by Janny Wurts
Arithon suffered the barrage on the open deck. Pounded and jounced, soaked to the skin, he hunkered in misery, while intelligent thought became thrashed beyond sense, and spirited courage was battered away before stoic survival. He lost count of the days and the hours, pummelled dizzy and sawed by the lashings that secured him through the violent pitch of each roll. Torrents inundated the cockpit repeatedly. He resurfaced, wretchedly choking. Whiplashed over the wave-crests, he rode out the fate of his sloop, while the boom, broken loose from the traveller blocks, flailed arcs that carved up spray in rooster tails.
Fatigue dulled him past stupor. Arithon sank into delirium from lack of sleep. The few moments he catnapped, he woke, nearly drowning. The burn of salt in his nostrils and lungs curled him, retching, until he blacked out. Other times, sunk into uncontrolled mage-sight, he viewed a vista fractured into rainbows that shimmered between solid existence and the ethereal realms past the veil.
Charge danced at the tumultuous maw of the void: Arithon beheld bouts of actinic lightning, near continuous strikes that seared coruscations through his clenched lids. One dazzling burst seemed to shred the fabric of the known world, as if a crack opened up in creation, with tortured water and wind seized into eerie suspension. Then the slamming crescendo of thunder rang like a mighty bell. Stinging vibrations chased through the frail wood of the vessel beneath him. Arithon held out. Glued to life by his white-knuckled grip on the whipstaff, he breathed air saturated with ozone, while the lurid glare of Saint Elmo’s fire scribbled the wheeling masthead.
He tended the pump to the edge of his resource, the gale shrilling a hags’ chorus over him. Almost, he made out the snarling words, when at last the horrendous wind slackened under broken cloud. He was too wrung to celebrate. Jellied to rags, he clung like a half-wit while Talliarthe slewed and slammed over the swells, waterlogged under the punch of the capricious gusts.
Collapsed finally, draped over the tiller, Arithon slept as though kicked unconscious. He did not dream. Sunk in black-out oblivion, he did not resurface for a night and half the next day.
He woke to the burning glare of noon sun. Around him, the polished, residual swell heaved and dropped, clumped with foam and clots of sargasso weed. Talliarthe wallowed. The bump of her floor-boards below decks meant her sprung seams had taken on water. The overrun bilges flooded the cabin.
Arithon scrubbed his crusted eyelids, stung by chafed skin and wincing at stiffened muscles. Fingers swollen, he picked out the seized knots in the safety line. Breath hissed through his teeth, he straightened and stood, heart pierced by the wreckage that met him. A ramshackle mess of torn lines draped the fore-deck. Frayed and overstretched rigging allowed slop in the mast. If his short-lived relief lay dashed against the toll exacted on his sloop, her strength had withstood the test.
Talliarthe floated still. Repairs could restore her trim enough to limp back to safe harbour. Arithon set to and pumped her dry. He patched the worst leaks with torn sailcloth, and wadded oakum into the worked planks. Then he cleared the fouled lines and cut away the tattered canvas.
His inspection of timbers and spars found a check in the mast deep enough to require a fish splice. Arithon went to work. The calm broke, as he laboured, the fitful breeze fore-running a freshening westerly. A mild set-back, given his fixed position: the storm had blown him far eastward and north. A hundred and eighty leagues off Orvandir, he had a stressed mast, able to bear tender use of the main, but too weakened to withstand the head-sails. The jury-rig would not beat to weather. The broad reach or the run he could manage required changed wind for a downwind course for return to the continent.
Meanwhile, the sloop drifted farther afield, held stern to by her sea-anchor. She would weather the added delay without hardship. Provisions were plentiful. Her fresh water and nonperishable stores in sealed casks had taken no damage. Arithon washed, aired his clothes, and buffed the rime off his marlinspike. He was not discontent as he whipped a new end-splice on an unravelling sheetline. Maintenance of a sea-going ship was stock fare for a seasoned mariner.
Nightfall, under starlight, he strung his hammock on deck and settled to sleep, lulled by the lisp of the whitecaps and rocked to a stiffened westerly.
