause both major fault-lines to rupture?”
Sethvir disclaimed nothing. Could not, where no margin existed. His Fellowship must destroy Rathain’s prince before such a disaster threatened Athera’s integrity. Else forsake the bound charge of the dragons, which secured Paravian survival above all else.
The cruel conclusion fell to Elaira. “The life of my beloved, balanced against humanity’s continued existence?”
The Warden of Althain bowed his head, aggrieved. “Our choice is proscribed, should Mankind’s rambunctious ignorance tip the balance. This continent nurtures the heart of Athera. The etheric web that upholds the mysteries cannot withstand the shock of another grand cataclysm.”
Distress wrung Elaira to pallor. “Another?”
“Oh yes.” Sethvir’s sigh ruffled his beard. “Thrice, the weal of the world has been fractured. Always by dragons, though Grace of Ath, just once in our time, and thankfully never in the Third Age under the compact’s constraint.” His dread simmered unspoken, concerning the dire unrest of the exiled drakes beyond Northgate. “Prime Selidie’s aware of the harrowing crux. The plot she’s spear-headed through Vivet has many threads, all of them woven through Arithon’s fate to our calamitous detriment.”
Elaira drew a vexed breath. “Is this a plea to break Arithon’s trust? Are you urging me to resolve the sealed memories I guard to deny the Koriathain the unscrupulous leverage of our relationship?”
“I ask nothing,” Sethvir declared in discomfort, his eyes lucent with pity. “You required to know, given your vision has been unsealed by Shehane Althain’s directive. Whether as a boon or for warning, I am not at liberty to say. But how you keep faith with your handfast prince steers the precarious outcome.”
Elaira punched the mattress and swore, until smothered laughter crinkled Sethvir’s face and caught her short. The fragmented memory resurfaced, of a lonely night on a foggy shingle at Narms. There, Traithe had offered her kindly advice across a drift-wood fire. “If I should fail my beloved,” she recited, “or should Arithon fail me, the result will call down disaster.”
“Quite.” Sethvir’s levity died. He stood up in closure and poked up the spent logs that glimmered in the hearth. “Though you’ll find you can’t hurry your convalescence. If you hoped to bolt for Davien’s den at Kewar, by evening, winter will close the north harbours.” A desperate, last respite from the True Sect sword, for the hounded clan survivors put to flight under Saroic s’Gannley’s protection: but the saving, mailed ice that choked passage across Instrell Bay would cage Elaira at Althain Tower until spring.
The storm presaged by Sethvir’s earth-sense howled in with a fury that choked Tysan’s sunset in sackcloth cloud and muffled the fells of Atainia in cotton drifts. Raging, the blizzard raked Rathain’s free wilds and rampaged unspent against the cragged Mathorns. Its aftermath cracked trees and smothered both trade-road and river-course, and left the great firs and massive oaks bowed beneath crusted hoods. Hush battened the vales, while relentless cold halted the True Sect’s eastern campaign in Halwythwood.
Chased by starvation, The Hatchet marched his frost-bitten companies from the field and quartered them to nurse their chilblains in shelter at Morvain, Narms, and Etarra.
For Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn, enmeshed in the Prime Matriarch’s cat-and-mouse game-play at Ettin, the winter danced him through the artful steps of guarded avoidance. While his threat of rogue iyats forced the shamans’ enmity to a stand-off, trapping for Vivet’s upkeep required extended trips into the high country. The brutal cold and remote terrain at least granted him the needful solitude to redress his fragmented memory. Or so he believed, camped under the stars in the quiet between blizzards. He doused his wood fire, determined to tap his deep self-awareness through mage-trained discipline.
But the visions that flowered revealed Sunwheel war hosts and the horrors of battle-fields heaped with windrows of dead. Either the vistas had resurged from his past experience, or if they portrayed a glimpse of an unwritten future, Arithon lacked any means to discern. The initial effort left him dizzy and heaving. The after-shock felt like a violation. As though he had been stalked and covertly ambushed amid an etheric trance. He sounded the flux currents lightly. If no night-spying owl flew within range, the suspicion persisted that something stealthy watched still, just beyond his ephemeral awareness.
Unease stole his sleep. The fierce impulse to unsheathe the black sword he wore only outside the bounds of the village raised gooseflesh. He minded the warning. A blade whose defences raised ancient enchantments would attract more than quaint curiosity. Best to avoid such untoward attention until he mapped the source of the shamans’ empowerment.
Daybreak failed to lift Arithon’s apprehension. Arisen at first light, he turned out his pack, then reinspected his meagre belongings. He found the attached talisman wired onto the struts bracing the runner of his drag sleigh. He left the unclean construct alone; spent a day at the timberline constructing another sled with gut sinew and pegs. Then he stashed the compromised gear with his pelts in a cave,
and moved on with the replacement.
