Yet Elaira’s gray eyes held no trace of contempt; only sympathy clothed over the steadying framework of prosaic conversation. ‘The Prime’s seat has its drawbacks.’
‘What would you know?’ Lirenda snapped, all at once crushingly weary. Forgetful this once of marring her silk, she braced on the rim of the grape vat.
‘Everything to do with having nothing left to lose.’ Elaira tucked up her feet. Her small, marring frown came and went for the fact her ankles had numbed from the chill. ‘One learns, in the streets, what cannot be taken. Friendship, courage, self-respect. The world’s weave is set on a very broad loom. A single snapped thread doesn’t have to mar the whole fabric.’
Lirenda tipped up her chin. ‘Fine words for you. Easily said, since you never passed into rank.’
Elaira just looked at her, an odd little smile arguing the gravity of the moment. ‘I can’t have what I want, either. That can be supported. There are other joys, other goals, many avenues in which to seek human growth and fulfillment.’
A moment fled by, filled by the moan of the wind, while the tallow dips fluttered and streamed oily smoke, and the door shook on its ill-fitted hinges. Then Lirenda looked away. Had anyone else offered companionship through her hour of abject defeat, she might, perhaps, have loosened the grief fastening her shackled heart. But Elaira’s straight tolerance did nothing but refire the memory of the s’Ffalenn prince’s face, and a tenderness held in the depths of green eyes that, now and forever, would only be there for another.
Elaira had made herself outcast for a love well returned.
For Lirenda, Arithon’s boundless compassion had touched and uprooted her sense of inner alignment. His cool removal left her exposed and unpartnered. ‘You cannot help me,’ she told the woman whose bedrock dignity eschewed refined clothes, and whose bone-simple courage surpassed her. ‘I asked to have privacy. Do you mind?’
‘No. Not at all.’ Elaira arose. She tucked up her cloak hood and let herself into the night, in the earnest, but mistaken, belief she left her sister initiate to the healing virtues of solitude. For Lirenda, alone in the frigid isolation of the derelict vintner’s shed, rage and shame far outstripped any wounding of sorrow. Truth nipped like a gadfly. If Arithon’s kiss had unstrung her defenses and bared her most glaring weakness, the betrayal of Morriel’s promise of redemption assuredly had preceded the bastard’s flight out of Jaelot.
‘Damn you to Sithaer’s nethermost pit!’ Lirenda cursed the lately departed spirit of the Prime. ‘You had to have planned this! Why else should you contrive your passage of the Wheel while I was diverted by the pretense of proving my worth?’
Why indeed; the stabbing resurgence of logic hitched her breath. Lirenda chafed her numbed hands. A frown marred her ivory forehead, while her mind turned in bitter calculation. The events were too perfectly aligned for less than a calculated endgame. She saw, for all time, that she had become the duped butt of Morriel’s manipulation. The old Prime had set her up, blindsided her with distractions, even played upon her flaws to ensure she would be distant and preoccupied through the crucial change in succession.
Lirenda reviewed the irregular facts, doused by the needling, certain awareness that her presence at hand would have posed a sure threat. Only a former First Senior could have known of Selidie’s outright incompetence. The young woman had never been remotely capable of surviving a second-level initiation, far less the rigors of the ninth test required of all aspirants who had achieved the seat of Prime office.
‘What have you done?’ Lirenda demanded of the departed spirit of the crone who had wrangled and cheated her. ‘Ath, oh Ath, what was your grand plan, that you dared not risk me as a witness?’
The wind gusted, rattling the door on its hinges. Snow crystals scattered in driven bursts against the gapped board walls. Inside, ignited to towering fury, Lirenda paced, the dust lashed to billows at her back. Her cloak snagged a hook on the bottle rack. She snapped the hem free, uncaring as the lining tore with a scream of ruined silk. Her skirts with their elaborate layers of gold stitching flared to her agitation like the charge in an oncoming squall line.
No human balm could absolve her deep pain. The hate scalding through her lacked target or recourse. One stroke had cut off the prize she had pledged her whole life to pursue. The ignominy galled. Her initiate’s vow to the Koriani Order would permit no release into freedom. All her days, she would suffer in dog-pack subservience for the sake of a kiss in an alley. Arithon’s unconscionable intervention sealed her fate. Her name would now wear the same taint of disgrace that Elaira had borne for three decades.
‘May you scream, chained in Sithaer, prince and Spinner of Darkness!’ Lirenda swore under her breath. Even still, his near memory scalded her mind. She relived the branding, hot passion, unwilling, of her lips against his, pliant with ecstatic surrender. Damned for all time for a liaison of the heart, she reviled the love she could neither banish nor conquer.
She would suffer Morriel’s most wretched revenge for that failing. Another ignominy piled on the first, when impatient ambition had driven her to break the original grand construct designed to snare the Master of Shadow.
She had not righted one shred of the balance. Arithon s’Ffalenn still ran free. Ever and always, the cipher that damned was her drawing fascination for his royal gift of compassion. His triumph had fashioned her insufferable downfall, and oh, she knew, might easily do so again.
Lirenda clamped her fists in frustration. She was condemned to mediocrity, but scarcely helpless. If Arithon’s wretched play on her heartstrings had destroyed her brilliant career, she had a lifetime left to exact her retaliation.
Two steps, three, her skirts snagging cobwebs from the staves of half-rotted wine tuns, Lirenda paused between strides. Miracle of miracles, amid avalanching setbacks, the tools for her use already lay in her hand.
Earlier that day, she had imprinted a sigil of command on the captain of Jaelot’s garrison when the man’s gruff competence had to be steered clear of her delicately plotted affairs. Yet the construct wrought at need on the street still remained fully active. Renew that one cipher of manipulative control, then key it to a geas of obsession, and Lirenda could draw the mayor’s captain on puppet strings. Add a tangling net of spells, and Prince Arithon’s flight could be hounded beyond reason and sanity.
The s’Ffalenn bastard would suffer for the snatched kiss that had condemned her to final failure. Lirenda vowed to seal his demise. How easily she could make him the beset hare in the path of a bloodletting hunt.
The idea took firm shape. A warm thrill curled through the enchantress’s black rage. ‘Oh yes, your royal Grace, you’ll pay well for your ill-gotten freedom.’
Lirenda began by inscribing eight ritual circles to cloak her act in deep secrecy. The craft she invoked must not perturb the lane flux. Like the spider who stole from a rival’s web, she worked outside strictures that governed her trained use of power. Rage snapped all restraints. In furtive steps, she laid down the sigils which ensured that the backwash of shed resonance would be absorbed within her own body. A few days of sick weakness would be worth the satisfaction of seeing Arithon s’Ffalenn hunted down like a forest barbarian.
Protections in place, Lirenda knelt by the vat last used for Cadgia’s scrying. Welded to the cause of unvarnished spite, she caught the silver chain and cleared her spell crystal from her high collar.
‘An,’ she whispered, the Paravian rune for one, which opened the first stage of ritual. She traced the primary rune of binding over the membrane of ice on the water, then added in sequence the chained string of ciphers that claimed a man’s will beneath the threshold of consciousness. A breath through her crystal infused her sketched symbols. The construct pulsed active, shedding harsh purple light that could burn to blindness the eyes of the careless. Drawing from the passionate well of her hatred, Lirenda laid the