by Janny Wurts
Engrossed over tactical maps in a tent, surrounded by his ranked captains, The Hatchet stabs a thick finger into the notch at the Pass of Orlan, and declares, “Like slinking rats, the clans have denned up where the terrain is riddled with bolt-holes. The High Priesthood wants them flushed out before winter. Let’s hear your proposals to meet that directive …”
Gathered in Halwythwood’s lodge to select the party sent after the Prince of Rathain, Iyat-thos Tarens squares off against Cosach like the boulder pitched against granite: “No one besides me knows his Grace’s history at first hand, and none of your scouts has the town-born background to travel the open roads with impunity …”
Summer 5923
III. Fissure
The hidden approach to Ettinmere Settlement devolved to a terraced footpath, ancient and weathered. Arithon followed Vivet’s lead with care, often required to leap crumbled gaps or surmount wheeling vertigo where the way narrowed. The precarious track notched a near-vertical slope, edged by sun-beaten rock crocheted in the cracks with the roots of crabbed firs. The dizzying view opened up over air, the milky haze of midday filmed over the gashed chasm below. Hawks soared like flecks of nicked gold, with the indigo sky overhead a stretched drum between snow-capped peaks.
In an open vista that extended for miles, the trail behind snaked like unreeled cord through the contorted vales. Any unfriendly movement could not be concealed. Yet Arithon could not shake the persistent impression of watching eyes.
“We’re not far.” Paused to sip from one of the spring-fed falls that splashed over the brink and frayed into mist, Vivet tipped her chin skywards. Her flushed, freckled skin was no longer yellowed by fading bruises. Two patient fortnights at the cabin, and more time on the trail had settled her nerves. Or else the familiar ground eased the tension that rode her like a whipped horse.
Arithon looked up at her prompt. A vulture spiralled on the thermals, distanced to a taut pen-stroke. Common enough in the Storlains, where wolves and mountain cats hunted, carrion birds circled in tireless search of gnawed carcasses: except that something shiny winked through the feathers on the raptor’s breast. “Yon creature is tame?”
“Not exactly. Our shamans link with them as observers.” Vivet qualified without artifice, “That one’s tracking our presence.”
“And Ettinmere doesn’t like trespassers.” Annoyance gouged Arithon back to his feet. “I hope you’ll be more forthcoming about how your folk receive strangers.”
“My people kill suspected rapists on sight,” Vivet answered, wilted. “That’s why we waited to leave. I dared not risk misplaced blame for my shameful condition.”
Arithon measured her belated sincerity, flicked to guarded distrust. “I have gone far enough. As one of their own, such arcane protection should see you the rest of the way without harm.”
Vivet exclaimed, “Please! You can’t go.” Alarmed, she expounded, “We have rigid customs concerning outsiders. If you turn away without proper leave, you’ll forfeit your place as my guest. My people must know who you are, first. If you don’t face them honestly, they will shoot you down. I can make things right!” she hastened to amend. “I promise you’ll be welcomed warmly once the formalities are satisfied.”
Arithon weighed his choices, pinned in discomfort as noonday sun smote the clear air and baked the rocks like a furnace. His sword was no use against concealed archers. Conjured shadow turned upon folk without any cause for hostility risked a notoriety that might draw his enemies. Better, he judged, to earn amity and let Ettinmere’s vigilant suspicion of strangers guard his back as a windfall advantage.
“Lead on,” he told Vivet.
“I cannot,” she added with chagrined regret. “By our ways, I must take you in, blindfolded.”
That protocol nettled him. Nonetheless, he endured with iron forbearance while she tore the dusty hem from her chemise. His bent head concealed his distaste as she bound his eyes and knotted the cloth at his nape. Her seductive scent and her touch offended his person. Yet indignity scarcely merited a fight, not when he was tired at heart and disinclined to provoke cultural friction.
“They will come for us,” Vivet said at a rushed whisper. “Do as they say and stay quiet.”
The sentries arrived fast, two on foot from behind, their step almost soundless, while two more unreeled from above, the creak of stressed rope occluded by the bounce and crack of dislodged pebbles. They asked no questions of Vivet but took brusque hold of Arithon. Because they did not attempt to disarm him, he allowed them the blistering liberty.