And still, he snapped awake in the night, brushed by the uncanny awareness a watcher defiled his dreams.
A more rigorous search flagged the subtle spell inlaid in a button sewn onto a shirt that Vivet had mended. Tempted as he was to bury the token under a pile of offal, tracking charms were a fell craft, never to be treated lightly. Rather than endanger a blameless scavenger, or reveal his schooled knowledge, Arithon contrived a clumsy spill on his sleeve, and under the pretence of cleanliness, boiled the construct in an infusion of cedar bark.
Alhough he hung the sopped cloth to dry for two days, scoured in wind and sunlight, the itch of cat’s nerves still dogged him. Arithon minded his workaday business, beyond careful to guard his steps. His ruffled faculties proved to be warranted: returned in disquiet, he discovered the ensorcelled hook in the button had failed to dissolve. Which pernicious integrity fed his reluctance to fathom its nature. Sounding the unknown pattern might lend its maker the opening to read him. He discarded the obvious counter-measure. If he neutralized the button in the poke of raw salt brought to field-cure his skins, his thwarted antagonists were hell-bound to try a more devious invocation.
Presumed ignorant, he could wear his unfriendly pursuit to cross-eyed boredom, then shed the offensive button into running water through a careless scrape while crossing a streamlet. The need for such obstructive restraint cramped far more than his spirit. He had not foreseen the inflexible threat, or imagined the brutal patience required to shield his anonymity. While the cold-blooded ploys to disarm his opponents compromised his free movement, Arithon faced the gravity of his mistake. The delicate game of appeasement to comply with the settlement’s hidebound laws now entangled him in the murky practice of Ettinmere’s shamans.
Ettinvale, where Vivet’s folk wintered over, nestled into a gorge that snaked down to the basin of a thermal crater. Steam vents and geysers belched plumes of mist, puffed and coiled and clumped into wool bats that lidded the snow-clad peaks. The mizzle of cloud pocketed the hothouse humidity, and spilled moisture like floss down the flanks of the slopes. Year-round, the peat soil at the valley floor wore the velvet of greensward. Grazed milch cows gleamed, sleeked with buttery fat, and speckled trout leaped in the rain-fed pools, plentiful and quick to strike.
Solstice released the austere custom of contemplation and silence imposed throughout the long nights. The children’s exuberance scattered echoes amid the nasal honks of the flocking geese. Like an emerald jewel bezelled in ice, the haven tamed the harsh weather in comfort, while piled drifts mantled and corniced the Storlains, and ferocious cold drove the creatures in the high wilds to dormancy.
The season did not abate quietly, even as the air freshened towards spring. Equinox brewed the most fickle storms, when the overburdened snowpack posed the lethal danger of avalanche. Forays up-country to trap became stalled.
For Elaira, hardened to the bitter ennui that gripped winter’s end in the Storlains, the gales that smothered the peaks were no match for the slow suffocation of her unnatural estrangement. Disquiet rode her helpless vigil, until her secure haven at Althain Tower enfolded her like a tissue of dream. No toppled books shed light on the qualities imbued in the Biedar knife. Whether the artifact might stem the tempest brewed by the Prime Matriarch’s meddling, Sethvir provided no counsel. Not with Arithon’s fate snagged on the prong of the shamans’ fixated interest.
The Teir’s’Ffalenn bided, alert and inscrutable. Music allowed him to spend his nights wakeful, badgered by company eager to teach him Ettin’s traditional roundelays. By day, laughing, he joined the rambunctious pursuits of the young: the manic feats contrived with goat-drawn sledges, the hurley games played at strenuous speed on black ice, and the cutthroat bets over archery contests that fleeced the inept. For a while, rough sport released his pent frustration and glazed the rapt eyes of the shamans.
But sunlight returned and dissolved the sulphurous fog. Blue sky ushered in the melt-song of thaws and burst the iced rungs of the freshets. Overnight, the frozen lace froth of the falls exploded into roaring cataracts. As early spring bird-song resurged with the snowdrops, Arithon confronted the trial of Vivet’s confinement. By Ettin tradition, a birth was not private but regaled in communal ceremony.
When the expectant mother’s time neared, the sire who claimed child-right became ousted from his warm bed by his rowdy male peers. Carried or dragged, then tossed from hand to hand, he would be pummelled into mock submission, to ribald advice and teasing laughter. The villagers relished their celebration of apprehensive, new fatherhood.
Yet Arithon was not to be taken off guard, or found naked in the marital sheets. Snatched while fully clothed, seated for a late supper, he suffered for the evasive affront dealt out to his Daldari relations. Sly kicks and punches landed in the scuffle, masked under the shadows cast by the streamed torches. If his hecklers trounced him without obvious damage, Arithon’s ribs were bruised underneath sturdy clothing stressed to frayed seams. The hitched winces, however bravely suppressed, made even the toothless grand-uncles snigger.