In the pre-dawn pallor, the boom of a comber ripped him awake. The hissed rush of current as the breaker receded chilled the blood in his veins. Ahead, the ragged line of a reef rimmed the dark mass of a looming coast-line. Wind drove his sloop hard against a lee shore, with naught but a sea-anchor holding her course, and no sail to grant vital steerage.
Arithon swore and raced to bend tattered canvas on the main boom. He had no jib to claw off, with the breeze dead astern and the swell in shoaling waters risen to peaks. His little craft breasted the chop and rushed forward, coasted into the clinch by each passing crest.
At risk, out of time, Arithon hoisted the weakened main and made fast the halyard. Then he threw the helm down, cut loose the drogue, and trusted his lot to Dame Fortune. The odds ran against him. Talliarthe lacked the sea-room to beat her way free. At best, Arithon sought a gap in the reefs to sneak through.
The thrash of surf and bursting spume starboard offered nothing, and the limited draw of the main heeled the sloop into a side-slip. She trounced, ungainly as a lugger, while Arithon fought her unbalanced helm. He wrestled her broadside approach, unable to point the bow higher. Louder, the crash of the waves walloped into shot spray. Through blown salt and the backwash seethe of thrashed foam, his searching eye found no entrance.
Talliarthe careened onwards, bucking her fate, while the orange tinge of on-coming dawn notched a forested shore-line. Tried spirit and sinew to maintain her course, Arithon remembered just one charted land-mass in the vast expanse of the Cildein. Los Lier’s remote atoll lay distant from the coastal sea-routes, where the clockwise trade current nudged deep-water ships around the slack doldrums between. Location made the remote landfall difficult, useful only to refill casks in a pinch on extended voyages. Navigable access from the northwest spur had a sand bottom, too exposed for a secure anchorage. Nor had the archipelago he recalled ever extended this far to the south.
Whether through faulty navigation, or by dated maps in the locker, the landfall he faced matched nothing Arithon recognized.
Dire straits granted him no time to ponder. The weakened mainsail chose that moment to give. Bellied canvas parted with a coarse rip and spilled out her wind. Talliarthe bobbed upright and slowed, with the sucking seethe at the reef disastrously close to her quarter. Arithon threw down the helm. Swung stern to, as the following wave lifted, he caught the trampling curl of the breaker and let Talliarthe surf.
The sloop rushed ahead, barrelled down on the shoal with the comber still rising beneath her. Then her keel struck the coral head. Impact slammed her onto her beam ends. She crunched down and slewed, wallowed broadside and stricken, while water gushed through her bashed strakes. Then the next swell heaved her upwards and reeled her over the barrier into the jewel-toned shallows beyond. There, jetting bubbles, she settled and sank.
Arithon bobbed to the surface over her submerged cockpit, striped in the forlorn shadow of her canted topmast, which poked through the placid lagoon against the lemon glare of daybreak.
Small blessing, his craft had not hung on the seaward side, where the merciless sea would have smashed her to matchwood. At rest three fathoms deep in flat calm, at least he could dive for salvage. Arithon put heart-ache and losses aside. He ducked under, descended into the cabin and retrieved the black sword. A foray into the chart desk hooked the oilcloth bag protecting Elaira’s quartz pendant. Out of breath, he resurfaced and swam through the opaline wavelets and stumbled ashore.
There, wrapped in the resinous fragrance of pine, the castaway encountered his most brutal loss. The packet’s waxed seams had not withstood the immersion. Devastation dropped Arithon to his knees: salt water had soaked the silk wrapping inside and cleared the volatile quartz matrix. Emptied of its precious burden of record, now a sparkling bl
ank, the crystal’s dedicate service to his beloved was finished. Arithon bent his head, desolate, too shattered to weep. For every time he seized hold of his destiny, fate conspired and ripped the reins from his hands.
Late Winter 5925
Presence
Shipwrecked on an unknown shore, Arithon drew in a shuddering breath. Personal grief once again must defer to the urgency of survival. The beach underneath his clenched fist showed no trace of habitation. The breeze wore the astringent accent of salt, pungent with evergreen resin. Rhythmic surf boomed on the outer reef, stitched by the refrain of lapped wavelets, and the lonely piping of birds that pecked morsels from the petticoats of receding foam.