They bound his wrists. Roughly, as though they handled a criminal, he was noosed by the neck with a slip knot. Then he found himself prodded ahead, the man in front and the one at his heels his sole guidance on the narrow path.
Their intention was plain: if he resisted, a shove off the rim would hang him outright. Arithon broke into a sweat. On the whim of a woman he had no grounds to trust, his life lay at the mercy of eccentric strangers. Whether the Ettinfolk tested his courage, or tried his mettle to measure his earnesty, he had no recourse except to rise to the uncivil challenge.
Unrelenting, the Ettinmen were, but not cruel. They paused for rest when the ascent left him winded, and quenched his thirst from their unstoppered waterskins.
Yet the imposed conditions upon him overspent kindness or courtesy. Chilled after dusk, while the glacial gusts buffeted through his thin shirt, Arithon checked his temper, fed up by the relentless silence. Yet before he rejected Vivet’s advice, the footing beneath his nose-led step opened up in descent. The rock ledge broadened to packed gravel and mud, grooved by the passage of cart-wheels. Then the rutted track gave way to pasture, fragrant with alpine flowers. Through muffling cloth, Arithon scented the redolence of penned livestock. Breeze moaned through a nearby wind-break, embellished with the tinkle of goat bells and fragmented chatter: a woman’s chirped laugh, and the treble excitement of children, underscored by male voices and downhill, barking dogs, perhaps kept for herding.
Yet Arithon’s keepers did not turn towards the settlement in the valley. Blindfolded still, tugged by their rope, he was shepherded into a timber enclosure. The tight space cramped even his slight build, and soaked up sound without echo. Head ducked beneath the low, raftered ceiling, he sucked in the rancid aroma of a smoke-house recently used to cure butchered meat.
The door creaked shut, followed by a rasp and thunk as someone outside shot a timber bar stout enough to thwart bears.
Then urgent hands pushed and shoved till he sat on the packed-earth floor. The stale strip of rag was yanked from his face. Mage-sense plumbed a darkness frowsty as cut felt, with two of his escort huddled beside him.
Then one sparked a tallow dip. Painted by the yellow ripple of flame, Arithon studied the Ettinmen.
Each wore a peaked felt cap, with rolled brims and wool bands stuck with feathers or knot-woven oat straw. Fair-skinned and sunburned, they had cropped, sandy hair, and eyes pale as coin silver. Narrow, refined features bespoke insular blood and inimical lack of expression. Long-boned, with slender hands, they were as alike as fledged hawks with their thin, high-bridged noses and feral attentiveness.
Among their kind, Arithon was the crow tossed into a harrier’s nest.
The extravagant detail of their dress began with embroidered shirts, chamois vests, and elk-hide leggings stippled with indigo ink. Belts and boots were adorned with braided furs, or stitched quills, or the flayed bones of small birds. Each man wore a curved dagger, the handles inlaid with lapis and gold and topped with varnished knots at the pommels.
No move was made to free Arithon’s wrists or remove the looped rope from his neck. If he was a prisoner, no one yet asked him to forfeit his weapons. When loaded stares failed to pressure him to speak first, the fellow with eyes like steel grommets and the hatband with a cock pheasant’s crest snapped off a statement in his native dialect.
Arithon did not understand. Given his clammed silence, one of the pair at length ventured a stilt
ed translation. “Vivet Daldari claims you as her guest. We wait with you here while Ettinmere’s elders hear her petition in your behalf.”
But Arithon had firmed his own course: to smile and be gracious, and smartly move on once he had established his harmless credentials. “No matter the outcome of Vivet’s appeal, I expect to fare eastward directly.”
The speaker bared wolfish teeth. “Stranger, our custom says otherwise. If the elders reject you in Vivet’s behalf, you will not leave here alive.”
Arithon controlled the spark of his anger. Conversational, uncompliant, he said, “You would seize rogue authority and condemn a blameless traveller subject to crown justice?”
The spokesman returned a bold ultimatum. “The blameless man does not venture here, and we answer to no other law beyond Ettin.”
Arithon kept his own counsel concerning the sovereignty of charter law. Rather than argue, he showed them contempt and settled back for a catnap. Mage-trained and in sharp command of his nerves, he slept, perhaps for an hour. Until inbound tension like a plucked string stirred the dead air and roused him.
