Traitor’s Knot: Fourth Book of The Alliance of Light

‘Your treason won’t take me,’ Lysaer gasped, enraged.

Whipped to tears, panting through lancing pain, Sulfin Evend could not snatch the resource for answer. Without words, against hope, he must mend shattered trust, before the fell forces his meddling had unleashed drained off his life and claimed both of them.

Where muscle failed, he used leverage and weight, jammed the murdering fist to the floor. He knew where the nerve ran, and jabbed, as he must. Through Lysaer’s snarled curses, Sulfin Evend bore in. He matched that incensed blue stare until the wrist that he savaged went limp in his ruthless grasp. He groped, one-handed, recovered the knife.

Fury whipped through his liege’s taut frame. Sulfin Evend grappled drawn wire and steel. He held on, while faintness sucked at his balance. His stomach felt yanked inside out, while his hands and feet came unravelled and dissolved into substanceless air. Every skilled art of war, all his tricks of in-fighting, ebbed away under roaring vertigo. Rushed witless, he fell back on expedience, and gouged a knee into Lysaer’s exposed groin.

The prince curled, caught short by the cruel restraints. The pinched breath in his nostrils passed, whistling.

He gasped, while his officer hefted the knife. Grainy flint blade, and sweat-printed obsidian handle: the weapon seemed made for no purposeful good. Yet its foreboding appearance could not compare with the obscene shard of knapped bone that Lysaer had used to enslave himself. The Lord Commander levelled the dagger before his liege’s wracked face. Reeling, he waited. Through surge upon surge of debilitating torment, he held on until those gemstone-blue eyes showed the flicker of restored comprehension.

Moving slowly, he reversed the keen edge, then laid the stone handle in the slack fingers of Lysaer’s pinned hand.

He relaxed his grip slightly, sensed the impulse to kill, and locked his fist down once again. If the venomous, stinging pain was receding, a numbing fog now invaded his being. Sulfin Evend battled its deadening lethargy. He would persevere; even failing, he must. He released his clamped hold on his liege’s bruised forearm.

Lysaer’s fingers, too willing, stayed clenched on the knife.

Wrung to reeling faintness, Sulfin Evend tried release.

The blade dived for him, glittering. He parried with his forearm, felt the grazed burn of flesh meeting flesh. His instinctive counter-response proved too brutal: Lysaer’s hand released, skating the weapon in a clattering spin over the wax-polished floor-boards.

Sulfin Evend hurled sidewards, pinned the flying blade before its slide escaped the protective circles. Hard-breathing, his raced pulse a roar in his ears, he battled his up-ended senses. Despair struck: he was not going to rally. The hesitation as he tried to regroup would only sink him, unconscious. He rolled again, used dead weight to bear Lysaer backwards. Lose his hold now, and the other, bound arm would wrestle free of the silk wristband.

Couched on straining flesh, gut-winded and sick, Sulfin Evend placed the haft of the knife into Lysaer’s slack palm once more. The wrist he crushed to submission was scuffed raw, congested with bruises from brutal handling. Beyond pity, the commander grappled his ebbing strength. Each second he succumbed, Lysaer rebounded. The next strike of the knife would be lethal. Exposed beyond recourse, Sulfin Evend locked stares with his liege, all the mute will in him pleading. He forced the awareness that he foresaw his own murder. As his grasp weakened, he stood down, unresisting, while his loosened hand grazed in an unvoiced apology over the welted scars marking the length of Lysaer’s forearm.

The ritual joined in the circle still ruled him. Sulfin Evend sensed the imprint of his own touch. He recorded each unpleasant, tingling snap, as his fingertips grazed the healed lesions. Lysaer felt the sting also. Hazed into recoil, he must know the intrusive sensation was nothing natural. The man in him had to acknowledge the queer, creeping wrongness that suffused his intimate flesh. If his s’Ilessid lineage ran true, he would respond through his forebear’s gift of true justice.

The demand of the ritual disallowed speech. Shoved hard against the last rags of awareness, Sulfin Evend mimed the cut through the air that would sever the tie set by necromancy. Propped, shivering, on his spread hand, he pointed to Lysaer’s damp brow, then repeated the gesture, just short of disturbing the unseen cord that rooted the source of vile conjury.

Strapped logic could not find a second approach. Win through, or fall woefully short, the commander could do nothing more. Crouched on his tucked heels, he waited.

