Cephrael's Hand: A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book One

by McPhail, Melissa

  “Morwyk.” Ean had forgotten all about him. “How does Morwyk play into this?” Then he remembered Morin’s admonishment, There are always new actors on the stage, but this play has but one director.

  “We suspect he is allied with the Prophet,” Gydryn explained. “Bethamin’s Ascendants are mysteriously finding their way inside our borders despite strict commands to the army patrols. My men have been ordered to stay clear of Morwyk’s lands. It is the obvious answer.”

  “So he shouts in fear of Saldaria while dealing with them in secret.”

  “A tried and true tactic of the seditious,” Morin pointed out. “Quite predictable, actually.”

  “And now we come to you, my son,” Gydryn said in a tone of aching sorrow. “I must travel to the parley to give the Duke of Morwyk his chance to claim my kingdom. We believe he will stage a coup in my absence. It is nearly as certain as the trap that awaits me in Taj al’Jahana.”

  “But why, father?” his plea sounded that of a much younger boy, and indeed, Ean felt his father’s imminent loss as acutely as the day five years gone that he’d first set sail for Edenmar.

  “In order to reveal Morwyk’s alliances,” Raine said after a brief silence in which the king and queen both seemed choked for words.

  Ean looked to the Vestal.

  “Events progress,” Raine told him, “around the world. It becomes increasingly important to reveal the network of Bethamin’s allies.”

  “And you’ll sacrifice my father in the bargain?” Ean challenged hotly.

  “Bethamin is a scourge upon the land!” Raine snapped with uncharacteristic heat, pinning him with such force of will that Ean felt the declaration rumble through his chest like near thunder.

  “I do not walk blithely toward death, Ean,” Gydryn assured him. “There is one other who knows of our undertaking who will be there to help me, one who makes the ultimate sacrifice, for he walked knowingly into the Prophet’s embrace.”

  How Ean connected it so quickly surprised even himself. “Kieran van Stone,” he murmured. “You sent your Truthreader to spy on the Prophet.”

  Raine cast him a respectful look as he nodded. “I bound Kieran to this quest, even as I bound you and Fynnlar, and everyone else here, though with a binding much more intricate and penetrating, for such was needed if any part of Kjieran meant to withstand Bethamin’s ‘purifying’ fire,” and the scathing disgust in Raine’s tone left little question of how he felt about the latter.

  Ean couldn’t imagine anything more penetrating than the bond Raine had just instilled in his head. He didn’t envy Kieran his task.

  “So you begin to see,” Raine surmised from the grimace on Ean’s face. “Even so, I do not know how much the binding will protect him.”

  “Surely Bethamin isn’t more powerful than yourself, my lord,” Morin said.

  Raine turned him a dire look. “I have never so much as laid eyes upon the Prophet. He hides like a snake deep in his temple in Tambarré. If he is merely a wielder like any other—”

  “A wielder?” Ean said, startled. “The Prophet is an Adept?”

  “If he is a wielder like any other,” the Vestal repeated more firmly, “there is no fear, but if he is more…”

  “More?”

  Raine shook his head, unwilling to expound on his fears. “Bethamin’s influence is corruptive, Ean. The longer Kieran stays bound to him, the more imperiled he becomes. Only time will tell if my working can withstand the test. It is a chance we are forced to take.”

  “Bethamin threatens us all, my darling,” Errodan said. “Not one kingdom, but many. We must do what we can.”

  “So you will go to M’Nador,” Ean said, looking back to his father.

  “And you must be far, far away from Dannym when Morwyk moves on the throne,” his father replied in turn.

  The king looked to Raine, who nodded once. Ean felt something in his mind, like the light snapping of fingers, and instinctively knew Raine’s time of binding had ended. Gydryn stood, helping Errodan also to stand. They came toward, Ean, who rose as well.

  “This is farewell, Ean,” the king said. Ean saw tears in his eyes.

  Errodan threw her arms about her son’s neck and peppered his cheek with motherly kisses. In his ear, she whispered, “I love you with all that I am.”

  Ean managed a swallow, confusion welling. He hugged her tightly in return, and then moved to embrace his father.

