Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon

Night’s gloom deepened his cankered malaise. He skirted the feathered boughs of stunt firs, unmoved by the primal thrill of a wolf pack howling beyond the ridge. The vigorous rustles of nocturnal creatures failed to shake off his low spirits. Though a night and full day of hard labour had laid Vivet’s knifed attacker to rest, the nameless man’s violent passage left a nagging sense of unease.

No record remained to decipher the final words left unsaid. Arithon’s sensitive talent had failed to sift meaningful clues from the roiled cascade of the regional flux lines.

That arcane endeavour, and the back-breaking chore of hauling loose stone for a grave cairn, yielded an exhaustion without numb relief. Subsequent pursuit of wild herbals fell short as a peaceful distraction. Scraped hands and the ache of spent muscle could not blunt the appalling wound to his spirit.

Arithon had never grappled the scope of such pain. The brute history packed into a sliver of crystal seared his heart-strings to anguish and unreeled a desolate future.

Last place on Athera he wished to revisit, the cabin offered the nearest shelter. He needed the immediate warmth to dry off and sleep before he moved on.

The rose tint of the afterglow bled from the ranges as he retraced his path down the remnant track, cut by the harness mule that had once hauled an ice cutter’s sledges. Spent, he crossed the streamlet and mounted the log stair, zigzagged upwards from the deep ravine. His arrival at the derelict shack found no one inside. The unlatched door swung open to fastened shutters and quiet.

Except yesterday’s velvet-thick darkness had changed. No longer musty, the air wore the spiked fragrance of balsam. The boards underfoot were swept clean of debris. Once his fumbling, chilled hands lit a spill, he took stock of Vivet’s industrious tenancy: a bed of cut pine boughs arranged in one corner; also a table fashioned from the salvaged wreck of a muleteer’s sleigh. Logs hewn from a deadfall served as makeshift seats, with birch kindling stacked by the hearth.

The axe wielded to split the stockpiled fuel seemed nowhere in evidence.

Arithon ignited the woodchips in the grate. The quickened flame melted the shadows and confirmed: the tiny cabin lay empty around him, with Vivet gone off on her own.

The small blaze burned fast. Arithon added more logs. Then he shed the cross-strap of his baldric, unslung his sheathed sword, and settled to rest by the fireside with the black blade propped against his bent knees. He soaked in the heat, grateful for privacy. Later was soon enough to assist Vivet’s busy intent to claim residence. Since noose traps for game were best set before daybreak, he catnapped, forehead braced on the crooked forearm that cradled his weapon.

If the exquisite enchantments forged into the weapon spun him uncanny dreams, he was not given solitude to plumb their content. The scrape of the door, then the icy draught wafted over the threshold signalled Vivet’s return.

Snapped awake, Arithon surged erect in apology. “I shall leave at once for your peace of mind.”

But if his presence seemed cause for dismay, the woman did not shrink from the surprise encounter. The knot torch in her hand revealed tidied hair, russet coils pinned at her nape with a hazel sprig still jewelled with peridot leaves. She carried two woodcocks strung up by the legs. Also a resourceful haul of wild berries, tubers, and greens, bundled up in her mended overskirt. Pale cream, marked with bruises, her oval face turned. Wide-eyed, she regarded him.

“Please stay. I don’t fear you.” The hatchet looped through her sash lent teeth to a statement at odds with her tremulous grip on the brand.

Moved under the whispered flutter of flame, Vivet spilled her bounty upon the crude table.

“I brought food for two. In case you came back.” She nodded towards the evergreen bed, where the brightened light showed a cache of muddied belongings. “My things tumbled down-slope in the scuffle last evening. I saw your work during my search to recover them. You need not have shouldered my troubles to start with, far less stayed on to give decent burial to a criminal stranger’s remains. A meal’s the least you deserve for the kindness.”

Pain hitched her hesitant step. The livid bruises on her throat and neck strained her voice husky with swelling. Defiantly able to fend for herself, she jammed the knife used to dispatch her assailant into the boards, then attacked the gruesome task of dressing game.

