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

by McPhail, Melissa

  The King’s Own Guard filed out to surround the val Rothschens, and the group departed with no more fanfare than a dog shamed by its master.

  Suddenly overcome—relief, gratitude, lingering fear, so many emotions welled—Alyneri threw her arms around Bastian’s neck with a little squeak. Then she blushed and stepped quickly away again, drawing herself to her tallest though her own face flamed as red as Bastian’s. “I thank you, Lieutenant.”

  Bastian gave her a polite bow. “Your Grace, it is young Tanis you should be thanking. He sought me out in a fury and would not be turned away.”

  Alyneri looked gratefully to Tanis, but before she could thank him, another guardsman in red and gold rushed up. “Lieutenant,” and he whispered something in Bastian’s ear.

  Bastian’s expression turned grave. “Indeed,” he said as the man pulled away. He looked apologetically to Alyneri. “Your Grace, I must beseech you to accompany us at once.”

  “Of course, Lieutenant. Tanis…” and the boy came and took her outstretched hand, the only gesture of her gratitude time would allow.

  Thusly, they headed off.

  ***

  Ean and Raine waited for dawn in the secret circular chamber deep within the bowels of Calgaryn Palace. Morin and Fynn had both headed off to set events in motion, and now there was no going back. Ean sank deeper into his chair while the Vestal slowly walked the circumference of the room running a flat round rock back and forth between his knuckles.

  Reckless and brash. Ean brooded over Morin’s declaration. He wouldn’t know where to even begin searching for a Shade, so why did Morin’s barb sink so deeply? Was it because Ean felt the truth in it?

  He’d agreed to go to the Cairs, but he couldn’t help wondering what new perils awaited him there. Raine said he would find safety in numbers, in anonymity, in hiding in plain sight in a country that played host to dozens of races. But what would Ean do there? And how would Creighton’s death ever be avenged if all he did was hide and cower while others risked their lives?

  “There will be time enough for vengeance when this is done,” Raine advised from the far side of the room. At the Prince’s startled look, the Truthreader smiled softly and said, “I wasn’t eavesdropping. You should know that thoughts have force, Ean. Some of them are…very loud.”

  Ean stared hard at him. “I take exception to fleeing my enemies in the night.”

  Raine held his gaze for a long time. Then he came over and sat down across from the prince, his expression troubled. “Ean…you are in grave danger. Geshaiwyn are relentless. Whoever hired them through the Karakurt’s network is actively plotting your death. Leaving the kingdom may keep you safe from Morwyk’s schemes, but have a care at every turn that you don’t fall prey to another’s.”

  Ean wished people would stop telling him that. He was well aware of the dangers he faced. He stared broodingly at the Vestal and after a long moment of silence observed, “Do you believe he was sent to protect me?”

  Raine sat back in his chair. He eyed him carefully. “The Shade, you mean?”

  Ean nodded. “Franco Rohre thought it so.”

  Raine looked noncommittal. “I dare not speak as to my oath-brother’s motives, Ean. I think it safe to say only that when the zanthyr came to your rescue, he saved you from an uncertain fate.”

  “The Shade did save my life,” Ean admitted, more to himself than to Raine. Until Franco had spoken the words, Ean had forgotten the ache left by the Shade’s fist striking his chin, as well as the reason for it.

  ‘For respecting so little those who saved you...’

  “Why would he heal me if his master only meant for me to die?”

  Raine cracked a humorless smile. “Again, I do not presume to understand the Fifth Vestal’s plans,” and he added resolutely, “though I vow to unravel them, thread by thread.” He settled Ean a penetrating look. “Who knows if my oath-brother merely gave the creature an order to bring you back alive? A Shade follows his master unquestioningly; such an order would easily have necessitated his healing you of any injury.”

  “And why would the Vestal want me alive?” Frustration constricted Ean’s chest, and anger welled behind it. His emotions on this point were potent and fierce, and he held them back with naught but a fragile shield of composure, already many times cracked.

  Raine grunted sourly. “If only I knew. My instincts tell me your Return plays some part in it, but to say more than this would be mere conjecture.”

  Ean looked away and stared into the fire, working the muscles of his jaw, clenching and unclenching. “I should just ask him, I suppose,” he remarked bitterly.

