by Janny Wurts
For a while, only the torch-flame whickered in dialogue with the drawing blaze in the fire-place.
Vivet presently dropped the halfway-gutted bird and banged down her fists. “Damn you!” Outrage pointed enough to drill flint turned her battered face towards him. “You act as though naught in the world has gone wrong!”
But the purple contusions on her flesh shouted testament to the contrary.
To stand with a sword, even sheathed, posed a threat. Arithon tucked up and sat by the hearth. He laid the shining, obsidian blade flat, deferent to the axe she kept within reach. “Should I forget? You knifed your attacker.” Arms folded atop his bent knees, he added, “I’ve witnessed your courage. Therefore, I’m able to bow to your fears without prejudice.” His grave regard was an initiate sorcerer’s, grounded in the self-knowledge to bear the most vicious hatred, unflinching.
Vivet spun away. The gleam on her hair like warm carnelian, she raised her blood-smeared wrist to her cheek to blot her ashamed tears.
Arithon’s patient remonstrance pursued her. “A past act of abuse can’t vanquish the strength of the survivor I see before me.” He petitioned for truce. “Tonight’s calm is equally real. And without pretence, despite the after-shock of an unspeakable trauma.”
Vivet quivered. Fragile poise undone at a stroke, she snatched the knife from the trestle and bolted. Her tempestuous exit slammed the plank door, forceful enough to shake cobwebs down from the rafters.
She could not be gone long. Without a wool mantle, the relentless cold must outface her emotional storm. Arithon slid the black sword out of sight behind the stacked firewood. Then he took charge of the half-prepared meal, goaded by the ruthless irony: that his platitude consoled nothing. Within and without, his presence was emptied by desolation. The core of his heart had been just as savaged as Vivet’s used body. Naught existed in the wide world to salve the anguish encountered within these four walls. His own needled urge to take flight found no respite in the rote plucking of carcasses.
Yet a master’s awareness viewed the hard road ahead without quarter. All pain must be measured, and met, and finally conquered. Life demanded resilience. Or else the mired spirit would languish, forlorn, crippled under self-indulgent regret.
Arithon stuffed the split birds with wild onion, then wrapped them in herb leaves for flavour. Spitted, they roasted over the coals, while his makeshift oven contrived with flat rocks baked the tubers inside their scrubbed skins.
Vivet returned to that savoury aroma, her downcast eyes puffed, and her arms burdened with additional evergreen. Not to seem useless, she dropped the fresh boughs for his bed in the opposite corner.
“I’m sorry.” Her strained limp brought her back towards the trestle. “I’ve given poor thanks for your civil forbearance.”
Arithon shifted at once to restore space between them.
“Stay,” Vivet objected, singed red with shame. “Don’t freeze yourself on the floor for my sake.”
The first torch had burned down. She kindled another and wedged the stake upright before perching in rigid defiance across the table.
His own raw emotion battened in shadow, Arithon studied her. Up close, underneath the patched bruises, her skin was too young for crow’s-feet. Barely into her twenties, she had a sparrow’s pert grace, a firm chin, apple cheeks, and an expressive dimple beneath coral lips. Her independence carried the cracked fragility of fine porcelain, savagely used but not ruined, though her shadowed glance had forever lost the care-free sparkle of innocence.
“I was returning to Ettinmere Settlement,” she admitted, a brazen effort to forge trust in good faith. Sooty circles beneath downcast lashes wore the pouches of recurrent weeping. Trembling unmasked her false confidence as she added, “I have family there. A father, now passed. Three brothers. Two married sisters. My mother fell ill. I heard through a fur trader. But no word since then to know if she’s living.”
Vivet’s lids flicked up, her bloodshot eyes the vivid blue of a fair-weather lake. “My people are proud of their insular ways. They’ll say, perhaps rightly, I should not have run off on a feckless adventure to Deal.”
The moment filled with the sibilant crackle of flames, while wind off the peaks swooped over the roof shakes, and prised a complaint from a squeaky shutter. Arithon studied Vivet’s clenched hands, without obvious marks of a gainful profession. Distress obscured her true personality. Left to his musician’s gift, he sifted the overtones of her remark and answered her plaintive uncertainty. “You’d have had good reason to seek your own way. One just as important as the resolve that drives your contrite return.”