  “Not the homecoming I desired,” Gydryn murmured.

  Ean held his gaze though his eyes stung with unshed tears. Gydryn took his hand and placed something in it, and Ean looked down to see an ornate silver ring lying in his palm. The sapphire it contained sparkled even in the muted light. “You are a val Lorian,” his father said in a choked voice. “This has always been and will always be yours.”

  Ean stared at his family’s royal ring feeling conflicted. Both of his brothers had worn such a ring to their deaths. Swallowing, Ean slid the ring on his first finger and looked back to his father.

  Gydryn gave him a tragic smile. “One day, with Epiphany’s Grace, we will have time to learn each other’s ways again.”

  “I pray it so, father,” Ean returned, his chest tight with emotion that he strangely found no outlet for.

  Morin unbarred the door to let the king and queen leave, and then locked it again behind them.

  Raine walked to the table to pour himself a goblet of wine. “You can speak now, Fynnlar.”

  “Blaarghh!” Fynn shook his jowls as if to dispel a foul taste. “I hate it when you do that!”

  “I’d no idea you had such a history with the Fourth Vestal, Fynn,” Ean observed, suddenly grateful for the levity Fynn could be counted on to provide.

  “Oh, we go way back,” Fynn grumbled. He eyed the Vestal disagreeably.

  “We are quite well-acquainted, your cousin and I.” Raine motioned to Ean to retake his seat and came to sit in the chair opposite him, with a glowering Fynnlar in between. Morin hovered in the shadows, but Ean remained aware of his presence. He was intensely curious to know who Morin d’Hain really was.

  Raine crossed ankle over knee and settled his gaze upon Ean. “Your Highness, Morin tells me you spoke to Franco Rohre.”

  “Yes.”

  Raine took a sip of his wine. “He’s vanished, you know.”

  Ean blinked at him. “I just saw him at the banquet—”

  “He took leave of Ysolde before midnight and didn’t return. I don’t expect that he will.”

  “I thought he was in your employ.”

  Raine cracked a humorless smile. “I believe his loyalties to me were preceded by those to another. What did you and Franco speak of?”

  “I told Morin already—”

  “Yes, the Geshaiwyn. That was more helpful than you know. Geshaiwyn are contracted through only one agent at present.”

  “The Karakurt,” Fynn supplied. At Ean’s curious look, he shrugged and added, “I heard there was a contract on your life, cousin. I didn’t know Geshaiwyn had accepted it until tonight.”

  “I’m more interested in the other things you spoke of,” Raine murmured. His expression became solemn. “This is important, Ean. Please, you must trust in me.”

  Ean felt he was betraying Franco to say anything at all, but it was difficult to know who to claim allegiance to anymore. If Franco served another… “He…we talked of my pattern,” Ean reluctantly confessed, glancing at Morin, “and he told me it was…he said…”

  “The Pattern of Life,” Morin finished when it was clear that Ean could not, or would not.

  The prince turned him a rigid look. “Just so. But I don’t understand any of this.”

  “Yours is the Pattern of Life, and it isn’t,” Raine said. “The truth is complicated and requires an understanding of Patterning. As for why you can see it, surely you must understand what that means…”

  Ean shook his head.

  “Seven hells, Ean, don’t be so obtuse!” Fynn protested. “Once you work the
Pattern of Life, it forever becomes part of you. Even I know that much.”

  “But I’ve never worked any pattern, Fynn.”

  “Not in this lifetime, perhaps,” Fynn muttered. He downed his wine in one gigantic gulp and looked around for more.

  Ean heard the words but somehow couldn’t comprehend them. He stared at the Vestal. “Do you mean to say…you think I have…Returned?”

  Morin and Raine exchanged a look, and the former asked, “Ean, do you recall anything strange happening while you were a captive of the Shade?”

  Ean leveled him a flat glare. “You’re seriously asking me this?”

  “Something unusual happening around yourself—something not caused by others,” Morin clarified.

  Ean thought back to those crazed days, but he could think of nothing. He shook his head.