Incomprehensible voices in dialect approached the barred door. A Masterbard’s sensitivity picked out the discordant notes of outraged surprise, fast tempered by someone’s authority. Whatever the unforeseen hitch, the Ettinmen with him surged to their feet. The bilingual fellow, eyes gleaming, explained in his stilted accent, “Vivet is brought here. You are permitted to speak with her alone. None will disturb you although our guard stays until the elders request your word on the matter.”
Prickled at his nape, Arithon probed with delicate courtesy, “What business of mine concerns Ettinmere’s council?”
The man smiled, eyebrows raised. “If the business in question is yours,” he began, then snorted back sudden laughter, and grinned. “Ah, by Teaah’s sacred pink tits! You don’t know, then? Well, laddie, bequeathed by my breath to your ears: our shaman’s confirmed that Vivet Daldari is pregnant.”
The news punched Arithon windless. Stone-faced, he watched the door open and shut behind the spokesman’s departure. The tallow dip fluttered to the influx of draught, then steadied and streamed again as the panel flung inward. The young woman entered, whose artless deceit had contrived this benighted embarrassment.
She had bathed and changed. Hair twined with primroses cascaded in splendour, reddish strands glinting over a draw-string gown that exposed the freckled, cream skin of her shoulders. Her scent pervaded the windowless gloom as she knelt at his feet, a scared doe in poised entreaty.
Her upturned face and the imposed view of her cleavage raised a stab of visceral hatred. Stung as though whipped, Arithon moved back, annoyed that his mindless male instinct still stirred to her flaunted attributes.
“I told my elders the quickened child was yours,” she confessed, scalded scarlet. “What choice did I have? Its life would become forfeit without a willing sire’s grant of child-right.”
“Your dishonest seduction was an attempt to establish paternity?” Arithon accused, stunned incredulous. Her claim was unconscionable, that one bungled tryst might pin her luckless conception on him. “The chance is slight, Vivet. Birth is likely to prove I am not the babe’s father.”
“Although you could be!” She clung, head bowed, and disclosed in agony, “Outsider, you don’t understand. If my people find out I’ve been used, unwilling, they’ll say my womb’s been cursed. A forced woman brings sour luck. If no man claims the burden as ward, her offspring henceforward are shunned as ill-fated.”
“Without my protection, you claim to be ruined?” Brittle with sarcasm, Arithon snapped. “That’s bathos!” Her glass-beaded necklace shivered as she shrank. The glint against her trembling flesh did not stir him, and the tawdry effort to dress for appeal offended his natural intelligence. “Just leave. Why stay for this piteous drama, Vivet? Anywhere else, you’d live free. Why not marry for love, without stigma?”
“I prayed to Sky and Earth that my courses would come,” the woman gushed on, woe forced through a choked throat. “I wasn’t beyond a fortnight overdue!”
“Then why rush things into a public scene?” Arithon asked, furious the issue had been broached before strangers without his prior awareness.
Vivet lifted a face streaked with tears, delicate as the glaze upon an heirloom porcelain. Fragile enough to shatter at a touch, she reached for his hand, and the constraint of s’Ffalenn compassion entangled his personal need to pull back.
“A woman’s moon time is not private, here!” Vivet hastened to explain. “By Ettin tradition, females who travel abroad are questioned upon their return. The shaman condemns those who answer him false. Could I forsake my last pretence of virtue? Of course I told the truth! Roaco’s divination ascertains I will bear a male child in the spring.”
Arithon engaged his mage-sight straightaway, loath to rely on an Ettinman’s word. For self-integrity, he confirmed the ephemeral gleam of the quickened seed in her belly.
Yet Vivet refused to have her get’s rightful paternity deferred until birth. “What proof will matter, then, whose babe draws breath? Here, offspring of rape are killed without quarter! Exposed on the mountain side and left to die, unless someone of character agrees to foster them.”
Arithon’s fury exploded past restraint. “Murder in cold blood! Your people execute blameless newborns for the lack of a paternal name?”
Vivet flinched. “Ettinmere raises no half-orphaned children. More, as the mother abandoned, I would be outcast. Fit only to serve others, and never to be chia, cherished as a wife. A woman in pregnancy must have a provider to pledge surety for her welfare and the babe’s upbringing.”
Wisdom in this case spoke for mature strength. “A liaison gained by manipulation won’t give you that happiness.”