Vivet’s breath hitched. “More than anything, I wanted the learning to read and write.” More tears might have spilled, had she not been wrung dry. Her loosened hair hazed under flame-light, she huddled like a storm-battered bird, fluffed after a cruel drenching. Her panicky outburst escaped before thought, “Fatemaster’s mercy, I daren’t be seen by my people like this!”
And that sharp, fateful phrase struck the sensitive ear of the Masterbard. Arithon sounded the unpremeditated truth and mapped Vivet’s untenable conflict. Beneath fear, under desperate, trapped rage and stunned hurt in the aftermath of violation, her mangled spirit required the unpressured solitude to recoup and heal. There, vital need floundered into the pit of her frantic anxiety. Wing-broken, her shattered confidence quickened the terror of being alone.
Arithon committed himself without thought. Rootless after his own love’s betrayal, the ashes of his desire embraced Vivet’s agonized need, uncontested.
Distraught incentive cared very little how long her predicament shackled him. Since his ancestral compassion abandoned no wounded spirit to languish, the man sanctioned as the Crown Prince of Rathain plucked the spit off the hearth in deferent anonymity.
“Your brace of woodcock appear to be roasted.” Pain masked by the trivial matter of supper, he set the unwarranted seal on his future. “You need go nowhere before you are ready. I’ll keep watch at the door while you sleep. When you’re comfortable travelling, and if you wish, I’ll guard your way back to your kinfolk in Ettinmere.”
Vivet’s tension unburdened in flooding relief. Arithon rode the impulse of his generosity, salved by his power to offer redress, where his personal hurt found no solace. No farsighted glimpse of dire complication ruffled his sensitive instincts.
Instead, as the evening deepened, the quiet camaraderie shaped by the meal wove a web of frail magic. Meat knifed off the bone and eaten with fingers wore down reserved self-consciousness. His teasing remark about duelling with straws to determine who washed up, without pots and plates, almost raised Vivet’s shy smile. The fleeting flicker of forgotten joy touched the moment she thought he looked elsewhere.
Eased by a beauty that transformed her marked face, Arithon conceded her path to recovery was not entirely one-sided. Though a prolonged stay at the cabin did nothing for his pierced heart, his earnest offer of escort to Ettinmere perhaps posed an unforeseen advantage. Vivet’s grateful family might give him shelter. If not to over-winter in safety, at least he might bargain for warmer clothing and needful supplies. The settlement was remote. Its insular society, hidebound in tradition, shunned outsiders and distrusted Sunwheel priests. As a passing haven, the site could thwart the deadly reach of his enemies.
The present meanwhile rested on the ordinary. While Vivet attended her necessities outside, Arithon tossed their leftovers through the window to fatten the scavenging mice. He secured the loose shutter, replaced the spent torch with a rushlight, and banked the embers in the fire-place. After Vivet’s return, he took up his sword and moved the piled evergreen boughs for his bed to the threshold. Then he sat with his back against the shut door. Tired himself, he honoured his word: burned reckless resource to keep wakeful vigil until the woman settled her nerves and rest overcame her anxiety.
The rushlight burned low. Melted into shadow, the swept boards smelled of damp. Long fled, the sweet fragrance of the bundled herbs o
nce hung to dry in the rafters. No ephemeral trace of the healer’s presence remained to chafe Arithon’s overkeyed senses.
Aching, bereft, he watched Vivet fight the stir of incipient nightmares. Reflection sparked a fitful gleam in her opened eyes until the reed ember winked out. She did not toss and turn but lay in taut stillness into the deeps of the night. Chafed by her turbulent tension, and haunted by other ghosts from his gapped memory, Arithon yearned for the balm of his talent on the lyranthe. The cabin’s too-personal history made the silence ring loud on his ear. Each breath offended his nostrils with the stinging pungency of balsam: a strong scent, not her, and a signal wrongness that frayed every natural instinct.
Fretted past sense, Arithon shouldered the watch through another wearisome hour. The thud of his heart-beat yearned for another woman’s secretive thoughts. He felt more alone than ever before in his years of extended life.
The onerous minutes crept by. The risen moon silvered the cracks in the shutter. Naught stirred the fir boughs outside but the breeze, while the shuttlecock flight of an owl chased mice come to gorge upon the scrapped bones.
