Which insolence snapped the Prime’s patience. ‘Be silent!’
‘I will not betray Arithon,’ Elaira stated, blunt as nails in a suicidal challenge. ‘If that’s what you’ve brought me here to achieve, let me clear the least shadow of doubt. I’ll cast off my vow of obedience, even welcome the punishment that makes final end of my love as your private weapon. Never again will I be the tool to gain leverage for Koriani politics.’
Lirenda caught her breath, stunned. Against the Prime sigils, no sworn initiate held the power to keep personal secrets; Elaira had hurled down the gauntlet to compel her own immolation.
On the dais, Selidie settled back in her chair. ‘You will not betray anyone,’ she rebuked in flat quiet. Her oval face gave no clue to her thoughts, the lucent flesh unmarked in youth, and the disciplined iron that showed no trace of emotion. ‘I am no fool, to misread the strengths and shortcomings of any initiate bound to life service. I will not abet suicide. Nor will I ruin a valuable resource over a textbook adherence to propriety.’
Shocked to naked retreat by the point-blank rejection of her tactical sacrifice, Elaira fell back on bravado. ‘Swear, then.’ Prompted by her razor-sharp instinct for survival, she added, ‘Take oath on your personal crystal that I will never be asked to betray Arithon s’Ffalenn, nor coerce another innocent as crow bait to draw him into the hands of his enemies.’
Selidie raised a silver-toned eyebrow. ‘Is your trust in my office so diminished? I have forthrightly stated my case. You are too strong a will to be wasted.’ Then, as Elaira failed to relax, ‘Ah, I see.’ She clapped petite hands, caught remiss. ‘You fear a repeat of Fionn Areth’s constrained fate.’ Coquettish malice touched her coral smile as she said, ‘Of course, you couldn’t know that plan was Lirenda’s idea.’
But Elaira proved too wise to be swayed by the diversion of petty vengeance. ‘Morriel’s permission endorsed that mishandling.’
‘As a lesson, yes, to an eighth-rank enchantress who failed to unmask the true core of the test as a trap. In due course, Lirenda proved out the flawed weakness that disbarred her from the succession.’ With a girl’s catty shrug, that her subject of revilement was constrained to listening silence, Selidie cupped her palms to the glowering sphere of the Waystone. ‘Did you know our great amethyst can record and enforce promises?’
Elaira shivered, speared through by chills. The warning stopped breath, that this was no green antagonist who countered her moves like a predator loosed on a chessboard. ‘Don’t do this.’
‘I require your trust,’ said the Prime, unequivocal. A freezing finger of cold stirred the air, then a ripple of malice clothed in stinging power, as the Matriarch engaged her will with the wakened might of the order’s most perilous focus stone. ‘For the record, in duration of my lifetime, bear witness to my word as Selidie Prime: initiate Elaira will never be forced to betray Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn in the interests of the Koriani Order.’
Elaira shook her head, stunned. ‘I need to sit down.’
The closed chamber seemed to magnify stillness, until the pearlescent gleam thrown off Vhalzein lacquer furnishings seemed a lawless intrusion of movement. Selidie uttered no word. Her eyes the dense, polished silver of hematite, she stroked the dire amethyst back to quiescence. Dainty in grace, and butterfly fragile, she inclined her head in permission.
A page pattered forward bearing a footstool. Blanched paper white and never more wary, the bronze-haired initiate groped, and caught shaky hands on the cushion. She let her knees give way underneath her. Lirenda’s thunderstruck silence at her back endorsed shocking fact, that an oath on the Waystone would be held in trust by the Prime Matriarch’s very life.
Limp in the juddering light of the candles, Elaira braced her stripped nerves, too aware she fenced wits with an enemy who outmatched her every resource. ‘If not to lay strings upon Arithon s’Ffalenn, why should you trouble to summon me?’
‘Why indeed?’ Selidie loosed sprightly laughter, then dispatched her page to the kitchen to ask for a tray of tea and buttered cakes. ‘Because the man is Dharkaron’s own shadow to track. He’s alone, and ill, and probably injured. If he’s going to succumb and die in the Skyshiels, our world loses a powerful cipher. You offer the best link we have to trace him. Surely you share the same interest at heart?’
Elaira considered this. Taut fingers laced on the crossed ankles of her riding boots, she scarcely winced as the grit of dried mud flaked onto the priceless carpet. ‘You won’t seek to claim full advantage of his weakness?’
‘Our order has no means to pluck him from the wilds of Daon Ramon, in any case. Not with five musters of Lysaer’s armed allies beating the brush with drawn steel.’ Selidie rearranged the sleeves of her mantle over the lion-carved chair arms. ‘They wish him dead. We desire him living, but captive. You are offered the choice how you serve him.’
‘I would keep him alive, but not at the cost of integrity,’ Elaira admitted without heat, though the knuckles she locked on damp leather bespoke the backhanded sting of the trap barbed and set to waylay her. ‘Just what service are you asking me to perform?’
Selidie regarded her disheveled wariness with a startling, frank gesture of kindness. ‘You are linked to him, yes? At the outset, I ask for your help with a scrying. In exchange, I offer these safeguards. You alone will review the results. For my needs, you need share nothing except the fact of his death, or the word of his safe arrival at the ruin of Ithamon.’
‘And if the issue is not black or white?’ Elaira pressed. Distrust scraped through her strained fabric of hope, that the inevitable, unseen hook in the bargain must put her conflicted loyalty to a more punishing test.
Selidie answered without hesitation. ‘By my oath on the Waystone, you are left free to answer his need at your personal discretion.’
Which gift was a dangerous boon. The master ciphers possessed by the Koriani Prime enabled Selidie to follow Elaira’s every move; by extension, she would gain infallible means to dog Arithon’s position at will.
The door latch jostled warning. Two servants in house livery entered in soundless tact. Both gave the unshielded quartz crystals wide berth. One cast a lace cloth over the claw-footed table set at Selidie’s elbow. The other settled the tray of refreshments and poured steaming tea into porcelain cups.
‘You’re too thin,’ observed Selidie. ‘Why not make your choice after you’ve eaten some honey cake?’
‘No blandishments.’ Elaira had recovered the aplomb to strike back in wry humor. ‘I’m no longer the starving street orphan who could be bought for the promise of bread crusts. S’Ffalenn princes have ever looked after their own, and your quarry has already proved himself as Torbrand’s trueborn descendant.’
‘His escape from Jaelot was no accident,’ Selidie agreed, ‘and you yourself honor his royal trust to the point where you won’t accept bread crusts without the old-law bonds of honest friendship.’
‘I’ll have surety before cake,’ Elaira insisted, her mettle steadfast under pressure. ‘A hard ride up the coast would make anybody thin. I’ll recover on gruel in a tavern, but after you’ve listed your terms of demand to offset my presumed gift of freedom.’
While Lirenda sucked in a breath of amazement, Selidie tucked her neat, coquette’s fingers around the scrolled handle of a teacup. ‘You should have been a merchant, the way you read nuance.’ She waved the hovering servants away. Steam plumed against the dimmed fall of the tapestries as she spooned in a thick gob of honey. Her gaze stayed thoughtfully level, but not discomposed, as she savored a lingering sip.
‘Merchants can’t traffic in slaves or prisoners, under terms of the Fellowship’s compact,’ Elaira attacked. ‘You need Arithon as your leverage to upset the old order, and to reach him, you plan to use me. I would have this over with.’