  Raine looked disappointed. “Returned,” he confirmed, “of that you can be certain.” He settled the prince a tragic look then. “Our race is dying, Ean. Perhaps you don’t know, but the concept of the Returning, as mentioned in your Litany for the Departed, comes directly from the Sobra I’ternin, the Adept race’s most treasured text.”

  “There is no afterlife,” Ean quoted, “there is only the Returning.”

  “Just so.” Raine held his gaze with a troubled frown. “An Adept is inextricably tied to his strand, and when we say inextricably, we mean even death cannot sever the link. Adepts are reborn as Adepts. This is known as the Returning. Typically an Adept is either born knowing his gift or grows into his talent during adolescence. Over the past several centuries, however, the race has been dying—and by that we mean fewer and fewer Adepts coming into their gifts. We Vestals have long suspected that the Adepts are still Returning but just not Awakening.”

  “This is but one part of the problem,” Morin said.

  Ean felt these facts were certainly problematic enough on their own. “What’s the other part?”

  “My oath-brother is a grave threat, Ean. His return can only herald terrible times to come. Franco’s disappearance is a perfect example of one of many inauspicious events since Björn’s return to Alorin. You probably know Franco was one of the Fifty Companions—you’re familiar with them, surely.”

  “Yes.”

  “Recently—that is, since my oath-brother’s return—many of the Fifty Companions have vanished.”

  “Or have been vanished,” Fynn muttered into his wine. He’d somehow managed to refill his goblet without Ean noticing. “You know, more permanently.”

  “Your oath-brother,” Ean said slowly, holding the Vestal’s gaze. “Do you mean the Fifth Vestal?”

  Raine settled him a telling look. “The very same. It was he who sent his Shade to claim you and slay Creighton Khelspath. Ean,” Raine stressed the prince’s name with an undertone of caution, “your father told me you wish to seek out this Shade. Is this true?”

  “I haven’t had a change of heart since this morning, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What he means, Ean,” Morin inserted, “is to know that you understand the peril you are in should you undertake such a foolhardy quest.”

  “I think I have a fair idea, Morin,” Ean snapped.

  “I cannot forbid you from seeking the creature, Ean,” Raine said, his gaze compelling, “but I implore you not to do so. It matters not in the end whether your life is claimed by Morwyk’s assassins or a Shade’s fell power; in either case, Bethamin’s dark work is done.”

  Ean regarded him carefully. “Yet I cannot stay here, you’ve made that plain.” Looking around at the others then, he asked, “So. Where do we go from here?”

  “To hell,” Fynn muttered and belched gratuitously.

  Twenty-nine

  ‘One does not long bask in the glow of a god’s favor; ’tis a perilous transient state indeed.’

  – The Agasi wielder Markal Morrelaine

  Trell had a fair idea where to find Lily, and he and the Khurds reached the canyon with its little river as dawn flamed the eastern sky. Stopping the horses in the shadow of a high cliff, Trell conferred with his two unlikely accomplices.

  “They’ll be expecting us. We’ll have to take out their sentries or we won’t stand a chance of surprising them. Which of you is the best knife-fighter?”

  “I am,” said Kamil with a feral grin of brilliant white teeth, bright against his dark skin.

  “Kamil, you climb to the canyon rim and follow the ridge. We’ll be counting on you to eliminate their sentries.”

  “It would be my pleasure, Trell of the Tides.”

  “We will give you a quarter-hour to precede us.”

  Kamil drew a thin dagger from his belt, clenched it in his teeth, and scrambled agilely up the jagged canyon wall. Something about his movement reminded Trell in that moment of Istalar, another good man who had willingly traded his life to save another’s.

  They waited in silence to give Kamil time to find and dispatch the guards. Thin violet clouds had begun to striated the blue sky when Trell nodded to Sayid and they led the horses on foot into the canyon. The tributary flowed to their right as they followed a path single file, the desert horses surefooted in the rocky sand.

  They came upon Kamil’s first victim at the top of a rise. The man lay broken across a boulder that jutted from the hillside about ten paces above them. The bodies of two more guards littered their path as they continued deeper into the ravine, its walls narrowing with every step.

