On the unsteady moment when he had sworn his guest oath, the Prince of Rathain had not realized the extent he would need to rely on Davien’s hospitality. The safe haven offered within Kewar’s caverns gave his exhausted faculties time to recoup from the devastating trials of the maze. Soon enough, he encountered the unforeseen changes stitched through his subtle awareness. After years of blank blockage, the healed access that restored his mage-sight required an interval of sharp readjustment.
Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn was not the same man who had crossed Daon Ramon shackled by guilt and the horrors of loss and bloodshed.
Nothing was as it had been. With each passing week, he encountered the odd rifts shot through his initiate awareness. His waking thoughts tended to stumble without warning, unleashing a mind-set that was not linear. The least supposition, no matter how trivial, might touch off an explosion of thought. He saw, perhaps, as the Sorcerers did, in vaulting chains of probability. The sudden shifts became disconcerting. Overcome, seated at breakfast one day, his inward musing upon his borrowed clothes showed him vision upon vision, overlaid.
Arithon viewed himself, using knife and needle to shorten his oversize sleeves; then observed Davien, who could sew as well as Sethvir, poking fun at his sail-hand’s stitching. In future imprint, he watched as he was offered a green-velvet tunic edged with ribbon and emblazoned with the leopard of Rathain. That raised his hackles. The jolt of his visceral rejection became an electrical force, impelling him into chaos…
… even as he thrashed to recover himself, Davien laughed again, while his unruly mind raced on and leaped to reframe his adamant preference: of simple, dark trousers and a loose linen shirt. Unreeled thought patterns streamed past all resistance. Left no choice, except to close down his mage-sight, Arithon tumbled back into the confines of his five senses. Even as he wrenched himself back in hand, he heard echoes: the loom in a weaver’s shop, and behind that, like crystalline imprint, the singing of country-folk, pounding raw flax into fibre…
Reoriented, gripping the edge of the table, Arithon sat, hard-breathing and deeply disturbed. He clung to the moment: as though the smells of bread and honey and fresh fruit could reweave his form out of something more solid than air.
Across the breakfast nook, an inquisitive Sorcerer regarded him, arms folded and dark eyes amused. ‘My shirts are too large?’ Davien raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ve been remiss? I’m expected to see you reclothed in state?’
‘If you’re offering, I’ll take plain linen,’ said Arithon. ‘The simplicity would be appreciated. It’s the cloth of my mind that won’t cut down to fit.’
Davien suppressed laughter. ‘Not if you try to cram yourself, wholesale, back inside the same vessel. You have much more than outgrown your past, Teir’s’Ffalenn. I daresay the puzzle enchants me.’
Fast enough, this time, to check-rein the surge of another spontaneous trance, Arithon reached for the bread knife. He buttered a crust, as though that one act might anchor the spin of turned senses.
‘You can’t live, shut down,’ the Sorcerer prodded.
The faintest of smiles bent Arithon’s mouth. ‘I can’t starve, overset by unbounded visions. That would demean your hospitality’ He bit into the morsel and regarded the Sorcerer, who watched him, each move, with tight focus. ‘I intrigue you that much?’
Davien found the jam jar and shoved it across the table, unasked. ‘Wrong word. You amaze me. But that’s the least point.’
Arithon set down his bread crust. ‘Why do I sense this discussion is verging on dangerous?’
‘Words are dangerous,’ Davien agreed. ‘Thoughts, even more so. That’s why, when mankind first came to Athera in need of a haven, I stood opposed to the compact.’
‘Your one vote, cast against your other six colleagues.’ Arithon accepted the preserves. ‘That fact is on record at Althain Tower, and truly, I’d prefer you kept out of my mind.’
Davien’s interest expanded. ‘You read into my history?’
Arithon regarded the enigmatic being before him, wrapped in the fiery colours of autumn, with a wolfish, lean face and the shadowed eyes of a creature that had lived for too long by sharp wits. ‘I saw enough to realize you wished to guard against the horrid expedient, should the terms of the compact break down.’
‘Expulsion, before enacting humanity’s extirpation from Athera,’ Davien summed up with steel-clad dispassion. ‘You believe what was written?’
In fact, the historian had condemned Davien’s stance: that twenty thousand refugees should be left to perish, before risking the reckless endangerment posed by the acts of their future descendants.
‘The suppositions on paper were damning.’ Arithon retrieved his knife, slathered his bread crust, then halved the unseasonably ripe peach set before him. ‘Doubtless your own words cast a different light. I don’t think you rejected compassion.’
The Sorcerer blinked. ‘I voted to replenish the refugees’ supplies and send them onwards, before risking the potential abuse of Paravian territory’
‘Send them on, to what fate?’ Arithon said gently. ‘“Frightened, in darkness, what would they find, but more fear and more darkness to hound them? What world will they desecrate, in their sore desperation? What innocent life might be trampled? Send the refugees elsewhere, and we will have disowned the problem, as well as washed our hands of all hope of a reconciled solution.”’
‘You quote Ciladis.’ Davien reclaimed the jam, thoughtful. ‘Once, our Fellowship was that frightened, that dark. No. We were darker. Without the drakes’ binding, we would have gone mad when first we encountered the Paravians.’ Bread slice in hand, the Sorcerer expounded, ‘You have traversed Kewar. How much suffering did you lay on yourself before you awakened and recognized that guilt is deadly, and empty, and profitless?’
‘The touch of a centaur guardian uplifted me,’ Arithon allowed. ‘Without that grace, I would surely have perished.’
Davien’s dark eyes flicked up and bored in. ‘You say? Then who admitted the centaur in the first place? Teir’s’Ffalenn.’
Arithon’s gaze turned downward, abashed. He could not disown himself; not again. The infinite presence that had touched and absolved him of itself demanded self-honesty.
‘Whose will broke the wards on the maze?’ Davien pressed. ‘You plumbed your self-hatred and demanded your answer, prince. Then you followed up with the courage to acknowledge your own self-worth. There is your grace. You are my fit weapon, to champion the cause of humanity’
Arithon’s knife slipped through his nerveless fingers. He stared, transfixed and horrified. ‘The Mistwraith’s curse is mastered, Davien. Its hold upon me is not ended!’ When no reply came, he said, tortured, ‘Your weapon? You expect me to salvage the compact and drag humanity back out of jeopardy?’
Davien’s answer came barbed. ‘I expect you to live out your life, Teir’s’Ffalenn. To make choice in free will. That you have endured Kewar’s maze, and survived, has well fashioned you for your destiny. You have broken the mould and stood forth on your merits. Mankind’s hope of survival will come to rely on the consequence. Either way’
The ominous ambiguity behind that soft phrase smashed Arithon’s tenuous hold on awareness. He perceived the forked path of his resolve in simultaneous split image: either he would rise to assume royal heritage, and rule with intent to heal the eroded tenets of the ancient law. Or he would adhere to his preference, and abjure his born charge, and let Rathain’s royal lineage die, crownless.
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