Until Vivet broke the unbearable quiet with a tremulous whisper, “I’m sorry. I never asked for your name.”
“Call me by Arin,” said the Prince of Rathain, disinclined to share his identity. That mistake had harmed the crofters in Kelsing, whose fortunes had turned for the worse by his presence. Better to consign Vivet’s well-being to her family and depart without leaving a trace.
Time came at long last when the body’s exhaustion surmounted distress and the throbbing complaint of fresh injuries. Vivet’s tortured breathing deepened and quieted. Beyond weary himself, Arithon fashioned a simple cantrip to awaken himself before sunrise. Then he retired the sword and snugged down his mantle. His depleted awareness let go at once. Alert for too long, reserves utterly spent, he welcomed oblivion and plunged without care into dreamless sleep. But not as he wished, until dawn.
Pulled from the drugged syrup of black-out exhaustion, Arithon stirred to the blissful, bold heat of a woman’s hands on him: fingers that teased through his parted clothes and caressed him with intimate urgency. Her touch trembled, shameless, arousing as fire, intoxicate with the fierce promise of release. The assault on his undone defences caught his breath, then drove the wind from him, branding his skin with desire that rushed him senseless.
He roused, consumed. Vital, alive, hazed by animal lust after repressive years of cruel abstinence, his flesh screamed. The air he fought into punched lungs wrung him dizzy. Clinging as velvet, musked in piquant smoke, the scent of exotic perfume unmoored him. He need only surrender himself. Falling into the abyss of raw pleasure, he plunged heedless towards blind conflagration. Past reason, the urgent clamour of male ecstasy trampled his desolate hurt.
Confusion welcomed the storm wind of passion, a forceful antidote for the heart-break that stranded him in bleak solitude. A longing too vast to contain might be drowned, if only for one fleeting moment.
If he dreamed, here was surcease. Veiled in a silken fall of warm hair, raised to heightened torment by blind need, Arithon groaned. Thought fled as her fecund weight straddled him.
Reflex took over. Yearning drove the leap of his being: but no answering spiral surged in response. No rarefied synergy kindled delight. The lightning bolt of her counterpoint harmony did not rise to balance him. If ever he had shared such exquisite joy, or flown, bedazzled, into the glory of a matched consummation, no such seamless experience unfolded. His spirit encountered no flowering grandeur but launched into nothing, unpartnered. No piercing tenderness thrilled his raced pulse with the grace of a mirrored response.
The hands gripping his shoulders were none that he knew: and in the burgeoning blaze where emotion should have melted him into cascading completion, Arithon slammed, bewildered, against an implacable separation.
In fact, the glad shimmer of physical pleasure on her part was utterly absent.
This frenetic bid to possess him was not carefree eagerness but the desperation of dread, overwritten by calculation. His shaken faculties curdled. Pain of the flesh and anguish of mind violated his initiate’s integrity.
Arithon recoiled as though struck in the gut. He broke the chokehold of her embrace. Wrenched free of her naked weight in revulsion that tore the eyelets of his unstrung laces out of his rifled clothing. Slammed backward against the cabin’s latched door, he cried out. The jolt to his frame scarcely registered. Cold to the bone, breached desire quenched utterly, he stared reeling into the dark, blistered to mage-sighted outrage.
The waif’s face he confronted wore bruises.
“Vivet!” he shouted, aghast. “Ath’s greater mercy!” Moved again, jackknifed upright, Arithon snapped off his shredded shirt. He flung her the garment with a hoarse plea to cover her nakedness. “What are you about? Grace above, you can’t want this! Not from me, tonight, surely not from any man!”
“Believe it.” She crumpled, shivering, the mangled cloth crammed beneath her soaked cheek. Damaged in body and spirit, she languished in artless prostration amid the scattered balsam. “More than life, I crave your affection.”
Which was an outright lie. The note of her falsehood jarred his musician’s ear and splashed ugly echoes across his rogue far-sight.
Arithon jerked away lest she debase herself further. Yanked up his small-clothes and breeches, even as she stretched and clasped his ankles in entreaty.