“Did I ask to be forced?” Sobbing, Vivet clutched his legs and poured out the dregs of her misery. “This is my home, with my ties to family thrown into jeopardy by an ill turn. Ettin’s way embraces tuoram, a code of responsibility that assigns privilege through honour.”
“I should walk away.” Arithon wrenched free in disgust. “Your people’s tradition is nothing but vicious barbarity.”
Yet in the dense distance between them, the unspoken, slim chance: her babe might in fact bear his lineage. And if the innocent get of a stranger, his choice to sacrifice that unborn life laid an infanticide at his feet. S’Ffalenn prince to the core, his blood heritage chained him to Vivet’s needy plight.
“What of the child?” Arithon pressed. “Could a luckless bastard find any joy amid this rigid culture?”
Crest-fallen, Vivet exclaimed, “But you sorely mistake us!” She flooded him with eager reassurances. “Outsider blood is highly prized! We may be an unworldly folk, hidebound by obligation and kin ties, but our lines are in need of fresh vigour. Your charge as a foster parent won’t last for life. The community holds our children as equals after they celebrate puberty. Mine would be sought as a coveted mate if, by your grace, he survives.”
Tallow-fed flame dipped the moment in gold, the flush on the woman’s over-bred skin transparent with hope, and the slim man before her armoured in retreat, his stubbled jaw clenched and his eyes chipped emerald. Twelve years of freedom, balanced against a blameless, new life: forced to capitulate through compassion, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn yielded to the bitter price that silenced the outcry of his royal conscience.
The static that deranged the flux through the Storlains allowed only erratic glimpses of Arithon’s straits. The bursts of connection brushed over Elaira where she camped under stars in the flatlands beyond the outskirts of Shipsport. The air smelled of dust and paper-dry grass, muddied by a south breeze fecund with marsh taint off the river delta. A squall line formed over the Cildein deeps riffled her skin to the distanced flicker of heat lightning.
The mainland would be sodden by dawn. Therefore, her blankets stayed laced in cerecloth, stuffed under her neck as a pillow. Her journey tomorrow would breast flaying wind and cold ra
in like the snap of a wet rag in her face.
But not yet. Poised as an indrawn breath before change, the electromagnetic currents in the high Storlains surged into a lucid stream.
The connected touch of her distant beloved raised Elaira to flash-point gestalt. The tumultuous wave of Arithon’s recent past and the burden of his entangled present threw her a jumble of impressions, the charge of emotional turmoil a surprise punch to the gut. Rapt mastery alone let her anchor until the morass settled into cohesion.
The impact of Vivet’s pregnancy surfaced first, her dread fear and vulnerability warped into a selfish demand for protection. The result wove a snare to bind the tenets of any s’Ffalenn born true to his lineage. The price wrung Elaira to empathic tears. “Don’t,” she gasped, helpless. “Arithon, don’t give way.”
Yet he would, he must: even as once before he had staked his life to spare Fionn Areth.
Elaira knew his true heart, as no other. She grasped the deep-set revulsion that savaged his dignity: the bitter trial laid on his spirit, suppressed under pressure through forty-eight days since the storm had compelled him to share the decency of charitable shelter. Woman herself and healer-trained, the enchantress stripped the false tissue from Vivet’s clinging need and exposed the manipulation behind the beguilement that fuelled this moment’s trapped anger.
The unstable flux in the Storlains rang to Arithon’s stifled revolt as he bent to appease his inflexible heritage. The sorrow driving his resignation stamped the crux like a granite engraving: what gave an extended life its self-worth? Where could a man go to find peace of mind, relentlessly hounded by enemies? What better priority ruled him if he could not commit a mere dozen years to salvage an innocent life?
Elaira shuddered, wrung in the crushed turbulence of his emotion as her beloved divested himself of his blades and stepped from the smoke-house in surrender. His own, or hers, the sense of suffocation and bleak foreboding? The hour felt lidded in darkness, each movement sealed in jet glass. Again blindfolded by Vivet’s possessive touch, Arithon resigned himself to the escort of four Ettinmen, three padding a wolf’s pack tread at his heels, with his bound wrists leashed to one in the lead. Their route skirted the nearby settlement, chased by snarling dogs and breezes sooted with woodsmoke from an open-air spit.
