Just returned from an errand in the Kingdom of Havish, Mearn s’Brydion, youngest brother and envoy of the clanborn Duke of Alestron, makes landfall at Middlecross; informed there that Prince Lysaer plans a royal inspection of the Riverton shipyards, he smiles in sharkish pleasure, then chooses to play the advantage of timing and let his demand for an inquiry coincide …
Autumn 5653
Asandir thumped back the lid of the battered wooden clothes chest, which held the few personal effects he kept at Althain Tower. Craggier, and cross-grained as beached driftwood from the harrowing events that had taxed him to infirmity last season, he chose a formal cloak of heavier wool, a deep enough blue to be taken for black, with borders edged in bands of silver foil ribbon. The rich color brought out his lingering pallor.
To Luhaine, attendant upon his preparations like a cloud of morose, glacial air, the detail became the caustic reminder of a convalescence cut short by necessity. ‘You know you ought to be resting.’
Asandir paused. Recovery had left him just short of rail thin, the creases around his eyes knifed into dry flesh, and the rubbed ivory knuckles of each capable hand embossed through his blue-veined skin. Yet workworn as he appeared, the Sorcerer who shouldered the Fellowship’s field work retained his uncompromised will. His gray eyes held the etched clarity of lead crystal, as he countered, ‘You could have asked my leave when you lent Sethvir the use of my black stallion.’
‘In fact, I could not,’ Luhaine said, plaintive. ‘At the time he departed, you happened to be comatose.’
That line of defense died into an unsettled quiet, neither of the Sorcerers anxious to pursue the confrontation head-on. Though Sethvir spent little time in his private quarters at Althain Tower, the chamber was cluttered as a junk stall. Mismatched chairs had acquired heaps of horse harness. Two marble plinths were piled with snake skins, spancel hoops of oak, a tea canister missing its top. The spare pallet held skeins of wool yarn, brought in to remedy a straw hamper stuffed to bursting with holed stockings. Their odd, distorted imprints came and went in the dance of shadows cast by the candle set on a tin pricket.
Asandir knelt on the scarlet carpet, a lit form against the gargoyle shapes sculpted from the surrounding gloom. Nor did he accept Luhaine’s comment as he rummaged through the bottom of the clothes trunk. ‘Even unconscious, I would have heard you speak. You know that.’ He unearthed an item that chinked metallic protest.
‘At least with no horse we forced you to rest until you regained strength to walk. Do we have to go through this all over again?’ Luhaine huffed aside from the grounding threat of steel as his colleague raised a black-handled hunting knife and tested the edge with his fingertip. ‘If you knew how it felt to live as a shade, you’d stop doing that.’
‘You’re right.’ Asandir snicked the blade back into its sheath. Draft fluttered the dribbled candleflame as he added the knife to his select pile of necessities. ‘Out of body, I’d have small use for skinning a deer.’ The invasive smell of vacancy and dust made petty argument seem a welcome affirmation of life. ‘An unnecessary sacrifice, whatever your case, had you taken a moment and asked the bread mold and field mice to feed anyplace else but the pantry.’
Luhaine snorted. ‘The Prime Matriarch has launched a new plot, and you’re bound in knots for a miserable few rinds of spoiled cheese?’
Asandir stood. Large boned and imposing as an ocean-flying albatross, with the same matchless grace when he moved, he folded one arm and tucked his other fist beneath the clean-shaven jut of his chin. ‘Luhaine?’ he asked with piercing mildness. ‘What under Ath’s sky have the Koriathain done this time?’
Stripped by a glance keen enough to shear granite, Luhaine regretted his impulsive choice to broach that particular sore subject. ‘I don’t know yet,’ he hedged. ‘Once Sethvir returns, I’ll hope to be freed to find out.’
Asandir grunted. Unfazed by his colleague’s transparent evasion, he knelt and bundled his supplies into a weatherproof blanket roll. ‘Whatever unpleasant hunches you harbor, I could venture to Capewell and confront the Prime’s purpose headlong.’
‘That shouldn’t be necessary.’ Rather than reveal the shattering ill turn, that Morriel’s interests had broken Elaira’s retreat at Araethura, Luhaine breezed toward the doorway. ‘Sethvir ought to find his way back before solstice. Koriani sigils can’t trace Arithon at sea. Since his fleet sailed from Innish with provisions to last through midwinter, the matter should bide until then.’
And must, Luhaine raged in concealing silence; with six camps of Alliance armed forces blocking the safe sanctuary of half the clan bloodlines in Tysan, Caithwood’s trees perforce must claim preference.
Blessedly practical, Asandir tied the last thong on his bundle and snuffed the failing candle. ‘Then I’ll enjoy being spared the company of a bedridden harridan with a grudge.’ Faced with a second, urgent transfer by lane force, then an overland journey to be started afoot, the bent of his thoughts swung full circle. ‘Sethvir needs my horse before I do in any case. That stallion’s the only flesh-and-blood creature I trust to stand firm through a flux of grand conjury.’
Luhaine called in droll gloom through the doorway, ‘I’m forgiven in advance if you’re tossed off the back of some clansman’s borrowed hack?’
Asandir straightened, a lank scarecrow in black leathers. His shoulder-length hair shone like loomed cloud in the fading light through the arrow slit, and his sudden, rare laugh shattered echoes off the ancient Paravian stonework. ‘You’re absolved if I happen to fall off a nag.’ He raised a lean leg, kicked the trunk shut, and strode clear of Sethvir’s belongings. ‘But for the rest of the secrets you’re brooding like eggs, I’ll hold mercy under advisement.’
The sundown surge of the lane tide carried the Fellowship Sorcerer southward to Mainmere. The circle that delivered him lay under the gloom of near dark. Stars bloomed like punched sparks on a cobalt zenith, and wind-combed, thin cirrus overhung the ink waters of a restless, tide-roiled estuary. Asandir stood motionless and allowed his reeling senses to reorient. More worn from the transfer than he liked to admit, he sorely missed the warm presence of his horse, and the satin black shoulder that usually braced up his balance on arrival.
He willed himself steady, while around him the raised play of lane force subsided. The bleached, weathered runes laid into rinsed bedrock sparked and flashed as the discharge bled off, actinic white to a whisper of blue, before fading through the spectrum of ultraviolet into the ordinary night.
An owl called, mournful. Beyond the stilled circle, the tumbled-down ruin of the Second Age fortress slept under its shrouding of vine. Past memory ran deep through the rain-scoured granite. Where the wide grasslands of the coast joined the sea, unicorns had once run like braided light on the hilltops, gathered for their seasonal migration. The songs of the sunchildren followed their course, while the joyous feet of the dancers had circled, waking the mysteries of renewal each cycle of equinox and solstice. The coming of mankind at the dawn of the Third Age had woven new thread through that ancient tapestry. From Mainmere, at midsummer, to the landing at Telmandir, the painted boats of townborn celebrants had rowed south under torchlight for the water festival. Each year, humanity made way for the passage of mysteries that were Ath’s gift to this world, their presence too bright for mortal endurance, outside