  “Ean,” the intensity of Raine’s reply drew the prince’s gaze immediately back to the Vestal. Raine pinned him with a look of fierce entreaty. “Ean, my oath-brother is a dangerous man—the most deadly wielder ever known to have walked the realm. Please, I beg you—please do not seek him out.” When Ean still looked defiant, Raine frowned and pressed, “Perhaps if you will permit an illustration?”

  Begrudgingly, Ean nodded him to proceed.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard many versions of the story of the last battle of the Adept Wars, where the other Vestals and I were captured and brought to T’khendar to witness Malachai ap’Kalien’s imminent victory. But there is a part of the story that is never told, and I think you should hear it now.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Raine pushed out of his chair, reached into his pocket and pulled out his smoothly rounded, flat black stone, which he began twining through his fingers again with skillful ease. “During those last days of the war,” he began, “I was fighting in western Agasan—the Sunset Battle, it has come to be called. The Adept forces were losing—that much is often told true. We might have stood united against Malachai alone, but when Björn turned against us…” he paused, glanced off into the shadows. “When Björn betrayed us,” he continued after a moment, “many good wielders fell. The Fifth Vestal was more than our spearhead of strength, he’d been our hope. He took both with him when he broke his oath.”

  Ean could only imagine the sense of betrayal Raine must have felt—must still feel. “I remember the story of the Sunset Battle of Gimlalai,” he said, hoping to spare the Truthreader its retelling. Under any other circumstances, Ean would have loved to hear it straight from the man who fought the battle, but this was not the time. “You fought Shades and a…a Sundragon, I think?”

  Raine gave him a dour look at this truth. “Five Shades overtook me as I fought the Sundragon Şrivas’rhakárakek, who had allied himself with Björn. After the Shades captured me, they took me to T’khendar where I spent several days in Malachai’s palace—a hellish time, for in every conscious moment I endured the agony of life in a realm without elae. I was on the brink of death when Malachai paid me a visit.” He paused and fixed his crystalline eyes on Ean in a pointed manner. “You see, Ean, an Adept breathes elae like humanity breathes air, and we cannot live without the lifeforce to sustain us. I’m not sure what Malachai did to bring me back, for I felt none of the working—whatever it was—but after he left, I was much restored.”

  “If it wasn’t elae,” Ean asked, “then what was it?”

  Raine frowned. “T’khendar touches both the outermost edge of the living realms—those fueled by elae—as well as the fringes of what might be considered the end of the universe, what lies beyond the realms of Light. There, in that place of unraveling, a different power rules, a consumptive power created to destroy everything it touches. We call this power deyjiin, which means ‘death’ in the Old Tongue.”

  “Deyjiin,” Ean murmured, remembering the violet-silver sheen that had destroyed his sword. The one the zanthyr remade…

  “After Malachai visited me in my room,” the Vestal continued, “I was taken to a hall where half a hundred Shades waited. I was joined by the other Vestals—Seth, Dagmar, my oath-sister Alshiba—and we were made to line up before the dais like penitents awaiting sentencing. That day was the first time i
n many weeks that I’d seen Malachai, for he’d long sought the safety of T’khendar while Björn won his war for him in Alorin.” Raine paused and shook his head sadly. “To see the change in him… Malachai was mad by then—beyond madness, really. There was little left of the man I’d known, just a haunted shell dominated by the darkness that had usurped his soul. You couldn’t even see his eyes, so devoured they’d become by his dark power, so afraid of the light. It was…it was tragic.”

  Raine flicked the stone off his thumb, and a dark sparkle sliced upward through the air. Then it was back in his hand and flashing across his knuckles again. “Things happened then…terrible things. You’ve heard the stories—the sacrifices, the parade of heads.”

  Ean felt a pang of disgust. “That’s all true?”

  Raine’s look was telling. “While we watched, a procession of Shades passed us carrying the heads of the last of our kind: the Mages who’d sheltered in the Citadel on Cair Tiern’aval. Only Björn had the wherewithal to breach the Citadel’s defenses.”