  Trell used the time to prepare himself, a ritual he’d followed many times in his short span of adulthood. While Ware and the others had teased him about spending too much time dwelling in his head, they’d never had occasion to fault his mental preparedness. Trell could clear his mind and find a state of alertness in mere seconds if conditions required it, and once focused, nothing disturbed his singular concentration.

  He heard the Nadoriin long before he saw them, though he didn’t need his heightened awareness to do so, for their raucous laughter echoed harshly off the ravine’s rocky walls. Hearing it disturbed him, for the laughter held a vicious, jeering undertone.

  The moment they came in view of the camp, Trell knew why, and the sight turned his stomach, rousing a sense of moral fury.

  A dozen Nadoriin gathered in a semi-circle around Lily. They were tormenting her, making a game of tearing off her dress a few strips at a time, and there was little enough left of it now. As Trell watched, a man grabbed a handful of her shift and pulled her into his lap while the others goaded him on. He fondled a crying Lily like a common whore, then roughly shoved her back into the center. A bald man grabbed her around the waist and pushed his hand up her skirt, forcing his way with her.

  Trell looked to Sayid and saw the same cold fury in his dark eyes. The desert tribes held women in the highest regard—though Trell was sometimes at odds with the way they practiced this respect—but Lily was a nobleman’s daughter and a slip of a girl at that. Their treatment of her was unconscionable.

  Four men turned as Trell and Sayid rode out of the canyon shadows into the pale morning light. Trell saw the first Nadoriin hand reaching for a dagger even as the man’s brethren turned to see what had caught his eye.

  The bald man slung Lily into the dirt and stood. “Well, well,” he gloated in the desert tongue, resting hands on hips where a scimitar gleamed at his wide belt. “So this must be the young and very stupid, soon to be dead, Korin Ahlamby.”

  In that moment Trell understood the dynamics of this meeting, and he shifted tactics at once. “I am Korin,” he returned with just the right touch of indignation in his tone. Using an inflection of the desert tongue that farmers used when calling their pigs, he continued, “Unhand my betrothed, you bastard son of a pig herder, and I will offer you a clean death, however undeserved it be.”

  The Nadoriin’s expression hardened, replaced by a steely glare that could only be a thirst for blood. As if by silent signal, eleven men stood as one and drew weapons against Trell and Sayid.

  Well, Trell had seen worse
odds. But not lately.

  Trell pulled his sword and Sayid his scimitar.

  The Nadoriin rushed them with a blood cry.

  Trell heaved on his reins, and Gendaia reared angrily, bringing her hooves down upon the skull of the closest Nadoriin while Trell slashed at another, his sword opening the man’s chest. Two more grabbed for him, and Trell kicked and elbowed them off while managing to gouge a fourth in the neck before someone pulled him backwards off Gendaia.

  He twisted as he fell, taking an elbow in the mouth but yanking free of their hold. Swearing as his hip landed hard against the rocky dirt, he rolled beneath Gendaia, who reared again with a scream of protest and then tore away from the man who was making a grab for her reins. On his feet again, Trell drove his sword into the gut of the closest man just as the latter was raising his own blade.

  Trell maneuvered out of the way as his attacker crumbled and elbowed a man in the nose who was approaching from behind. Even as the latter fell back, Trell turned and speared him through the heart. He skipped aside as two more men flung themselves toward him, then he rushed in again to close blades.

  His fist found the jaw of the first, sending him sprawling in a splay of blood, and his sword claimed the other. Another man barreled into him, and Trell brought his sword hilt down on the back of his head, hearing the bone crunch.

  As the latter fell, Trell swung to block the advance of yet another Nadoriin. Their blades clashed to the hilt, and their eyes locked.

  The Nadori leader was not a handsome man. His face was pockmarked, his eyes glaring and dark, but his sword gleamed with a deadly edge, and his shoulders were solid as a bull’s. Staring at Trell in close proximity, the man’s expression flicked from surprise to anger, for he realized Trell wasn’t the proclaimed Korin.

  “Northern Pig!” the leader hissed. “You’ll pay dearly for your interference.”

  Trell pushed the leader off him and danced back. For a moment, they stalked each other, and Trell used the time to catch his breath and judge the remaining resistance; he could hear Sayid fighting behind him, but at least seven of the Nadoriin lay dead or dying.