Yet the site was not ordinary. The flux currents here wove a vibrant tapestry, their harmonic range too richly complex for a pristine wilderness. A bard’s hearing caught a lyric cadence like melody, a presence that raised the ephemeral resonance into a confluent splendour. Arithon paused, captivated by the echo of surreal rapture. Pursuit of the essence eluded his reach. His trained sensitivity entangled and crashed, ripped apart as the pain of his loss overset the rarified strain of peace.
Arithon gripped his sword to ground his excess emotion. Centred and still, he imposed self-command through initiate discipline. Under the sudden surge of heightened senses, he settled in listening calm: and fell prey, seduced by a quietude that stormed his identity with irresistible strength. Hurt lost its edge, soothed as though by a lover’s caress. Fingered by a thrill, sparked to abstruse joy, Arithon trembled. Then he gasped, overcome by bright ecstasy. He was not alone! The ripple of resharpened awareness seized hold, mighty enough to annihilate reason and shear through his flesh like a tonic.
Stress and fatigue fell away. Thought unravelled. Each indrawn breath recharged his spirit in waves. Arithon shuddered, rapt. Sheer joy drove the dance of his heart-beat. Self-image up-ended, until he wept for the beauty that flooded creation. Rocked by the effervescent, thunderous chord that sustained the world’s teeming vitality, he laughed with the shimmer of wind on clear water, riven by a force to free him from the clay feet of mortality.
Tenderness beyond all imagining welcomed his Name as one point of light in the grand chord that sustained Athera. Sweet yearning like roses and honey unmoored him. Arithon lifted his head, whirled into expanded Sight. Dazzled in the deluge, hurled toward dissolution, he understood he need only let go. Give way, and sorrow’s ache would transform, striving and care scoured out by the tide of infinite celebration.
Mage discipline teetered at the verge of the veil, where mortal perspective lost meaning. Pierced, heart and spirit, Arithon acknowledged the resonant shifts that unstrung the balance of cognizance. He had been uplifted in absolution by the touch of a guardian centaur; had sought and found healing, immersed in a Sunchild’s music. But nothing prepared him for a living encounter with a wild unicorn.
She approached in a haze of light written on light, an impossible splendour of gossamer and star-shine that by rights should not have withstood the brazen blaze of full sunlight. Under her delicate hooves, the pearlescent sand shattered to rainbows. Her gold, spired horn rang with a vibration fit to pulverize flesh and bone. Grace reverberated when she reared rampant. The spear-sharp point aimed at Arithon’s breast inspired no fear. Scalded under a torrent of rapture, wrung pithless by beauty that burned, he felt himself shred like tissue sublimated in raging flame.
No art he possessed could capture a music that soared beyond gifted talent. Inadequate, naked, imperfect, and shamed, he clenched his hand on Alithiel’s unsheathed steel. A Fellowship Sorcerer’s blood bond to survive was insufficient to keep him earth-bound. He tried anyhow, with his last strength raised the weapon to deflect the clarion call to abandon himself.
The sword screamed. The rune inlay fired the length of the blade as the force of the star spell unleashed. Explosively virulent as never before, the primal song that Named the winter stars blazed like an actinic torch and enveloped him. The redoubled assault outstripped what his overstrained senses could bear. Arithon crumpled. Unconscious, he measured his length, while the dire tip of the unicorn’s horn scythed above, and a glory to unravel his being sliced through the air overhead.
The Riathan Paravian’s charge swept past his felled form. She landed and spun, his sprawled body under her velvet shadow, and her delicate hooves planted four-square across him.
Asandir’s frantic, long-distance sending from the wayside forge located in Radmoore reached Althain Tower hard after Alithiel’s cry pierced the stream of Sethvir’s earth-sense. “Ath wept! What just happened?”
Althain’s Warden scrubbed soaked palms over his flash-blinded eyes, stupefied as though struck by lightning. He fought shaken wits, while the shattering ripple of unleashed event cascaded through his overwhelmed faculties.
Equilibrium wobbled. The flood whirled him adrift. He managed to translate the immediate vision: of Arithon cast senseless in white sand on a perilous shore-line, his frame silver-lit by the raised wards of his sword, and also the luminous shimmer of flux, fluoresced by a living Riathan Paravian.
Asandir’s retort doused the flame of elation sparked by the lost race’s presence. “That fails to explain the active tie to the blood oath I demanded of his Grace at Athir!”
