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

Morning brightened. The watch-bells clanged from Erdane’s outer walls. When the rumble of cart-wheels racketed echoes from the cobble-stone yard by the kitchen, the Blessed Prince still had not stirred. For the first time that any man could recall, Lysaer s’Ilessid slept soundly past the hour of sunrise.

Westward, the velvet shadow of night was just lifting in Tysan’s regency capital at Avenor. There, Cerebeld, High Priest of the Light, attended his custom of daybreak devotion. A florid man with a dauntlessly focused intelligence, he sat, knees folded in meditation, the drape of his formal robes like sunlight on new-fallen snow. Four alabaster bowls on the altar before him contained his daily offering: of clear water, sweet herbs, and a wool tuft infused with volatile oils, commingled with a drop of pricked blood just taken from his lanced finger. Now immersed in deep trance, he waited for the ecstatic communion with the Divine Prince of the Light.

Yet this morning, the contact never arrived. No distinctive presence invoked his true visions. Cerebeld received nothing, while the minutes unreeled, and the flood of cold fear filled the vacancy.

‘My Lord, my life, why have you forsaken me?’

No answer followed. Only an empty and desolate silence that reduced him to anxious distress.

‘My Lord!’ he appealed, shaken. ‘How am I to enact the work of your will?’

Aching, Cerebeld hurled his mind deeper. He extended his awareness through the limitless void, but no bright power rose up to meet him.

Instead, something other stirred out of the dark. Alone, driven desperate, Cerebeld embraced the encounter that, after all, was not threatening or strange, but offered his name back in welcome.

Then the rapture struck in a welling, sweet wave, as always. Cerebeld shuddered, swept up in sublime content, as he had each day since his investiture.

He surrendered. Swept under, he shivered and gasped in the silken rush of a pleasure that ranged beyond reason. The moment of joined exaltation sustained until sunrise, then peaked, and faded away. The High Priest at Avenor tumbled backwards, recalled to himself. Ahead, he faced the dull framework of duty: petitions from council-men, and charitable dispositions, and the ongoing difficulty posed by an absent princess, still missing.

Cerebeld opened his eyes to the shearing, intolerable pain of his solitary awareness. He arose from his knees. No witness observed him. The oddity passed without pause for question that, today, the Prince of the Light had not spoken.

Late Spring 5670

Wakening (#ulink_53342eba-fc98-57d9-be30-b70b385aa9dc)

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.

The irony cut with piercing clarity: how readily he might force Paravian survival by enacting the lawless alternative. The curse wrought through his being might slip even his most vigilant grasp. He might err out of weakness, or misjudge the impact of his active or passive presence. Such forceful power as he carried might in fact precipitate the last crisis that brought town politics to sunder the compact. The dread consequence of that course was not revocable: the Fellowship of Seven would be charged to eradicate mankind from Athera, ruled as they were by the terrible binding set over them by the dragons.

Aware of Davien’s regard, which acknowledged his shocked grasp of the vicious train of repercussions, Arithon shivered, bone deep. ‘No one should dare try to fathom your motives,’ he addressed the Sorcerer point-blank.

‘Inside the Law of the Major Balance, our Fellowship cannot determine your future,’ Davien corrected with acid clarity. ‘Before that fixed truth, my motives are moot. For the ending, on our part, is certain. We are bound to our fate. Paravian survival will be enforced, since our Fellowship has not found the means to break the binding the great drakes laid over us.’

Understanding unfolded, a wounding epiphany. ‘Would you try?’

The Sorcerer did not respond to that question.

Caught in the breach, the man who was Masterbard surveyed the being before him. Davien stared back, his black eyes intense. He was not smiling. The shifting patterns of his inner thoughts could not be read in the depths of his silence. His driving restlessness could only be sensed, pattern upon pattern, behind entangled pain that was not caprice; and a genius vision whose brilliance was such that it would not brook any fixed boundary.