circle of Senior seeresses, at least until she mastered the change imposed on her by Arithon’s current predicament: the fragile defense that hinged upon the kept secret of his anonymity. He carried no recall of her existence. But she, who safeguarded the trust of remembrance, still endured the empathic channel that linked her with his intimate being. Infallibly, Prime Selidie’s malice would seek to exploit that subtle connection.
If Elaira failed to seal off her unruly emotions before she left the Kingdom of Havish, all stakes would be lost. Packed light for speed, her cerecloth bedroll held only jerked meat. The spare shirt and a tin panniken in her satchel wrapped no more than basic healer’s supplies. She slept in the open. A steel-shod staff tested her steps on the ice-fields, and the knife at her belt that shaved wood for kindling also skinned her snared game and dug tubers. One night, she bedded down in a cramped cave, steamed by the malodorous seep of a hot spring. Another found her camped on an ice shelf, bridged over a tumbling freshet. Always, she sought running water, or places where the tumultuous elements swirled with turbulence. She dared even those sites where the sprites, known as iyats, gathered to feed upon chaos. If their fiendish pranks broke her rest, the same interference thwarted the sisterhood’s scryers.
The burning jab of their probes never ceased. Elaira lost count of the times she plunged naked into deep snow. Such acute discomfort broke off the assaults, which struck always when she was most vulnerable. Anytime her alert focus drifted, the Prime’s spies thrust to rifle her mind. Over the course of two and a half centuries, such relentless pursuit had stalked her for an oath breaker’s punishment. But since their coveted male quarry’s escape, the old cat-and-mouse stalemate had broken. The prize became Arithon’s tenuous freedom, with herself the game-piece to expose him.
Elaira rammed her spiked stave into the glare ice scabbed over a tumbling streamlet. She assayed the next precarious step, her breath plumed in the bitter air. As she edged down the jagged scar of a ravine scoured bare by a recent rockfall, the lethal endangerment posed by the terrain became a pittance beside the love that made her a target. The day must never dawn that the Prime’s balked ambition should seize on the chance to use her again.
Once betrayed at such cost the true heart shrank to contemplate, Arithon had consigned that power of choice into Elaira’s steadfast hands. For both of their sakes, her strength must shield him through his harrowing hour of weakness. Exhausted in the fallen silence of twilight, her feet sore down to the bone, she sheltered amid a stand of stunt firs, cragged roots anchored like a miser’s clenched fists into the cracks in sheer rock. Possessed of the same tenacious endurance, Elaira huddled by a frugal fire, sinews limp as unravelled knit. Stars blazed above the snow-blasted summits, foil-stamped against gathering darkness. Here, no saving disturbance existed to upset the reach of a crystal transmission. Selidie’s scryers might snatch that advantage to break her resistance. Elaira hoarded a store of dry wood. She would shove her hand into live coals if need be to deny the Prime Circle’s intrusion.
Yet nightfall deepened without undue threat. Only brutal cold and astringent breezes whispered and moaned through the lopsided evergreens.
Elaira pressed her fraught hands to her face. Discipline never had tamed her inner bond with Prince Arithon. The instinctive alignment of magnetic rapport burned in her each moment, made urgent as breath by her solitude. Worse, Arithon’s acute danger drastically heightened the already volatile interface. His emotions flared hers into flash-point gestalt without warning: vividly intimate as he brought in fresh game, and the homely croft woman who sheltered him attached him with a nickname not even a dog would have answered.
Worse, the flat twang of her town accent offended his musician’s ear, coarse as ground glass to the lyric awareness once titled as Athera’s Masterbard.
Through his eyes, Elaira captured his sly effort to thwart the irksome presumption. His laughter laid siege to the sternest resolve each time he deplored the address by turning his backside in clownish rebuff.
The by-play lightened the enchantress’s spirits until his yearning, bewildered desire – to be as he was – sought relief from the desolate pain of his alienation. Quietly, Arithon flagged the fair-haired brother’s more sympathetic attention. Then, with a bit of flaked charcoal, he started to write out his preference on the slate hearthstone. The first of his sketched characters wrung Tarens pale.
With the sister too preoccupied to take notice, the crofter’s shocked hiss quashed that first earnest effort to establish a personal trust. The dropped charcoal, stamped beneath a rough boot, obliterated the crude writing. Tarens whispered, frantic, ‘Light save us! If anyone realized you knew the old tongue? We’d be ruined, my friend, and you’d meet your death. Condemned as clanborn or else burned alive, executed for renegade sorcery.’
Alone in the brutal alpine cold, Elaira suffered the blow as a silenced witness, while fear and distrust quenched the tentative spark of her beloved’s stifled identity. Buffeted by the cruel gusts off the glaciers, she gasped as the tears blurred her eyes. Her heart could break for the lifetime’s trove of experience that lay sundered from Arithon’s grasp. Without power to comfort, she ached for his outsider’s misery as he leaned forlorn on the largesse of strangers, pretending to drowse while his trapper’s fare simmered in the kettle slung over the flames…
* * *
…too anxious for subtlety, Kerelie kept nattering as though her subject were deaf, or born nerveless. ‘Suppose the fellow knows witchery, Tarens?’
‘What makes you think that?’ The brother reseated himself at the trestle. Too poor for a lamp, forced to squint in the glow of a spluttering tallow dip, he resumed stitching a mend in the torn harness strap, broken after the folly that led him to tie the ox up by the reins. Rattled himself, and unskilled at pretence, he kept his head bent to his work.
‘Well,’ Kerelie temporized, her usual piece of fanciful sewing draped over her knee, ‘you can’t pretend that the oddities don’t cling to the man like jumping fleas. He’s gotten that scrawny hen to start scratching. You’ll see she’s recovered the gloss of good health. The grouchy bird follows him like a tame pet. Tell me you don’t notice? The animals thrive something more than they should when he helps with the chores in the barn.’
Tarens shrugged. A fallen lock of fair hair veiled his face as he ducked her direct regard.
‘You know that our ox dislikes strangers,’ Kerelie pressured. ‘If the brute doesn’t tread on their feet or balk outright, it sidles them into a post. Yet your vagabond leads that beast hither and yon without the least roll of an eyeball.’
Tarens grunted, the plink of his hammer against the awl made the ready excuse to duck conversation.
Kerelie out-waited his reluctant stand and picked up once the hole had been punched. ‘Someone taught that man knowledge of herbals, and not in a kitchen patch, either.’
‘He’s not my vagabond,’ Tarens replied. ‘What makes you think I have answers?’
By fretful habit, Kerelie scraped a knuckle along her scarred cheek. ‘I say he could be an uncanny creature dropped into our midst.’
‘He appreciates things,’ Tarens amended. ‘You feel that quality with his attention. Dumb beasts respond by giving their trust. Where’s the mystery in that? He understands language, and if he’s a mute, he doesn’t need speech to make himself understood.’
Kerelie poked her embroidery needle through a fold in her loose sleeve. Overlarge for the delicacy of her stitches, her prim hands rummaged into her basket for the emerald floss to embellish a rosebud. She was not a mean spirit. Only frightened, and worried past peace for the brother who stubbornly languished in sick-bed. ‘Koriathain prefer to take on mutes and half-wits.
