Initiate’s Trial: First book of Sword of the Canon

Inside, tubby Grismard stood in a puddle, backed up with his spine bowed against the hard edge of the copper-lined sink. The vagabond faced him. At least a head shorter and one-third the weight, the fellow should have been harmless. All the more, since the hand gripped to stay his loose trousers disarmed any threat at the risk of buck-naked embarrassment. Yet the feral green eyes pinned on the disgruntled suitor drained the man’s salmon flush to fish-belly white.

‘Grismard!’ Tarens opened in venomous delight. ‘Don’t you look like the bloke who just pissed his own breeks.’

‘Who’s your unsavoury visitor?’ snapped Grismard, chins quaking with sweaty unease.

‘That’s the foot-loose vendor who sold me the herbals,’ Kerelie smoothed over, shaken. The relief that acknowledged her brother’s arrival stayed charged with alarm, that something beyond a straightforward brawl might erupt in her sensible kitchen.

Tarens traipsed forward, thumbs hooked in his belt. A grin pasted over his clenched jaw, breathing fire, he kissed his sister’s scarred cheek. ‘You’ve scrounged some old clothing the peddler wants in trade?’

As though cued, the vagabond stepped back and unpinned his discomfited victim. He raised one arm and displayed his oversized raiment as if pleased by an exchange for his wares. The ferocious edge did not leave his eyes. He stayed placed between Kerelie and the importunate caller, no matter that the breached door to the kitchen flooded him with icy air or that the ludicrous fit of the breeches threatened to strand him, half-stripped.

‘I was planning to make tea,’ Kerelie announced to stem a burst of wry laughter.

Tarens snapped up the dangling line, ‘But at the moment, praise be to life’s set-backs, your sewing claims the more urgent priority?’ He strode forward, seized Grismard’s arm, and steered him on firm course for the exit. ‘Announce yourself, next time. We’ll be better prepared.’

The incensed visitor jerked himself free. ‘Best watch the quality you bring under your roof.’ He shot his cuff, yanked straight his mussed tweed, then warned in thwarted vindication, ‘Word’s hot about town, or haven’t you heard? The high temple examiner’s dispatched his diviners to hunt down a minion of Darkness.’

Before the electrified clash of bravado cocked Tarens’s protective fist, the vagabond moved. Snake quick, his slim hand skimmed the trestle and snatched up the abandoned packet of herbals. His gesture shouted scathing contempt as he tossed the spurned packet across the room. His aim could have been deadly, executed with force: the tied bundle struck the caller’s broad chest at the heart and rebounded.

Tarens’s reflex barely salvaged the catch before the gurgling flask tucked inside struck the brick floor and shattered. ‘We’ve survived very well without any help from busybodies, religion, or charity,’ he retorted, still on the muscle.

The browbeaten outsider wisely chose retreat and backed onto the threshold.

‘Don’t come again unless Kerelie invites you!’ Tarens thumped the spurned gift against Grismard’s jacket, shoved him out, then banged the door shut in his suet face.

No one spoke. The gloomy chill left in the kitchen hung on, even after the carriage wheels ground from the yard, and the fancy harness jingled away down the lane and dwindled, turned townward.

Kerelie huddled in uncle’s stuffed chair, restored to the head of the trestle. Her chapped hands gripped the tea she had brewed after all, to soothe her rattled composure. Along with Tarens, she regarded the dark, bent head of the vagabond, who perched on the left-hand bench. The naked slenderness draped in her borrowed blanket did not belong to a displaced labourer. The unsettled quiet forced both siblings to acknowledge: the thoughtless dexterity of those slender fingers was too well practised at plying the needle and thread just filched from Kerelie’s mending basket. Nor were the intricate stitches that retailored the trousers to size part or parcel of any field-hand’s experience.

At length, through unease that failed to dispel, Tarens mused, ‘Where have I seen work like that done before?’

Kerelie’s glum spirits dissolved at the question like storm-clouds chased off by fair weather. ‘Did you think I burned those vile rags with my eyes shut?’ Her devoted enthusiasm for sewing gave answer. ‘The tentmaker locks each stitch the same way when he fashions the seams in his canvas awnings.’ Her shy smile flashed, surprisingly sweet, on the side not creased by her scar. ‘Don’t imagine that I haven’t chewed over the subject until I remembered. The chap said he learned his craft from a ship’s mate who once mended sail on a lugger.’

Tarens sighed, his loose hands as browned as the soil the plough had ground under his nails. ‘We are a very long way from the coast.’

‘Well, don’t pretend Grismard won’t keep his vile promise.’ Her scowl resettled, Kerelie rapped a flaked chip of glaze from her tea-mug. ‘How long do we have, do you think, before he brings your stray guest to the notice of the Light’s diviners?’