Offended, he shoved her off. “What do you want of me, Vivet?” Furious, he pressured her frigid intent. “Comfort? Favour? Security? Do you wish a house, a mate, or just a randy champion to cosset your injuries on a pedestal? Is it children you want to salve loneliness? Or do you seek a stranger’s infatuated sympathy to bury your sorrows? Take care how you answer! I am no puppet to be yanked on the strings of a craven manipulation.”
“I want nothing!” she retorted. “Only to win back a measure of happiness.”
Which indignant denial made Arithon feel soiled. “Stop cheating yourself.” The heated air gagged him, smoke-thick, floral sweet, and cloying enough to blanket his senses. “Tell me the truth before I walk out!”
She hung her head. Tangled hair, fallen, muffled her plea, “Is your offer to guard me so easily shaken?”
Sickened, wrung dizzy by his raced pulse and the mangle of grief left by his own ravaged hope, Arithon side-stepped and flung open the shutter. He needed the shock of cold air in his lungs. Anything to quench the rife scald of his temper, before he vented his outrage and struck her.
Whatever forsaken sentiment drove her, Vivet rejected all instinct for self-preservation. “Why spurn my thanks for your generosity?”
Arithon met her pandering question with sarcasm. “Should I succumb? A strumpet requires less attention. How long, before you also demand my loyalty and my confidence? Poppet, enlighten me. Is wanton sport in my bed worth so much?”
But his cruel bid to win solitude failed to shake her tawdry masquerade. “The choice, of course, is still yours to make.”
Arithon’s smile bared teeth in the moonlight. “And if I am ruthless? Would you balk at vice? Or protest if my habits don’t suit your fancy?”
“I trust you,” she insisted. “Give my favour a chance.”
“Blindly?” he shot back, the more vicious as his rocked equilibrium resettled.
“Even so.” She swallowed, her bruised features ribboned with tears. Piteous under his blistering scorn, she wrestled down sobs to finish. “Yes. Blindly.”
“Then you debase yourself like a dock-side whore! Why throw me your charms without self-respect? That’s a dangerous folly. Because I could take you, Vivet, on those libertine terms. Hard and fast, with no pang of remorse, because to do otherwise mocks integrity.”
The revilement that ought to have shaken her only clenched her obstinate fingers in his rucked shirt. “Even so. I offer.”
His response mocked. “You offer me what?”
Moonlight mottled her mussed hair and shado
wed her eyes too deeply to read what he sought: the least trace of the honest, misplaced feelings she denied for who knew what reckless purpose.
Restored to command by the bite of the draught, Arithon tried again to rend the pretence driving her to self-destruction. “Then who will drink the cup of pain that remains when I have deserted you?” He gripped the sill. Presented his back, whipped to a shiver that taxed his chilled frame. Masterbard, trained to interpret emotional nuance, he braced himself against flinching mercy and pitched his revulsion to break her. “For you would waken alone, my hot strumpet, because the passion you tender with such persistence is none of my making!”
Her riposte stung with anger. “Then go ahead and abandon me now since I’m ruined for life in the eyes of my kinfolk!”
Surprise caught him short. Arithon’s mage-sighted faculties slipped as her admission smashed his expectation. While he doused the blindsided scald of his temperament, sorting the puzzle of altered dynamics, Vivet hung shieldless and vulnerable through a silence that lasted too long. Shattered, she lunged upright. Faster than thought, she plucked out the trapper’s knife left impaled in the table-top. Steel flashed in self-determined aggression. Not against him, but angled inwards to pierce her own heart.
Arithon moved then. Shoved off the sill, he gripped her forearm with bone-crushing force. The blade tumbled free and clattered to the floor. The metallic clang too loud in his ears, he crushed Vivet’s balked agony into submission against his bare chest.
The contact unravelled his barriers again, spun him off centre, and ripped him wide open.
He reeled, fighting to ground his unhinged perception. Trained reflex escaped him. The exotic fragrance of Vivet’s perfume sucked his subtle awareness headlong into her fevered passion. Enveloped by frightening, intimate empathy, he drowned in the heat off her skin.
Her naked desire stormed his reserve. Thrown under redoubled assault and wrestling his besieged intellect, Arithon fought to breathe. The tainted air whirled him giddy and sapped his will to stay upright. Carnal instinct this time found no sheet-anchor. Nothing to stay his innate male response to her female bid for possessive conquest.
