he did,’ Tarens argued with rock-bottom certainty, ‘the order would have done away with him. He picks up connections and details too fast. That’s not a safe quality to keep in the presence of dark arcane secrets.’
The pause hung, sweetened with the fragrance of birch coals and the burbling of the meat stew. Kerelie knotted her hands and glowered at her brother until at last he was forced to look up from the harness.
‘You were never thick-headed,’ she scolded. Then added, persistently honest, ‘Are you willing to risk our livelihood? More, would you gamble that vagabond’s life on the chance that you could be misled? By tomorrow, we could face a temple diviner sent to probe for heretical practice. Do you truly believe the Light’s faith rests its cases on anyone’s heart-felt conjecture?’
‘Those herbals are all that’s kept Efflin alive!’ Tarens snapped, riled by his innate sense of loyalty. ‘Are you saying we should act upon groundless fear, disown kindness, and throw the man out?’ Engrossed by his sister’s well-founded challenge, and not least, by a shared anxiety, the big crofter also forgot the tucked figure, miserably stilled in the shadow behind the filled wood bin…
But the distant enchantress cried out, locked in empathy and unable to bear Arithon’s quick stab of agony from her vantage in the Storlain Mountains. Loss of memory had not dimmed the acuity of his gifted talent. The bitter argument between brother and sister smashed his frail poise at a stroke.
As initiate master, his extreme sensitivity tracked every nuance of subtle distress. The captive centuries spent under forced threat, healing the crazed terror of free wraiths, had laid his heightened awareness wide open. As the blunt blast of blame and raw stress battered into his unshielded nerves, the shock hit like a punch to the viscera.
Dizzy nausea shot him to his feet. The notion his presence might cause someone harm woke the echoes of forgotten horror. The drive to avert catastrophic misfortune lashed him to instinctive flight. He was gone, out the door in one silent move, both dinner and comfort abandoned. The latch fell. Only a chill swirl of draught marked the wake of his frantic departure.
While Tarens whirled, stunned past words of regret for the hurt bestowed by his carelessness, the distant enchantress encamped in the mountains shed furious tears. She raged at her fate, that the mate she cherished as her own flesh and blood should become so bereft! The prodigious, bright talent whose labours had dispelled the worldwide invasion by Marak’s hordes of hostile entities should never have been abandoned to languish alone in such bitter ignorance.
Which quandary baited Prime Selidie’s trap: Elaira dared not give way under pressure, no matter how vicious the consequence. She sucked a cold breath to rebalance her rocked poise. The signet ring of Rathain on her hand bequeathed her its burden of secrets. She was the defender of all that it held, and by Arithon’s placed faith, must sustain the harsh crux with her eyes opened. Or else become broken by sheer despair and take her heart’s beloved down with her.
Amid desolate rocks, by the glimmer of starlight, she shouldered the watch through another bleak night.
Yet this pass, far worse than a scryer’s assault rattled her shaken defenses. As Arithon’s headlong flight through the wood distanced him from the cozy croft cottage, he gave rein to his natural instincts. Elaira shared his acute stress and confusion. She also shuddered as his inner senses exploded. The same terrible onset raked through her like fire as the rogue gift of far-sight his straits had made him forget smashed across his rifted perception.
He whimpered, beset, while vision upon vision of what soon must be hammered into his shattered awareness. Overset, stumbled onto his hands and knees in chill leaves, he panted in traumatized panic while the incomprehensible blaze of his wild talent seized the posited threads of the future and unfolded them into simultaneous multiplicity. Drowned in that welter of colour and noise, he floundered, bewildered. The rushed assault of overlayered images flickered onwards like a meaningless storm. He found no bearing: until one view captured his focused attention and fused into a clarity sharp as cut glass…
By tomorrow’s dawn, an official mounted in ceremonial panoply would invade the croft with a cavalcade. The yard would be cluttered by gold-and-white banners, while shod hooves chopped the neatly mulched garden. While the armed outriders circled the cottage, their glittering captain would crash his mailed fist on the door, under temple authority. Doctrine confirmed his lawful right to arrest anyone who resisted. A search by his men would toss through every room. Despite the genuine strain of dire illness, Efflin would be hauled from his blankets. The bed where he lay became stripped to the frame. Men with drawn swords would hack mattress and ticking to shreds. Yet the Light’s avid talent would find naught to incriminate. None of the closets held any trace of the herbalist reported by an upright citizen’s complaint.
‘He’s not here,’ Kerelie insisted, past tears. She wiped her scarred cheek, undone with relief that Tarens was off to haul fire-wood and not underfoot with his ready fists. ‘Since no one knows where the odd fellow’s gone, your questions cannot be answered.’
‘Nothing’s been found?’ the lance captain snapped to the temple’s baffled diviner. ‘No item sufficient for an arcane scrying?’ Failure at last would press him to withdraw his men. While they trampled through the wrack of upended belongings and formed up outside for departure, he would leave the distraught woman with an emphatic warning. ‘Keep your door closed to strangers. The high priesthood at Erdane says Shadow is rising. A minion of Darkness is wakened and walking abroad, we’ve been told…’
Shuddering breaths pulled between his locked teeth, the fugitive huddled in the icy wood as the bout of slip-stream vision tattered to smoke and receded. He grasped what he saw well enough to perceive the precarious veil of innocence that shielded his benefactors. If authorities sought him, perhaps he was a criminal, although he could not remember the enormity that branded him as an outlaw. At least his shoddy rags were untraceable, burned down to ash in the cottage grate. Nothing he owned remained behind for a hostile talent to seize as proof, or use to track his subtle essence. Keep scarce and stay hidden, and he risked no one’s safety. Cold and privation could be surmounted. He had the resourceful, inquisitive intelligence to survive the bleak onset of winter. Steadied once more, in command of himself, he pushed upright to seek a snug bolt-hole for shelter and sleep…
But the haven created by his reasoned calm eluded the enchantress, cross-linked as his helpless observer. For her, Arithon’s momentary, insightful vision lashed her to alarm: the True Sect’s diviners were unleashed to run down a minion of Darkness. Initiate-trained, the Light’s examiners dispatched their servants abroad. Primed for an arraignment, such armed dedicates would harrow the country-side, played on the puppet strings of their creed and the canon law rigidly enforced from Erdane’s high temple by a susceptible priesthood.
Whose secretive ploy had provoked such a search?
Elaira suspected the Prime Matriarch’s ambition manoeuvred this cleanse to root out her fugitive quarry. Worse yet, the Fellowship’s stay of constraint gave free rein to permit that unholy alliance. The religion’s fanatics subsisted on faith since their grand avatar’s abdication. Wracked into factions by the theosophers’ jostling debates, and pitched by self-interest to extend the firm reach of the temple’s influence, the Light’s zealots and their righteous, false cause lay ripe for seduction as Selidie’s diligent tool.
Hounded already, Arithon could be hunted across Tysan anywhere he tried to flee.
Nothing might turn the relentless adversity he might be driven to face. Aching, exhausted, while her distant beloved also braved a frigid night, Elaira gathered her courage, dried her eyes, and wrapped herself in her lonely bedroll. More than ever before, if she slept, she must ward her dreaming awareness. Under stress, reluctant, she sought shelter behind the endowment left to
