manifest future.
When the Fellowship colleague just returned from the field found Sethvir’s cloud-wool hair tufted up into snarls, the sight raised a signal flag of distress.
‘You look like a sheep that needs carding,’ Asandir ventured carefully. He still wore his leathers. Pungent from his arduous sojourn abroad, he brought the fust of horse and the smoke scent of camp-fires into the bookish miasma of ink and antiquity. ‘Should I lay the blame on Davien, or the Koriani Prime Matriarch?’
Sethvir clipped off a shockingly filthy word: one better suited to embarrassed young men caught aback by the pestilent itch noticed after a toss with a harlot.
‘The witch brood is hatching up a fresh plot,’ Asandir surmised. But his rare laugh stayed silenced, and his chilly regard kept the bite of edged steel as he folded his tall frame into the squashed upholstery of the chair by the hearth. ‘Which arena?’
‘Where are they not meddling?’ Sethvir laid down a ribbon fastened with tiny bells, once worn by a Paravian dancer. His disgusted sigh seemed heaved up from the soles of his feet. ‘Like a plague of spelled rats, their Prime’s got the Light’s armed faithful scouring Taerlin and Camris to smoke out a minion of Darkness.’
Asandir steepled chapped fingers. ‘Arithon’s rediscovered the depth of his mastery and accessed the keys to grand conjury?’
‘No!’ Sethvir clutched his smutched temples, as if frantic to stem the torrent of disruptive images: of zealot lancers, and grim-faced league trackers with hounds, who avidly quartered the grey-on-white fields and scrub oak for two heretic fugitives: quarry in fact huddled inside a cold stable, with one of them battered half-senseless and terrified. ‘I would bless the good news, if his Grace had recalled even the glimmer of partial awareness.’
‘He hasn’t?’ Asandir probed with delicacy.
Sethvir dashed the forlorn hope, that the infamous s’Ffalenn temper may have singed the order’s ranked Seniors into embarrassed retreat. ‘By my accurate count, his Grace has recalled nothing, yet. He’s worked no craft at all! Beyond a bard’s turn of phrase with a flute, and the resonant notes to move iron, he’s carried off his friend’s rescue by straightforward subterfuge. A few darts made of tinker’s pins, aimed with effect, and the mischievous instinct that knows where a strategic bonfire will raise tempers and draw in stray iyats.’
Asandir frowned. ‘Then Arithon hasn’t yet tapped the force of his born gift for Shadow?’
‘No.’ Sethvir lowered his fingers, limpid turquoise eyes widened by acute distress. ‘Last night, his Grace moved at large in the yard of a travellers’ inn with no more protection than a burlap bag used to hood his face.’
‘It was snowing?’ Asandir observed, thoughtful. A seasoned winter traveller, he knew that grooms often sheltered their heads with grain sacking under a pinch-thrift stableman. ‘You don’t feel the prince was cautious by restraint, in line with his sly touch for cleverness?’
The reluctant pause lagged. Sethvir picked up the gold-and-black hawk’s quill with fidgety care, and said presently, ‘Earlier today, a temple high priest claimed to have sensed an act of dark spellcraft disturbing the flux lines. But actually, no such deflection took place. The True Sect’s examiner at Kelsing conducted the search of an innocent’s home under that falsified testimony.’
Asandir raised straight eyebrows, coarse as steel filings on his weathered face. ‘Ah.’
Sethvir’s anger acquired a dangerous spark of leashed rage. ‘More, that brazen lie marked an honest crofter for the scaffold and saw his family stripped of their landed inheritance.’
The logic required a beat to unravel. ‘No craft was used. The lane currents were silent. Else we’d have had Koriathain themselves drawn to Arithon’s refuge like crawling lice.’ Asandir sat very still, sensitive to the myriad threads of inquiry sorted by the vast range of his colleague’s earth-sense. ‘Then whose poisoned suggestion tipped off the prying diviner?’
‘A snitch with a rumour,’ Sethvir answered, too tightly succinct. ‘One inept, rebuffed suitor informed the temple those crofters had sheltered a ruffian.’
‘Quite a long leap, to peg a mere beggarman sight unseen as an affirmed minion of Shadow.’ The knifed lines of Asandir’s frown intensified. ‘How did Arithon raise undue attention?’
‘The deep empathy he evolved to appease Marak’s wraiths has entrained him to hear the nuanced pitch of emotion. A neat trap,’ Sethvir said, ‘exploiting the fact he still is quite defenseless, without a haven, and left with no secure route for escape.’
With all recourse hobbled in Arithon’s behalf, the old set-backs festered like thorns in the flesh, that the temple’s sway over Tysan remained absolute. The canon’s long-standing doctrine of fear kept the ports and the borders locked under a Light-sanctioned chokehold. Which ironclad security had been what prompted the Koriathain to locate Arithon’s spelled term of captivity at the ruined earl’s court at Kelsing. If their brazen connivance also used the false faith as the sleeve to flush out their fugitive, the move seemed an ominous excess.
Asandir gauged Sethvir’s raw nerves and probed gently, ‘Prime Selidie cannot fear the s’Ffalenn penchant for vengeful fury at this pass.’ Not if Arithon had yet to recall why he should bear the initiate witches a capital grudge.
Sethvir folded the sleeked hawk feather into a silk cloth, then picked up the gaudy flask. The indigo glaze, emerald vine-leaves, and scarlet birds glinted with gemstone brilliance as he raised the vessel up to the light and peered askance through the flawed glass stopper. His colleague knew not to press him. When the Warden chose to deliver bad news, his word often struck like the fall of a hammer and smashed every alternate option past salvage.
‘The thrust has changed,’ Sethvir allowed. ‘Since Selidie’s settlement rests our oath of noninterference, the Prime’s decided she has the leeway to spin wider plans. I’m loath to suggest that Arithon may be of more use to her, now, as a gambit.’
‘They’re angling for Lysaer?’ Asandir snapped point-blank.
‘Let’s hope I’m mistaken.’ Sethvir tapped the flawed crystal. His finger touch sparked a blast of raw light. When the flash cleared, the crack that gave the glass character stayed: but the chip was erased, which impaired the stopper’s integrity. ‘Lysaer cannot be other than compromised.’ Either by the roused influence of the Mistwraith’s curse or through the born drive for justice instilled into his royal lineage, the Prime’s exploitive stake in high temple affairs must engage the attention of its forsworn founder.
With the sinister upshot that the delinquent avatar well might fall prey to that lure. The sisterhood yet bore Lysaer’s entrenched enmity. To thwart their machinations, and to wrest Tysan’s religious populace free of their corrupt influence, he might well step in and resume his lapsed charge as the divine figure-head worshipped by the Light’s faithful. Should the affray in the westlands push him to try, he would flirt with a peril beyond his means to defuse: Desh-thiere’s insidious geas never slept. Its subtle pressure would warp any action he took and distort even the most altruistic morality.
‘Is Lysaer yet aware he may face a fresh trial?’ Asandir ventured at length.
‘Oh, yes.’ The frightful back-lash could not be disowned, that Arithon’s restored freedom inevitably renewed the murderous compulsion to destroy his half brother. Sethvir granted the proof of that horror without words and shared a fragment