Her presumptive gesture of repayment galled. Arithon shook off a stab of pique. Tired past sense, he recovered his misplaced courtesy. “At least allow me my fair share of the plucking.”

“I require no help!” Vivet’s quaver banished him to a safe distance.

Arithon tried conversation to soothe her jagged aggression. “You mentioned before you were on your way home?”

Vivet’s pinched mouth jerked. “Why not say what you think?” Knife brandished to lop off the birds’ heads, she sighed. “Surely you’d say these rugged mountains are no place for a woman alone.”

Which venomous bitterness attacked first in assumption: that men believed female vulnerability invited the opportune assault of a predator. Masterbard, healer, Arithon let her stung denouncement flounder in silence.

For a while, only the torch-flame whickered in dialogue with the drawing blaze in the fire-place.

Vivet presently dropped the halfway-gutted bird and banged down her fists. “Damn you!” Outrage pointed enough to drill flint turned her battered face towards him. “You act as though naught in the world has gone wrong!”

But the purple contusions on her flesh shouted testament to the contrary.

To stand with a sword, even sheathed, posed a threat. Arithon tucked up and sat by the hearth. He laid the shining, obsidian blade flat, deferent to the axe she kept within reach. “Should I forget? You knifed your attacker.” Arms folded atop his bent knees, he added, “I’ve witnessed your courage. Therefore, I’m able to bow to your fears without prejudice.” His grave regard was an initiate sorcerer’s, grounded in the self-knowledge to bear the most vicious hatred, unflinching.

Vivet spun away. The gleam on her hair like warm carnelian, she raised her blood-smeared wrist to her cheek to blot her ashamed tears.

Arithon’s patient remonstrance pursued her. “A past act of abuse can’t vanquish the strength of the survivor I see before me.” He petitioned for truce. “Tonight’s calm is equally real. And without pretence, despite the after-shock of an unspeakable trauma.”

Vivet quivered. Fragile poise undone at a stroke, she snatched the knife from the trestle and bolted. Her tempestuous exit slammed the plank door, forceful enough to shake cobwebs down from the rafters.

She could not be gone long. Without a wool mantle, the relentless cold must outface her emotional storm. Arithon slid the black sword out of sight behind the stacked firewood. Then he took charge of the half-prepared meal, goaded by the ruthless irony: that his platitude consoled nothing. Within and without, his presence was emptied by desolation. The core of his heart had been just as savaged as Vivet’s used body. Naught existed in the wide world to salve the anguish encountered within these four walls. His own needled urge to take flight found no respite in the rote plucking of carcasses.

Yet a master’s awareness viewed the hard road ahead without quarter. All pain must be measured, and met, and finally conquered. Life demanded resilience. Or else the mired spirit would languish, forlorn, crippled under self-indulgent regret.

Arithon stuffed the split birds with wild onion, then wrapped them in herb leaves for flavour. Spitted, they roasted over the coals, while his makeshift oven contrived with flat rocks baked the tubers inside their scrubbed skins.

Vivet returned to that savoury aroma, her downcast eyes puffed, and her arms burdened with additional evergreen. Not to seem useless, she dropped the fresh boughs for his bed in the opposite corner.

“I’m sorry.” Her strained limp brought her back towards the trestle. “I’ve given poor thanks for your civil forbearance.”

Arithon shifted at once to restore space between them.

“Stay,” Vivet objected, singed red with shame. “Don’t freeze yourself on the floor for my sake.”

The first torch had burned down. She kindled another and wedged the stake upright before perching in rigid defiance across the table.

His own raw emotion battened in shadow, Arithon studied her. Up close, underneath the patched bruises, her skin was too young for crow’s-feet. Barely into her twenties, she had a sparrow’s pert grace, a firm chin, apple cheeks, and an expressive dimple beneath coral lips. Her independence carried the cracked fragility of fine porcelain, savagely used but not ruined, though her shadowed glance had forever lost the care-free sparkle of innocence.