  Raine paused and shut his eyes. Even the stone became still in his palm. “Until then, I don’t think I really believed Björn had betrayed us…but that parade of death was a statement, Björn’s statement.” Raine lifted his gaze to hold Ean’s and shook his head bitterly. “You never could fault the bastard for efficiency. By sacrificing the Mages, Björn had, in one fell stroke, broken his oath to us and likewise proven his troth to Malachai. ’Tis Epiphany’s grace the Adepts known as the Fifty Companions lived to speak of it. They were the only survivors of Tiern’aval.”

  Raine closed his fingers around the stone and gripped it against his palm. “Soon thereafter, Malachai began his craft—that most famous of workings, the story told often and best by the Immortal Bard, Drake DiMatteo. Can you know how helpless we felt, Ean? To stand and watch first the flaunting of the murder of such sage souls—wiping out all hope for the advancement of Adept magic, which was Malachai’s fateful promise to us—then the imminent destruction of our home, and realize there is nothing we can do! Without elae, we were impotent as wielders, and as Adepts…as Adepts, we were dying. I myself could barely stand. But stand we did. Dagmar, Seth and I stood by and watched as Malachai struck down our oath-sister Alshiba, watched as he opened a weld into the Citadel in Tiern’aval, as Tiern’aval itself started crumbling...”

  Ean’s eyes were glued to Raine. “Until…?”

  Raine stared off for a moment. Then his tormented expression melted away. “Until the Balance shifted,” he answered, once more composed. “Malachai’s working had stretched the limits of Balance too far, and the Cosmos pushed back…but at a great and perilous cost.” He sighed regretfully. “The next thing I knew we were standing on the beach, soaking wet, looking out over the Bay of Jewels and wondering where Cair Tiern’aval had gone.”

  He shook his head as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. “To this day, no one knows what happened to the island. It vanished like a vapor, and while there are some who believe it sank, it is more probable that it still exists somewhere between the realms, wrenched out of Alorin as a result of the terrible forces worked in its vicinity.”

  Ean felt slightly numbed to hear this tale told true. Barely escaping Malachai’s dark work in T’khendar and finding themselves stranded on a beach was a far cry from the storied ending, where the triumphant Vestals banished Björn van Gelderan to the tainted realm. No wonder the bards tell a different tale. The truth was far too disheartening.

  “So. It was there on that beach that Dagmar vowed to return to T’khendar.”

  As far as Ean could recall, no mortal knew the reason the Second Vestal had embarked upon his quest to find T’khendar, though speculation abounded. All that was known was that the phrase ‘Dagmar’s dungeon’ had its root in fact. “Did he return in order to kill Björn?” Ean asked.

  Raine gave him a tense look. “No. He went back to salvage him.”

  Ean let out a low whistle. “And he never returned.”

  “No,” Raine answered grimly. He walked back to retake his seat. “Nor have any of the Vestals ever heard from him again. We know, of course, of the many testimonies of Dagmar coming to Nodefinders and others in dreams, but he has not contacted any of us.” Raine frowned as he exhaled. “To his credit, Dagmar might have tried to reach us and found that the nature of our magical oaths prevented contact in dreamscape. I just do not know.”

  Ean was piecing things together in his mind. “Before…you said you were dying,” he recalled, “that you couldn’t live in T’khendar without elae to sustain you. Returning there would seem certain death. Why would Dagmar risk his life to salvage a traitor?”

  Raine spread palms to either side, leaned back in his chair, and settled Ean a telling look that seemed to ask, Whyever indeed? But he replied only, “Dagmar has an elevated code of honor that is both his strength and his weakness. He did what he did because he felt it was the right thing to do. Now, if indeed he lives, it will be by Björn’s graces, and there is no telling what loyalties Dagmar will have been forced to betray to gain Björn’s goodwill.”

  Ean drew back in surprise. “You think he’s joined the Fifth Vestal?”

  The Truthreader looked regretful. “I fear it is more than a possibility. To have lived this long in T’khendar—if he lives at all…Dagmar has either sworn new oaths to Malachai’s dark gods, or he has sworn an oath to Björn. In either case, he is suspect…but Dagmar is not the point.”

  “What is?”

