and a hired crew of fishermen can collect the pair, and Khetienn can be flagged down for an off-shore rendezvous.’
Feylind stared, drained under her sea-going tan. ‘Leaving Arithon land-bound? Merciful death. I can’t bear it!’
‘For now,’ Fiark stated. ‘The idea is his choice. I can’t cross his royal will on the matter, and neither can you.’
When his twin swallowed, anguished, he held his breath, hoping that somehow good sense would prevail.
‘The weather’s not canny’ Uncomplacent, Feylind squared her shoulders. ‘They say it’s done nothing but dump rain in the west.’
Fiark released his sister’s taut limb. Sympathy, from him, would destroy her tough strength. She had not married, as both of them knew, because her unswerving devotion tied her heart to the cause of the Crown Prince of Rathain.
She stirred finally, stabbed the knife into a melon, and folded her arms at her breast. ‘Why couldn’t his Grace have made me the acting captain of the Khetienn?’ she whispered in plaintive longing.
Fiark need not answer. The reason was self-evident: Feylind was bound as master to an honest brig because Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn had sworn his royal oath not to set her at risk. Once, years ago, a female captain had been killed, mistakenly condemned as the Master of Shadow’s associate. The trumped-up charges had been an act of spite, inflicted by frustrated enemies.
‘You would break his heart, sister,’ Fiark said, a quiet truth. Day by day, the Alliance’s influence strengthened. The network of correspondence he handled was becoming increasingly dangerous. ‘You will sail for Havish. There are people suffering. Even as we speak, the Evenstar’s being loaded to relieve them.’
Feylind reached out and halved the melon, first sign that she might capitulate. Yet her truce held razor-edged warning. ‘There will come a time when the promise his Grace swore to our mother will not be enough to restrain me.’
Fiark released the pent air in his lungs. His smile was calm, and his eyes, very bright, as their minds at last reached concord. ‘On that day, if it comes, and if his Grace requires your sniping interference, you’ll cast off your hawsers and sail with my whole-hearted backing.’ At her laughing breath, the trade factor who master-minded Arithon’s shoreside affairs let his guarded worry evaporate. ‘You didn’t doubt?’
‘Never you,’ Feylind stated. Aware she was hungry, she attacked the hacked melon. ‘Though I wonder sometimes, watching you mince about with your gentrified manners, and your pompous velvets and lace. Let’s see how you manage when Mother grabs for her iron and brains you for keeping dishonest company’
Not chastened at all, Fiark replied in the fishing-village vernacular of their childhood. ‘Leave mother to Tharrick. It’s the wee snip I married who’s the more apt to snatch her pot-hook and geld me for agreeing to your feckless risks.’
Summer 5670
When the Fellowship Sorcerer Kharadmon appeals to Althain Tower for help to curb an invasion of free wraiths that threaten Athera, Sethvir must defer the request, since Luhaine cannot leave the Peaks of Tornir before restraining the Khadrim who fly and slaughter the caravans bearing relief supplies into Camris…
Snapped awake from a vivid nightmare, the acting steward of Etarra, Raiett Raven, discovers the priest dedicate of the Light lurking next to his bed and muttering queer lines of incantation; ‘A guarding ward to defend against Shadow,’ the robed man declaims, brazenly insisting the irregular intrusion should not merit an instant expulsion…
Daybreak at Avenor, in distant contact with the same Etarran acolyte, High Priest Cerebeld receives the private sequence of passwords to access Raiett Raven’s established network of spies; immediately after his morning devotions, he applies that suborned resource to his thwarted search after Lysaer’s runaway princess…
Summer-Autumn 5670
Once Lysaer s’Ilessid recovered his strength, he applied his state influence with muscular will and accessed the vault housing Erdane’s old records. The mouldering texts he perused showed how narrowly close he had brushed with disaster. A friend’s desperate courage had spared him, unscathed. If that depth of loyalty warmed his cold days, his icy resolve only hardened.
As Prince Exalted, for the common trust, he would see such dark works cleansed from the face of Athera.
Past solstice, as the flooding rains scoured the fields, and the north winds howled unabated, he took the rote steps that must guard his onward journey to Hanshire. He learned to frame lines of intent by clear thought and to bind his innate autonomy through affirmations. Fear gnawed him to doubt. The power of his naked word felt inadequate as he tired, and the vivid freight of his own memory closed in. Distorted faces sometimes appeared to gibber and leer from the shadows. He memorized Paravian cantrips to stave off the menacing nightmares that shredded his sleep in the chill hours past dark.
On sobering terms, Lysaer saw where his pride had led him to blinded folly. Sulfin Evend’s insistence on arcane defences had never been empty advice. While the Blessed Prince held his council in diamonds and silk and received the reports from his couriers, the cultists who coveted his influence would not rest. Lysaer brooded less on Shadow and sorcery and more on the treason that stalked his state hall at Avenor.
He answered correspondence and leaned without mercy upon Erdane’s treasury to regroup his campaign-shattered companies. When the roads dried, and the drays could be moved for supply, he was hale enough to wear armour and sword, and ride, surrounded by the hand-picked cadre of guards Sulfin Evend had detailed to attend him. Protected at night by herb-scented candles, he began his staged journey to Cainford, and thence to a borrowed manor at Mainmere. There, his officers mustered new recruits. Lysaer placated trade ministers, heard the blustering Mayor of Barish, and arranged for state galleys to transport last year’s surplus grain stores. As Tysan’s regent, he invoked martial law to ease shortage as blighted crops failed from the damp.
If folk blamed the weather on the Master of Shadow, no voice arose to gainsay them. Lysaer dispatched his idle troops to mend washed-out roads, and offered his powers of Light to cure the cut hay threatened by billowing rain-clouds.
While affairs on the mainland trod their mundane pace, the Lord Exalted sweated in his sheets each night. He resisted the acid-sharp prod to seek after the Master of Shadow. He paced, drained hollow, and assayed no more scryings, though the craving urge wracked him like recurrent thirst. The grey months slipped past without any word of the half-brother sequestered under the Mathorns.
Arithon himself seemed content in retreat within Davien’s impregnable sanctum. The caverns beneath Kewar blurred dawn and dusk. The underground deeps spoke of silence and dark, and the wisdom of timeless reflection. Stone measured itself, tuned to the magnetic spin of the earth, a spiral carved by orbit around a star, which itself trod the harmony of the grand dance amid the white whirl of a galaxy.
A man attuned to the depths of those mysteries might lose the boundaries of himself. For days,