The knife thrust at his leg. Sulfin Evend flung himself clear. Design, or plain accident, as he sprawled, his bent elbow rammed into Lysaer’s exposed thigh. The blow shocked the nerve. While his liege moaned in spasm, Sulfin Evend dragged himself back upright. Reeling, he caught the freed forearm. Again, badly trembling, he hefted limp weight and laid Lysaer’s slack knuckles in place. The dropped knife seemed beyond him. Twice, he fumbled before he managed to capture the obsidian grip. Rocked by shuddering gasps, he pressed the weapon back into Lysaer’s clasp.

By then, the hardened blue eyes showed recovery. Taut fingers closed. The flint edge of the blade jittered red in the hellish glare of the embers.

Light-headed, unmoored, Sulfin Evend owned no last stock of resource. He braced, streaming sweat, wracked hoarse by the rush of his breathing. Throughout, the victim of necromancy watched him, deadly and poised as a predator.

Naught else could be done, except tip back his chin, shut his eyes, and invite the quick strike to the throat.

Caithdeinen offered their lives to test princes, if no other means lay at hand.

Stung by that edged truth, the doomed man might have laughed, had the irony not robbed him of dignity. Chance ruled the moment, as he embraced his fate in sacrificial surrender.

Through that last, drawn second, while risen darkness choked down swimming vision, Sulfin Evend tracked the pattern of Lysaer’s forced breaths, brokenly rising and falling. His own chest ached to bursting. Every joint hurt. The spurred beat of his heart stabbed pangs through his breast, while his ears rang with the memory of his own voice, swearing the time-worn oath by which every sanctioned prince of the realm had been tested. He clung, while life trembled upon the snapped thread of a mad prince’s forgotten mercy.

Crippled, exposed as bait for a necromancer, Sulfin Evend felt the cold ribbons of sweat stripe his back through fast-fraying awareness. He measured the acid-etched stir of the air, as Lysaer firmed his grip on the knife. No coward, the commander opened his eyes and welcomed the stroke that would take him.

The aimed point of the dagger snatched short in mid air. Sulfin Evend stared full into Lysaer’s face, while the tears he could no longer contain spilled and ran down his cheek-bones. His terror could not be masked, or his pity, sustained in the locked stare between them. He bowed his head, waited, and again sensed the move as the knife settled trembling. Razor-edged flint pressed the side of his neck.

Sulfin Evend lost his will to move. Resigned beyond even wrenching despair, he could no longer endure the crazed light in his liege’s eyes. Nor would he reason with suborned insanity. Undone by weakness, trembling with terror, he swayed under the dissolving pull of the spells. At the last, the frail stay that kept his upright posture was the bruised and tenuous trust he owed for the discharge of life debt and service.

The blade moved. Sulfin Evend lifted his chin, just in time to see the black knife drop down. The stroke followed through and slashed across the last binding, rooted at Lysaer’s forehead.

An electrical snap sheared the air. Pain followed. The tearing onslaught as the spell sundered arched Lysaer violently upwards. The knife left his contorted grasp and flew wild, while Sulfin Evend ripped in a cramped breath and gasped the Paravian word, Alt! His scraped whisper finished the ritual, one split-second shy of disaster.

Then the hurled knife crossed the fourfold line of the circles. Dimmed hearing rushed back, shot to crystalline focus. The embers in the grate seemed the blaze of a holocaust, and the chamber, hurtfully solid enough to confound the overstrung senses.

Yet the peril was over.

Sulfin Evend felt the crushing weight of dissipation lift away. Retching, still dizzy, he raised his marked hands and caught Lysaer’s thrashing head. If his strength was spent, he could still lend support. Weeping, he could muffle Lysaer’s fraught screams against his shoulder and chest.

‘Here!’ he pitched his hoarse command toward the chair, where the valet presumably still kept his vigil. ‘Fetch dry towels and a blanket.’

As the commander’s battered awareness slid back into focus, he flexed his left hand and picked at the knots confining Lysaer’s right wrist. Holding the Blessed Prince propped upright against him, he let the valet assist with the cloth that collared the bone-slender ankles. Then he waited, recovering, as towels were brought, one thoughtfully soaked in cool water.

‘Make up the bed,’ Sulfin Evend ground out, while a competent touch wrapped the prince’s flushed forehead in soothing folds of wet cloth. ‘I’ll help attend to his Exalted Self. He is freed, but not likely to stay conscious.’