No one looked askance at hard feelings. The waylaid victim was expected to mope. Evicted without shelter, his home quarters crammed with the expectant mother’s relations, the young man was meant to bond with the community and earn the mercy of his companions.
Headstrong s’Ffalenn pride instead staked out the turf to do battle.
At Althain Tower, Elaira howled, forewarned by that signature flare of will. “Give in, you rank fool! Make your token show of surrender and let them embrace you in brotherhood.”
But no such temperance restrained Arithon, dislocated from his preferred lifestyle and exiled in bleak isolation.
He carved a bone needle and mended his abused clothes. If his odd, sailhand’s whip-stitch raised tittering scorn, the outcome passed muster. Badgered in form to shoulder the chores that his woman relinquished for her lying-in, Rathain’s prince spent a fortnight peeling potatoes and boiling hides. At female behest, he fetched water and washed reeking clouts for bawling Daldari infants.
No scatheful ribbing spurred him to complaint. He did all that was asked. But compliant resistance just stiffened the matrons, who saddled him with the unsavoury task of cleaning hog casings for sausage. He bent his back sweating over a boiling salt bath in a kettle, while around him, chattering, large women with reddened hands minced the cold pork with fat and spiced the congealed mix in iced buckets. The quips flew, denouncing his stature, with smirks at his reserved manhood sufficient to scald a flush on a deaf-mute.
“Did you hear the whispers?” the boldest one ventured, since their scorn failed to bait him. “That even when sober, the foreigner’s member is limp as his tongue? For sure, to enliven the breeding, Vivet must have laced his broth with raw mussels.”
Which comment scorched a bit too near the bone for Arithon’s nettled indifference. Like the stalking cat sprung, he attacked, “Why tarnish the incentive? Your remarks are quick to imply Vivet’s charm is ill-favoured. Forgetting all self-respect, could you value the mate who’d rut with a dog to prove his prowess?”
The gossip monger paused with her flensing knife lifted. “Do tell. Own up. Vivet’s get is not yours?”
Arithon stared her malice full in the face. “Oh, yes, the coming child is mine!” Circled by smouldering silence, he smiled. “Why else should I abide this noisome task, or field spite from closed minds of low character?”
The curdled atmosphere failed to erupt, only because a runner arrived with the breathless news Vivet’s birth water had broken. Natural sire, or claimant by child-right, the outlander bowed to the summons. The grumbling matrons took over his work, in no haste to bestow their attendance. Labour with a firstborn extended for hours. Given his scalding cheek, and the spurning of kinfolk, the settlement’s new father might as well suffer his miserable vigil alone with the family.
Yet the prospect of a prolonged obligation posed Arithon’s least thorny difficulty. More than apprehen
sion mired his step down the muddy path through the settlement. Also raked over the coals of his turmoil, Elaira fumbled her tea-cup in the distant sanctary of Althain Tower.
The crash of dropped porcelain shattered her nerves.
She picked the fragments from her soaked hem, knowing: her Teir’s’Ffalenn would never choose the wise course and forsake the child claimed by his compassion. He went, harrowed by the redoubled danger that birthings at Ettin commanded a shaman’s presence.
The shack his low station afforded was small, an oblong box built of logs, the sloped roof of stringers and slats sealed with bog turf. Steam off the mineral springs sagged the timbers, splotched with a patina of lichen. The warped front stair jammed the swing of the door, wedged open to admit fresh air. Arithon’s wary approach salvaged nothing. Every female relation not squeezed inside had gathered without, a gamut that seemed to include every matron not currently rendering pork. Met by pursed lips, he expected no quarter: not since the brutal ferocity used to defend his mauled privacy.
The packed bodies enveloped him at the threshold. Inside, every available bench, chair, and cranny was occupied. Glow from the hearth burnished flesh in relief and swathed the corners in shadow. Beyond escape, Arithon seized the challenge and with a Masterbard’s grace, greeted the Daldari matriarch.
She rebuffed him with silence. Estranged beneath his own roof, with fine irony, he breasted an atmosphere of antipathy thick enough to cut with a knife. The breathed air cloyed his lungs. The hot-iron tang of the kettle and the bite of astringent herbs turned his senses as he forged into the press. Arrived at the bedchamber, he steeled himself and went in.
Darkness and heat smothered him like a blanket, fecund with the scents of birthing and sweat, and the pungent offerings burned by the shamans. Vivet reclined, a sister at hand with a compress to blot her flushed forehead. Red hair clung to her damp skin in strings.
Tripped by empathy, Arithon missed his astute step. The smile that brightened her strained face tore his heart. Momentarily, he failed to address the piercing regard of the shaman.