“I was returning to Ettinmere Settlement,” she admitted, a brazen effort to forge trust in good faith. Sooty circles beneath downcast lashes wore the pouches of recurrent weeping. Trembling unmasked her false confidence as she added, “I have family there. A father, now passed. Three brothers. Two married sisters. My mother fell ill. I heard through a fur trader. But no word since then to know if she’s living.”

Vivet’s lids flicked up, her bloodshot eyes the vivid blue of a fair-weather lake. “My people are proud of their insular ways. They’ll say, perhaps rightly, I should not have run off on a feckless adventure to Deal.”

The moment filled with the sibilant crackle of flames, while wind off the peaks swooped over the roof shakes, and prised a complaint from a squeaky shutter. Arithon studied Vivet’s clenched hands, without obvious marks of a gainful profession. Distress obscured her true personality. Left to his musician’s gift, he sifted the overtones of her remark and answered her plaintive uncertainty. “You’d have had good reason to seek your own way. One just as important as the resolve that drives your contrite return.”

Vivet’s breath hitched. “More than anything, I wanted the learning to read and write.” More tears might have spilled, had she not been wrung dry. Her loosened hair hazed under flame-light, she huddled like a storm-battered bird, fluffed after a cruel drenching. Her panicky outburst escaped before thought, “Fatemaster’s mercy, I daren’t be seen by my people like this!”

And that sharp, fateful phrase struck the sensitive ear of the Masterbard. Arithon sounded the unpremeditated truth and mapped Vivet’s untenable conflict. Beneath fear, under desperate, trapped rage and stunned hurt in the aftermath of violation, her mangled spirit required the unpressured solitude to recoup and heal. There, vital need floundered into the pit of her frantic anxiety. Wing-broken, her shattered confidence quickened the terror of being alone.

Arithon committed himself without thought. Rootless after his own love’s betrayal, the ashes of his desire embraced Vivet’s agonized need, uncontested.

Distraught incentive cared very little how long her predicament shackled him. Since his ancestral compassion abandoned no wounded spirit to languish, the man sanctioned as the Crown Prince of Rathain plucked the spit off the hearth in deferent anonymity.

“Your brace of woodcock appear to be roasted.” Pain masked by the trivial matter of supper, he set the unwarranted seal on his future. “You need go nowhere before you are ready. I’ll keep watch at the door while you sleep. When you’re comfortable travelling, and if you wish, I’ll guard your way back to your kinfolk in Ettinmere.”

Vivet’s tension unburdened in flooding relief. Arithon rode the impulse of his generosity, salved by his power to offer redress, where his personal hurt found no solace. No farsighted glimpse of dire complication ruffled his sensitive instincts.

Instead, as the evening deepened, the quiet camaraderie shaped by the meal wove a web of frail magic. Meat knifed off the bone and eaten with fingers wore down reserved self-consciousness. His teasing remark about duelling with straws to determine who washed up, without pots and plates, almost raised Vivet’s shy smile. The fleeting flicker of forgotten joy touched the moment she thought he looked elsewhere.

Eased by a beauty that transformed her marked face, Arithon conceded her path to recovery was not entirely one-sided. Though a prolonged stay at the cabin did nothing for his pierced heart, his earnest offer of escort to Ettinmere perhaps posed an unforeseen advantage. Vivet’s grateful family might give him shelter. If not to over-winter in safety, at least he might bargain for warmer clothing and needful supplies. The settlement was remote. Its insular society, hidebound in tradition, shunned outsiders and distrusted Sunwheel priests. As a passing haven, the site could thwart the deadly reach of his enemies.

The present meanwhile rested on the ordinary. While Vivet attended her necessities outside, Arithon tossed their leftovers through the window to fatten the scavenging mice. He secured the loose shutter, replaced the spent torch with a rushlight, and banked the embers in the fire-place. After Vivet’s return, he took up his sword and moved the piled evergreen boughs for his bed to the threshold. Then he sat with his back against the shut door. Tired himself, he honoured his word: burned reckless resource to keep wakeful vigil until the woman settled her nerves and rest overcame her anxiety.