To Fionn Areth, who might ask probing questions, or even renew pointless argument, the Mad Prophet gave stiff advice. ‘I don’t care if you ever believe another damned thing that I say. Just pay heed to this: lane surge is in progress. Any element in disharmony caught in its path is going to get flung straight to chaos. If you don’t like that thought, put both hands on that marker stone. Then at risk of your sanity, stay put! When everything settles, you’ll wait for my word. I’ll say when it’s safe to let go.’
For a miracle, Fionn Areth seemed mollified. He assumed his place at the stone without protest, and even lent help with the horses. At his urging, the two geldings lowered their high-flung heads. Calmed by his singsong Araethurian dialect, they eased off the lead reins that threatened to separate both of the Mad Prophet’s shoulders.
Dakar had no chance to express his thanks. Across half the world, the sun’s disk reached the zenith. Midnight arrived at Jaelot’s old focus, and the last solstice lane tide peaked in a rush down the conduit of the sixth lane.
The channels through latitude wakened and sang, tuned into resonance by a masterbard’s skills, engaged twenty-four hours earlier. The Paravian marker stone roused to the primal cry of the mysteries. Beneath the sweating palms of two humans, the torrent rekindled to fire the land’s bounty licked through its interlaced carvings. As had happened for untold thousands of years, the quartz-ingrained granite resounded. The Mad Prophet was prepared as mortal flesh could be, alive as a boy when the Paravian rituals were still given active practice.
Yet the Araethurian goatherd at his shoulder had encountered no such experience. No word could prepare Fionn Areth as the surge struck the stone to a ringing crescendo. The note it sustained was downstepped in translation through the marriage of air and earth. The most subtle range of electromagnetic vibration became audible to mortal hearing. As the lane flux pealed to the chord of grand order, every formed object in Ath’s creation became touched into shared celebration.
This was the raised harmony that tore down stone walls, unhinged oaken doors, and shot green, budding leaves from the hewn beams of the rooftrees erected by humans, unaware they had trammeled its path. For the second time since the Paravian departure, the solstice tide crested, aligned to an arrow of clear force. Resistances shattered. Obstructive disharmonies became swept away, immolated in bursts of flash-point heat, or else shaken asunder by vibration. Where the spate passed, the unbridled mysteries demanded no less than a burgeoning rebirth of life.
Spiraled into whirling dizziness, Fionn Areth felt as though his whole being would take flight through the top of his head. He swayed, no longer aware of his hands, touched to the tempering megalith. The Mad Prophet’s shouted encouragement was lost. Fionn Areth saw and heard nothing else through that deluge of limitless ecstasy. The cascading tumult of sound unwound all reason and sanity. Hurled adrift, soaring beyond the earthbound ties of his moorland origins, Fionn Areth reeled as the boundaries framing his identity dissolved. Joy gripped him. Laughter burst from his throat, an irrepressible paroxysm that shook and rattled and shattered the fear in his heart.
In the trampling rush of abandoned acceptance, he recalled where he had heard fragments of the grand chord before this: first in the spelled cry of a sword, drawn to spare him from death and fire, and later, in the timbre of a masterbard’s voice, singing to heal his torn knee. Then his last scrap of cognizance shredded. He drifted, unmoored amid the vast flux that imbued Ath’s creation with life.
The suspension might have lasted one heartbeat, or closed the full arc of eternity. Fionn Areth could not finger the moment when time and space shrank him back into fleshly awareness. He understood that the lane surge was waning, the withdrawal of its tonic fire an ache beyond words to describe. He felt hollow, sucked clean, then grievously desolate, as under his hands the stone’s keening cry diminished into dumb silence. The gift of its presence had been all that allowed the clay senses to share the ephemeral event. Wrenched by the dulled aftermath, Fionn Areth realized he might bear a loss for the rest of his days that his mind had no means to encompass.
The legacy was two-edged, in the way of all wisdom. Recast in the light of compassionate truth, the note of blind discord he could not sustain was his distrust of Arithon s’Ffalenn.
More than shaken, the scalpel cut of the wind on his face chasing an unwonted spill of tears, Fionn Areth leaned on chilled stone until his clamped knuckles bruised from the stress. ‘I don’t understand. Who is he?’
Out of the dark, and the harrying storm, through the jostling warmth of wet horses, the Mad Prophet gave level answer. ‘He is who he said: Rathain’s sanctioned crown prince, bound to serve by his oath. As you saw, he also bears living title as Athera’s Masterbard.’
Fionn Areth swallowed. ‘That doesn’t explain everything.’
‘I have answers.’ Dakar for a mercy met nerve storms with patience. ‘They’re not simple, or short, or infallible, since at heart the man beats a fiend for complexity. He’s as human as you, but his motives can be by lengths more difficult to fathom. If you wish me to speak, you’ll have to stay long enough to hear through the telling.’
Fionn Areth would make no apology for an upbringing meant for the tending of goats. ‘If I accept Prince Arithon’s offer of protection, I deserve to know why he has criminal charges for black sorcery on record against him.’
‘Ask what you will.’ Refreshed by the euphoric riptide of lane force, Dakar grasped the reins of the broad-backed roan gelding and swung his bulk into the saddle. ‘What I know, I’ll share freely, as long as you’re willing to ride. We need to set distance between us and Jaelot while we have bad weather to cover us.’
Fionn Areth mounted the lanky chestnut, his first question dropped as he closed his heels to the animal’s steaming flanks. ‘What actually happened on the banks of Tal Quorin?’
Dakar rolled his eyes. ‘You Araethurians don’t mince your words, do you?’ Grateful at least that Arithon’s last order gave him free permission to reply, he opened an ordered recital of facts that could wring tears from blue sky for sheer tragedy.
Yet breaking dawn cast silvery light through the diminishing veils of fresh snowfall before Fionn Areth had exhausted curiosity. He rode faced forward, staring at nothing, while the horse underneath him followed herd instinct and trailed Dakar’s mount to a stop.
Silence descended like muffling cotton, sliced by the trills of a chickadee. The sky to the east gleamed lucent aquamarine between scudded streamers of cloud. In a crook tucked amid the steep-sided foothills, beneath evergreens mantled like ermine-cloaked matrons, the Mad Prophet dropped his reins and dismounted. His words fell diminished in the bitter air as he announced his intent to set up a warded camp. ‘If you want to hunt game, be advised, we can’t cook. Koriathain have a knack for noticing fires. Their skilled scryers can sense a dying deer if they’re vexed enough for deep sounding.’
No reply; just a determined rustle of clothing as Fionn Areth reined his tired gelding around.
‘Where in Ath’s name do you think you’re going now?’ Dakar cracked in ill temper.
Echoes ranged back from the slab-sided hills and shook snow in heaps from the treetops.
‘Back.’ The Araethurian herder glared over his shoulder. ‘Perhaps you speak the truth. If so, I made an unpardonable mistake.’ Uncertain, in daylight, whether the event at the marker stone had been a dream wrought by enchantment to turn him, he said, mulish, ‘I would know if your prince spared my life in good