‘I don’t care a hoot.’ Tarens stood up. His crusted boots tracked muddy prints without reprimand as he banged open the wood box and laid a split log to build up the fire. His blond hair shone against the stirred coals, crowned suddenly in bloodied light by the sparks wafted up the stone chimney. ‘I’ll never cringe from the threats of a toady,’ he cracked as he straightened. ‘Or bow one inch to the pious demands of some whey-faced temple examiner! Such sheep may preen in their white robes and pontificate. But I say human beings have purposeful brains beyond acting like flocks of scared pigeons.’

Yet as the wood caught and blazed at his back, the sudden, fierce heat lent the unpleasant reminder that brush-fires seldom burned without smoke.

Autumn 5922

Borrowed Time

Elaira braced for the next frontal attack launched against her by the Prime Matriarch. The Sorcerer’s warning, that Fellowship powers granted Arithon’s plight no further protection, woke the urgent need to unwind the riddle posed by the Biedar tribes’ intercession. Key to that answer lay three hundred leagues distant, amid the torrid black sands of Sanpashir. Already a renegade Koriani initiate, now determined to treat with the order’s most ancient arch enemy, Elaira expected the sisterhood must actively move to defend their close interests. Every hell-bent resource they owned could be unleashed to forestall her safe passage.

Therefore, she guarded her tracks and took flight through the spine of the Storlain Mountains. Travellers avoided those rugged wilds, far southward of the ancient pass at Lithmarin and well off the established route that linked land-bound trade with the deepwater harbour at Redburn. The hardy clanborn who trapped in the deep vales never ventured the high country alone. Few beyond the Fellowship Sorcerers braved the fault-line that bisected the continent where the collision of tectonic forces wrestled with titanic violence.

From the gouged channel of Instrell Bay, and against the primordial vistas of lava that bubbled the steam pots that bordered Scarpdale, the buckled strata of bed-rock ramped upwards. Towering white pinnacles scraped the sky’s roof, until the wracked terrain subsumed again and plunged into the reef-riddled fissure of South Strait. Where such mighty pressures shocked the earth’s bones, explosive shifts whiplashed the flux lines. Quakes tumbled the weathered scarps into slides, and spurts of destabilized electromagnetics erupted as howling gales.

A lone woman afoot was an insectile speck, tramping these trackless wilds. Overshadowed by clouds, or choked under the mist snagged on the vertical buttresses, Elaira journeyed where ice-falls and split rock keened to the savage winds. She laboured against the white-out blizzards that flayed her exposed skin like shot needles. Yet the same brutal elements also granted her a back-handed measure of safety. Storm and avalanche, and the roaring cataracts that tunnelled through crevasse and glacier produced the violent energy needed to confound the subtle venues of arcane surveillance. Enough to thwart even a circle of Senior seeresses, at least until she mastered the change imposed on her by Arithon’s current predicament: the fragile defense that hinged upon the kept secret of his anonymity. He carried no recall of her existence. But she, who safeguarded the trust of remembrance, still endured the empathic channel that linked her with his intimate being. Infallibly, Prime Selidie’s malice would seek to exploit that subtle connection.

If Elaira failed to seal off her unruly emotions before she left the Kingdom of Havish, all stakes would be lost. Packed light for speed, her cerecloth bedroll held only jerked meat. The spare shirt and a tin panniken in her satchel wrapped no more than basic healer’s supplies. She slept in the open. A steel-shod staff tested her steps on the ice-fields, and the knife at her belt that shaved wood for kindling also skinned her snared game and dug tubers. One night, she bedded down in a cramped cave, steamed by the malodorous seep of a hot spring. Another found her camped on an ice shelf, bridged over a tumbling freshet. Always, she sought running water, or places where the tumultuous elements swirled with turbulence. She dared even those sites where the sprites, known as iyats, gathered to feed upon chaos. If their fiendish pranks broke her rest, the same interference thwarted the sisterhood’s scryers.

The burning jab of their probes never ceased. Elaira lost count of the times she plunged naked into deep snow. Such acute discomfort broke off the assaults, which struck always when she was most vulnerable. Anytime her alert focus drifted, the Prime’s spies thrust to rifle her mind. Over the course of two and a half centuries, such relentless pursuit had stalked her for an oath breaker’s punishment. But since their coveted male quarry’s escape, the old cat-and-mouse stalemate had broken. The prize became Arithon’s tenuous freedom, with herself the game-piece to expose him.

Elaira rammed her spiked stave into the glare ice scabbed over a tumbling streamlet. She assayed the next precarious step, her breath plumed in the bitter air. As she edged down the jagged scar of a ravine scoured bare by a recent rockfall, the lethal endangerment posed by the terrain became a pittance beside the love that made her a target. The day must never dawn that the Prime’s balked ambition should seize on the chance to use her again.