  “Ean…” Raine pursed his lips and leaned forward in his chair. “What I wanted to impress upon you with this story is that yes, while Björn has an obvious interest in you, you may be safe from him—and I say may, for this is far from certain. But Ean,” and he settled the prince a penetrating look, “never allow yourself to believe that the Fifth Vestal is not a traitor, that he doesn’t work toward his own ends wholly, that he cannot betray you in the ninth hour, or that you are indispensable to his accursedly convoluted plans.”

  A knock came three times upon the door, and then twice more. Raine rose to unlock it, and Morin swept inside as Ean was also rising. “All is readied,” the spymaster reported. “Ten minutes ago, the duchess and the Truthreader left on a coach drawn by six horses, your stallion Caldar among them.”

  Ean wondered what they’d told Alyneri to get her to go along with him, or if they’d simply ordered her without any explanation at all. Then it occurred to him that if he couldn’t stand up to Alyneri d’Giverny, what chance did he have of bringing Björn van Gelderan and his Shades to justice?

  Morin meanwhile continued, “The captain headed into the city on a task for the king and will rendezvous with you at Fersthaven by midday.”

  “The captain?” Ean startled out of his brooding at this news. He’d agreed to taking Alyneri and Tanis along with him—there were a number of good reasons to have their talents at his disposal—but he’d known nothing of Rhys val Kinkaid coming too. He rather dreaded traveling with the hotheaded Captain of the King’s Own Guard. “Why Rhys?”

  “Your father agreed to this plan only if Rhys accompanied you, Ean,” Morin told him. “He was explicit in his terms.” To Raine, Morin said, “We must hurry. Fynnlar is in place to flag down the Healer’s coach, but Ean must be there to make a quick entry.”

  Raine nodded and looked to the Prince. “Leave word for me at the places I mentioned should you need my aid. Good luck, Ean. Epiphany’s blessing on your journey.”

  Ean nodded to him. Then he grabbed up his bag and followed Morin out into the dim tunnels. Morin led him with swift surety through the maze of passageways until they came to a door that opened onto a steep stone staircase angling up into darkness.

  “Here is where we part ways, Your Highness.”

  “Thank you, Morin…I think.”

  Morin placed a hand on the prince’s shoulder. “Remember all that you’ve been counseled. Knowledge is power, as your father said.”

  Ean turned to face the steps, but Morin called
his attention one last time. “And Ean?”

  The prince turned over his shoulder.

  “Keep thinking on your time with the Shade, on that question of strange things happening.”

  Ean shrugged. “Sure.”

  Morin nodded. “Good-bye then. Fair skies and safe passage.”

  After what seemed an interminable climb, Ean reached a landing and an iron door so rusted that it took at least five minutes to work it open enough to slip through, and even then he had to push his pack through first and suck in his breath as he followed it.

  The door opened into a well house that was damp and smelled of dandelions and wet leaves. Fortunately the door to the well house stood ajar, and Ean emerged to a brilliant day. He followed a path from the well house through the forest until he emerged unexpectedly upon the King’s Road.

  “Ean!” Fynn’s voice sounded a loud whisper.

  Ean looked around, but he didn’t see his cousin, only a vagabond curled up beneath the golden autumn leaves of a maple sapling.

  “Don’t stare, you fool man!” Fynn hissed while trying to look as if he slept soundly. Ean smiled as he recognized Fynn at last. The royal cousin lifted his head and glared at Ean. “Get off the road, you idiot! The duchess will be along any moment.”

  Ean cursed his own stupidity. Raine and Morin had both impressed upon him the importance of keeping a low profile and remaining as anonymous as possible, and here he was standing in the middle of the cursed road for anyone to shoot at. Fool man, is right!

  He dutifully pushed his way into a near thicket of bushes and then crouched down in the open center to watch the road.

  Only moments later a coach and horses could be heard coming down the road. As the coach came into view, Ean saw that it was drawn by six horses. Though all were grey-white, to Ean’s trained eye, Caldar was unmistakable among them.

  Fynn jumped up and ran to wave down the coachman yelling about alms for the poor and could they possibly spare some rum? While the driver had obviously been briefed, it was evident that Alyneri had not, for she immediately poked her pale head out the coach window. “Why have we stopped? Who is that vagabond? Tell him to clear the road!”