then halved the unseasonably ripe peach set before him. ‘Doubtless your own words cast a different light. I don’t think you rejected compassion.’
The Sorcerer blinked. ‘I voted to replenish the refugees’ supplies and send them onwards, before risking the potential abuse of Paravian territory’
‘Send them on, to what fate?’ Arithon said gently. ‘“Frightened, in darkness, what would they find, but more fear and more darkness to hound them? What world will they desecrate, in their sore desperation? What innocent life might be trampled? Send the refugees elsewhere, and we will have disowned the problem, as well as washed our hands of all hope of a reconciled solution.”’
‘You quote Ciladis.’ Davien reclaimed the jam, thoughtful. ‘Once, our Fellowship was that frightened, that dark. No. We were darker. Without the drakes’ binding, we would have gone mad when first we encountered the Paravians.’ Bread slice in hand, the Sorcerer expounded, ‘You have traversed Kewar. How much suffering did you lay on yourself before you awakened and recognized that guilt is deadly, and empty, and profitless?’
‘The touch of a centaur guardian uplifted me,’ Arithon allowed. ‘Without that grace, I would surely have perished.’
Davien’s dark eyes flicked up and bored in. ‘You say? Then who admitted the centaur in the first place? Teir’s’Ffalenn.’
Arithon’s gaze turned downward, abashed. He could not disown himself; not again. The infinite presence that had touched and absolved him of itself demanded self-honesty.
‘Whose will broke the wards on the maze?’ Davien pressed. ‘You plumbed your self-hatred and demanded your answer, prince. Then you followed up with the courage to acknowledge your own self-worth. There is your grace. You are my fit weapon, to champion the cause of humanity’
Arithon’s knife slipped through his nerveless fingers. He stared, transfixed and horrified. ‘The Mistwraith’s curse is mastered, Davien. Its hold upon me is not ended!’ When no reply came, he said, tortured, ‘Your weapon? You expect me to salvage the compact and drag humanity back out of jeopardy?’
Davien’s answer came barbed. ‘I expect you to live out your life, Teir’s’Ffalenn. To make choice in free will. That you have endured Kewar’s maze, and survived, has well fashioned you for your destiny. You have broken the mould and stood forth on your merits. Mankind’s hope of survival will come to rely on the consequence. Either way’
The ominous ambiguity behind that soft phrase smashed Arithon’s tenuous hold on awareness. He perceived the forked path of his resolve in simultaneous split image: either he would rise to assume royal heritage, and rule with intent to heal the eroded tenets of the ancient law. Or he would adhere to his preference, and abjure his born charge, and let Rathain’s royal lineage die, crownless.
The irony cut with piercing clarity: how readily he might force Paravian survival by enacting the lawless alternative. The curse wrought through his being might slip even his most vigilant grasp. He might err out of weakness, or misjudge the impact of his active or passive presence. Such forceful power as he carried might in fact precipitate the last crisis that brought town politics to sunder the compact. The dread consequence of that course was not revocable: the Fellowship of Seven would be charged to eradicate mankind from Athera, ruled as they were by the terrible binding set over them by the dragons.
Aware of Davien’s regard, which acknowledged his shocked grasp of the vicious train of repercussions, Arithon shivered, bone deep. ‘No one should dare try to fathom your motives,’ he addressed the Sorcerer point-blank.
‘Inside the Law of the Major Balance, our Fellowship cannot determine your future,’ Davien corrected with acid clarity. ‘Before that fixed truth, my motives are moot. For the ending, on our part, is certain. We are bound to our fate. Paravian survival will be enforced, since our Fellowship has not found the means to break the binding the great drakes laid over us.’
Understanding unfolded, a wounding epiphany. ‘Would you try?’
The Sorcerer did not respond to that question.
Caught in the breach, the man who was Masterbard surveyed the being before him. Davien stared back, his black eyes intense. He was not smiling. The shifting patterns of his inner thoughts could not be read in the depths of his silence. His driving restlessness could only be sensed, pattern upon pattern, behind entangled pain that was not caprice; and a genius vision whose brilliance was such that it would not brook any fixed boundary.
Arithon was first to lower his gaze. After meeting a centaur guardian, just once, he could begin to sense the grave weight of the Fellowship’s intangible burden. How could man or sorcerer wish to live in a world so darkened, it might forfeit the esoteric gift of the Paravian presence? Which binding tied the heart with more fierceness: the blood charge of the dragons, to stand guard at all cost; or the bright exultation of the harmony that walked, living, in the form of Athera’s blessed races?
One dared not, in this case, press for answer.
Yet as Arithon curbed that line of reeling thought, Davien crossed his arms, prosaic. ‘Ciladis would willingly speak on that point, if you should ever chance to encounter him. Whatever he might say, the primary issue was never in doubt. Paravian survival is paramount.’
Arithon valiantly picked up his bread crust. ‘It’s the pernicious question of mankind’s right to upset the balance that enables this world’s greater mysteries. That is what fractured the Fellowship’s unity’
Unblinking, unmoving, Davien stated outright, ‘That is also what threatens the compact.’
Arithon regarded the Sorcerer, hard-braced. ‘I am mortal, and human, and initiate to power, and cursed by Desh-thiere’s geas to seek violence. Therefore, I also embody the potential of the wanton destruction you speak of, but on the grand scale. My doom in the maze could have simplified things.’
‘You survived, in complexity’ Davien grinned outright. ‘Cursed or not, you are also the living exception.’ His confounding nature seemed to find delight in the quandary of razor-edged paradox. ‘Proved fit to rule, and honest enough to acknowledge your conscience. Have you a gambler’s addiction for risk? You have set yourself to cast the one loaded dice throw. How will you choose, Teir’s’Ffalenn?’
‘Not to kill.’ The words, lit to burning, hung on the air with an oath’s indelible clarity.
Davien leaned forward, detachment quite gone, and his face pared to riveted intensity. ‘The most dangerous path, and the most difficult, my friend. Strive for that, and the Mistwraith’s curse will be left no other avenue except to destroy you.’
The warning struck Arithon with splintering force. A barrier snapped. Inside him, the tissue-thin veil of reason gave way. Torn across by the scale of future event, strung through an obstacle course posed by his own sequence of cause and effect, he experienced a cascade of scalding awareness that unmoored the centre pin of his being.
Sight hurled him too far: the course that abjured violence with such visceral need must inevitably carry a terrible, wide-ranging impact. Arithon reeled, eyes newly unsealed. Each decision he weighed engendered a seed, which leaped, branching, into sets of probable outcomes like an unfolding tienelle vision. His senses opened in all directions, tumbling him into an uncontrolled state of bewildering simultaneity. Cast beyond the frail shell of his flesh, he became as a light-beam split by a prism, shattered headlong down the posited avenues of overlaid future projection.
He