Once betrayed at such cost the true heart shrank to contemplate, Arithon had consigned that power of choice into Elaira’s steadfast hands. For both of their sakes, her strength must shield him through his harrowing hour of weakness. Exhausted in the fallen silence of twilight, her feet sore down to the bone, she sheltered amid a stand of stunt firs, cragged roots anchored like a miser’s clenched fists into the cracks in sheer rock. Possessed of the same tenacious endurance, Elaira huddled by a frugal fire, sinews limp as unravelled knit. Stars blazed above the snow-blasted summits, foil-stamped against gathering darkness. Here, no saving disturbance existed to upset the reach of a crystal transmission. Selidie’s scryers might snatch that advantage to break her resistance. Elaira hoarded a store of dry wood. She would shove her hand into live coals if need be to deny the Prime Circle’s intrusion.

Yet nightfall deepened without undue threat. Only brutal cold and astringent breezes whispered and moaned through the lopsided evergreens.

Elaira pressed her fraught hands to her face. Discipline never had tamed her inner bond with Prince Arithon. The instinctive alignment of magnetic rapport burned in her each moment, made urgent as breath by her solitude. Worse, Arithon’s acute danger drastically heightened the already volatile interface. His emotions flared hers into flash-point gestalt without warning: vividly intimate as he brought in fresh game, and the homely croft woman who sheltered him attached him with a nickname not even a dog would have answered.

Worse, the flat twang of her town accent offended his musician’s ear, coarse as ground glass to the lyric awareness once titled as Athera’s Masterbard.

Through his eyes, Elaira captured his sly effort to thwart the irksome presumption. His laughter laid siege to the sternest resolve each time he deplored the address by turning his backside in clownish rebuff.

The by-play lightened the enchantress’s spirits until his yearning, bewildered desire – to be as he was – sought relief from the desolate pain of his alienation. Quietly, Arithon flagged the fair-haired brother’s more sympathetic attention. Then, with a bit of flaked charcoal, he started to write out his preference on the slate hearthstone. The first of his sketched characters wrung Tarens pale.

With the sister too preoccupied to take notice, the crofter’s shocked hiss quashed that first earnest effort to establish a personal trust. The dropped charcoal, stamped beneath a rough boot, obliterated the crude writing. Tarens whispered, frantic, ‘Light save us! If anyone realized you knew the old tongue? We’d be ruined, my friend, and you’d meet your death. Condemned as clanborn or else burned alive, executed for renegade sorcery.’

Alone in the brutal alpine cold, Elaira suffered the blow as a silenced witness, while fear and distrust quenched the tentative spark of her beloved’s stifled identity. Buffeted by the cruel gusts off the glaciers, she gasped as the tears blurred her eyes. Her heart could break for the lifetime’s trove of experience that lay sundered from Arithon’s grasp. Without power to comfort, she ached for his outsider’s misery as he leaned forlorn on the largesse of strangers, pretending to drowse while his trapper’s fare simmered in the kettle slung over the flames…

* * *

…too anxious for subtlety, Kerelie kept nattering as though her subject were deaf, or born nerveless. ‘Suppose the fellow knows witchery, Tarens?’

‘What makes you think that?’ The brother reseated himself at the trestle. Too poor for a lamp, forced to squint in the glow of a spluttering tallow dip, he resumed stitching a mend in the torn harness strap, broken after the folly that led him to tie the ox up by the reins. Rattled himself, and unskilled at pretence, he kept his head bent to his work.

‘Well,’ Kerelie temporized, her usual piece of fanciful sewing draped over her knee, ‘you can’t pretend that the oddities don’t cling to the man like jumping fleas. He’s gotten that scrawny hen to start scratching. You’ll see she’s recovered the gloss of good health. The grouchy bird follows him like a tame pet. Tell me you don’t notice? The animals thrive something more than they should when he helps with the chores in the barn.’

Tarens shrugged. A fallen lock of fair hair veiled his face as he ducked her direct regard.

‘You know that our ox dislikes strangers,’ Kerelie pressured. ‘If the brute doesn’t tread on their feet or balk outright, it sidles them into a post. Yet your vagabond leads that beast hither and yon without the least roll of an eyeball.’

Tarens grunted, the plink of his hammer against the awl made the ready excuse to duck conversation.

Kerelie out-waited his reluctant stand and picked up once the hole had been punched. ‘Someone taught that man knowledge of herbals, and not in a kitchen patch, either.’

‘He’s not my vagabond,’ Tarens replied. ‘What makes you think I have answers?’

By fretful habit, Kerelie scraped a knuckle along her scarred cheek. ‘I say he could be an uncanny creature dropped into our midst.’

‘He appreciates things,’ Tarens amended. ‘You feel that quality with his attention. Dumb beasts respond by giving their trust. Where’s the mystery in that? He understands language, and if he’s a mute, he doesn’t need speech to make himself understood.’

Kerelie poked her embroidery needle through a fold in her loose sleeve. Overlarge for the delicacy of her stitches, her prim hands rummaged into her basket for the emerald floss to embellish a rosebud. She was not a mean spirit. Only frightened, and worried past peace for the brother who stubbornly languished in sick-bed. ‘Koriathain prefer to take on mutes and half-wits. You don’t think our stray served their interests?’