‘You don’t look much better,’ said the servant, distraught. He shuddered, exclaiming, ‘Merciful Light! Just what manner of foul apparition did you banish?’

The Alliance Lord Commander stared back, battered blank.

Wordless, the valet struggled with his wrecked poise. His large hands were shaking, and his chattering teeth hampered his stumbling speech. ‘There were things, icy cold, crowding outside that circle. Unearthly, ill spirits, and Sithaer knows what else.’

‘You didn’t bolt,’ Sulfin Evend pointed out.

The prince’s serving-man brushed off the praise. ‘His Blessed Grace has been unwell for some time. What else could I do, except stand by your word, that those horrors were sent here to claim him?’

‘Well, they failed!’ Jabbed to vicious distaste for the fact he could not subdue his own trembling, Sulfin Evend realized the prince had gone limp. The gold head lolled, hot and damp, on his shoulder, while the skin cut he had made at the navel dripped blood with sullen persistence. ‘Your master’s ill, now. He requires our cosseting. Meantime, I don’t wish to burn for a sorcerer’s workings in Erdane! We’ve got this chamber to set back to rights. No one must see what’s occurred here.’

While the anxious servant took charge of Lysaer, Sulfin Evend untangled his legs, stood erect, and forced his unsteady feet to bear weight long enough to rub out the spent circles. Next, he recovered the spoiled silk that contained the bowl shards and bone-knife, scrounged up a coffer, and dumped out its load of state jewellery. After he had secured the ill-fated bundle under lock and key, he towelled himself dry and wrestled back into his breeches and shirt. The valet was no slacker. By then he had the unconscious prince bathed and groomed, and installed in warmed comfort on the bed.

Lysaer himself remained senseless throughout. Until he roused in his collected, right mind, his keepers could do nothing more than watch and guardedly wait.

As the windows were thrown open to dispel the herb smoke and the rug was spread over the scuffed flooring, the valet exchanged a tenuous glance with the Alliance Lord Commander. Neither man spoke. The next trial was inevitable. Until Lysaer recovered, they would have to fend off the mayor’s house staff, and worse, the inquisitive pressure applied by Erdane’s ambitious officials.

For that, Sulfin Evend chose to rely on the battle-trained wits of his field captain. ‘No one else will come in,’ he assured the stressed servant. ‘There’s not another damned thing we can do but try our utmost to maintain appearances.’

Wrung out and tired enough to fall down, the Alliance Lord Commander left Lysaer’s bedside and unbarred the shut door to the antechamber. No help for the fact he looked washed to his socks; raked over by the avid, curious eyes of the men under orders to keep vigil till dawn, he could but hope that the room at his back revealed nothing more than the brushed gold head of divinity, lying at peace on the pillows.

Still alert, his ranking officer stepped forth, expecting the word to stand down.

Sulfin Evend spoke fast to stall questions. ‘Send every-one back. The crisis is over. We’re into convalescent recovery, but for that, the prince must have quiet.’ He finished his orders in a lowered voice. ‘The page and the chamber servant must stay here in seclusion. I won’t have them abroad to spread idle talk. Let your day sergeant assign that detail. He’s capable. You are not excused, meanwhile. I plan to sleep here in Lysaer’s close company. This door remains tightly guarded, throughout. Not so much as a rumour slips by you. Have I made my needs understood?’

‘No one comes in?’ Honourably scarred from a dozen campaigns, the grizzled veteran flushed with dismay. ‘Plaguing fiends, man! I’ve no glib tongue, and no stomach for mincing diplomacy.’

‘That’s why I need you.’ Sulfin Evend returned his most scorching grin. ‘If the petitioners get testy, let them try your sword. Since when has the Grace of Divine Blessing on Earth been required to answer to any-one?’

Dawn arrived, pallid grey. Light through the fogged casements spat leaden glints on the mail shirt and sword, still draped on the chest by the armoire. Its unflinching candour also traced the gaunt face and dark hair of the Lord Commander, who watched at the bedside with steely, light eyes. Aching and sore, awake by the grace of a tisane mixed by the self-effacing valet, Sulfin Evend watched the new day expose a divinity no less than mortally fallible. Left burning with questions he had no right to ask, he guarded his charge with the dangerous calm of a falcon leashed to the block.