Sethvir groped for cohesion amid wheeling upset, while the shades of probability rapidly shifted, then said terse, “The unicorn challenged for trespass because Prince Arithon set foot where nothing born mortal had due leave to tread.”
Asandir’s astounded silence vaulted over the clamour of questions, while his field-hardened reflex sorted the most urgent priorities. Insight into the Paravians’ harrowing exodus, and what drove them to seal themselves into a haven beyond the Fellowship’s auspice must wait. Crisis demanded the unicorn’s motive. “She’d uplift a sanctioned crown prince through transition against our stay of surety under the compact?”
“She would have,” Sethvir confirmed, past aggrieved. “His Grace would be lost, had Alithiel’s wards not engaged in his rightful defence.” Given the back-drop clangour of worked iron, his itinerant colleague continued resetting the shoes on his black stud. Through the hiss of the bellows worked by the smith’s boy, Althain’s Warden qualified precisely, “Just cause was compelled by Arithon’s attuned royal blood-line, irrefutably sealed by your charge to survive, and bonded by consent through your invocation.”
Asandir’s rant emerged through the nails pinched between his taut lips. “Fiends take the day our Fellowship woke the fire of Kharadmon’s slap-dash wisdom!” He finished his thought by covert sending, “And Elaira? She’s heart tied!”
“Shielded! The lady’s safe under Davien’s exemplary wardings at Kewar.” Eyes shut, without consolation to offer, Sethvir endured the cruel suspension, while far distant, the unicorn poised over Arithon’s prone form stamped a hoof with imperious inquiry. Unspeakable grief tangled with heady joy, as the unresolved verdict on Arithon’s fate seized the moment in petrified agony.
Asandir’s undeflected acerbity pounced on the glaring discrepancy. “Best explain how this impasse occurred before Kharadmon torches off in a temper.”
“Avert!” Sethvir gasped. “Do, please, refrain from sword-rattling tantrums under that hornets’ nest.” Kharadmon’s provocations could be deferred, given his cantankerous spirit ranged underground in the Storlains, redressing the ignorance of four miners caught delving for contraband tin.
Althain’s Warden pared down the facts for Asandir’s stifled impatience. “Our crown prince sailed through a freak gale that unleashed electromagnetic havoc. Sheer chance, enabled by virulent lightning, hurled him through an impervious ward, cast across time and space.”
“Dharkaron’s Horses trample the hindmost! That’s the scale of magnitude driving the power that cloaked the Paravians’ retreat?” Ferociously quick, Asandir seized the gist. “Then Arithon’s landfall has ignited the flash-point of an unsanctioned disclosure.”
“Yes. No matter that his damaged sloop was
not seaworthy when she was wrecked, his misfortune has violated a hidden sanctuary.” Paused through a shuddering breath, Sethvir reeled, earth-sense struck in reverberation by the note of a centaur guardian’s horn.
Echoes shivered across the trackless deep, alive with subsonic vibration. Then movement unlocked the frozen tableau on the forbidden isle. The Riathan Paravian bent her proud head over the castaway sprawled at her feet. Golden light shimmered in deadly proximity, as the ethereal peril of her horn raked over him: not to touch, a contact lethal to mortal flesh. The scald of purified light passed him by, an uncertain reprieve as the unicorn withdrew the untenable grace of her presence.
Althain’s Warden rested wet cheeks in his palms, unstrung by relief. “The Riathan sentry’s acknowledged him. Finally.”
“Too late, if her encounter has swept him too far past the veil.” Asandir sighted the trim of the stallion’s rear heel, too pragmatic for optimism. He hefted the next crescent shoe. His infused charm against lameness riveted several mop-headed apprentices, as the steel flared bright blue. Deaf to their gasps, the Sorcerer placed the spelled horseshoe. He plucked and slotted a nail, which he set by a mallet blow and clinched with a practised twist. “Tell me,” he flung back to Sethvir, his distress at grim odds with his capable labour, “has our endebted concession to the Koriathain left his Grace with anything meaningful on this side to lose?”
Sethvir winced. “Only time will tell.” Whether or not s’Ffalenn integrity, bound under blood oath, packed sufficient incentive to survive, free choice might not even signify. Not if the Paravians enforced their secretive retirement.
