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 shadowed 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.
Dimly, he realized something was wrong. This prepotent beguilement could not be natural. In fact, his adamant outrage spoke true: a narcotic herb, unknown to his training, swirled through the trapped smoke in the cabin.
Disgust restored reason. Arithon shed Vivet’s clinging embrace. Plunged back to the window, he sucked a clean breath. Then he bent and retrieved the loose knife. Moved on, revolted, he dodged Vivet’s lunge and snapped the axe out of her reach. One stroke smashed the latched shutter opposite. He thrust the helve through, hurled the weapon into the ravine, beyond recovery until morning.
Arithon secured his abandoned sword next. Chest bursting, he surged to the hearth, where he hooked the hot iron damper with the quillon and reopened the draw of the flue. His kick scattered the poisonous coals. Tainted smoke swirled. He backed in retreat. Braced at the gapped window, he leashed his fired nerves. Inhaled the fresh air, again and again, while the restored draught cleared the fumes of Vivet’s potent aphrodisiac.
Streamed sweat and reaction by then made him shiver. Bitterly chilled, Arithon waited until his mage-trained reflex threw off the intoxication. In sharp command, fully guarded at last, he turned back and regarded the pitiful woman huddled in distraught collapse.
She would be freezing, unclad as she was. Arithon stirred to locate her shucked cloak. Minded as well to recover his jacket, he kept knife and black sword in hand, as much to shave tinder and rebuild the fire as to foil another attempted suicide.
Vivet flinched from his step. Weeping, she shouted, “I meant you no harm!”
Arithon granted her histrionics no sympathy. “Don’t prevaricate!” He hooked up the mantle from her rumpled bed. “I know my butchery better than that.” The cloth he shook out flicked over her shoulders, without human contact. “Why, Vivet? How could a planned seduction mend a rift with your family?”
He extended no hand to raise her up. No touch assuaged her limp pathos.
While the icy breeze leached the warmth from the cabin, Arithon retrieved his profaned shirt. Distasteful of the narcotic residue ingrained in the fabric, he proceeded with riveted patience to lay a fresh fire with kindling and birch. “I will listen,” he said, “when you’ve regained composure. Let’s discuss your problem with adult sense, or else forfeit my pledge to assist a safe return to your kinfolk.”
Althain Tower blazed with light from top floor to sallyport, a rare sight in the misty dark, where little but wind whipped the lichened rocks, gusts moaning a constant dirge through the stunt scrub and briar. Travellers seldom paused on Atainia’s bleak heath, bald hills heaped against the desolate Bittern, once laid to waste in a Second Age battle. Yet this night’s observer was not mortal.
Discorporate Sorcerer, summoned in haste, Kharadmon viewed with alarm the glow smeared through the fog from the library’s unshuttered arrow-slits. Sethvir’s normal, daft habit neglected the sconces, unless crisis threatened. Kharadmon reassessed the scale of the trouble behind this display, come already enraged by a train of events that defied credibility.
A cold gust embedded in summer’s northern chill, the Sorcerer’s vexed passage snarled the brush like jerked knit. His shade entered the tower with a gale-force shriek that rattled the panes in the casements.
Sethvir, Warden of Althain, peered up from his vigil, the black onyx table under his spidery hands cleared of pen nibs and clutter. Without his bastion of books and loose parchments, pocked with uncorked ink-wells and tea-mugs, he looked lost. The neglected beard tufted as a mouse nest overpowered his wizened features. But not his pale eyes, which tracked Kharadmon’s entry with piercing focus.
Keen as steel unsheathed, he did not prevaricate. “Don’t start, with Davien! We have worse afoot than his capricious obstinacy.”
“The Betrayer can jump with his eyes crossed and hang himself!” Kharadmon’s gusty essence prowled the chamber, candleflames guttering in his wake. “Was Luhaine stark crazy? Why should he shoulder the crass bargain with Seshkrozchiel to spare the Betrayer’s restored skin from decay? Am I meant to applaud him for back-handed genius? The wind-bag stickler is exquisitely fit to bore a
