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

While her blush heated scarlet, Davien chuckled. “The young women need not be a problem, I think. As you wish, I could fashion a form that makes you seem older in years.”

Daliana reeled under suffocating apprehension. “Would I even know myself?”

“You will hold your self-image, but only in Name. And only the fullness of that true identity could sunder the binding. Few but the most wise own the vision to sound your true essence. No man alive, beyond Athera’s Masterbard, or through a human love great enough to surpass the awareness of flesh and blood. I would not leave you helpless. The means to free yourself will remain under your command, always.”

Daliana skewered the braid, wound too painfully tight as gooseflesh prickled her nape. She scrubbed her hands over her face, rattled by atavistic reservations. Sensible caution knew her experience was inadequate to plumb the enigma Davien represented. His motive could not be read in the hands casually hooked at his belt, with the sparkle of citrine set in his ring a captive spark under starlight. Unable to fathom his greater purpose, and hag-ridden: since only one choice upheld Asandir’s charge, Daliana picked at the flaw in the Sorcerer’s terrifying proposition.

“How many years would I have before death? Would the effect of your glamour shorten my lifetime? Lysaer does not age as a natural man.”

Davien’s snapped fingers dismissed the concern. “This point can be redressed without consequence.” Shown disbelief, his peaked eyebrows rose. “Ah! You’d have proof? Dakar never informed you? My hand engineered the Five Centuries’ Fountain that crafted your liege’s longevity.”

Rocked by that admission, Daliana leaped to mad impulse and bargained, “Then you’ll match that advantage since I gave my heart-felt promise to Lysaer that I would never desert him.”

“With your due permission?” Davien yanked a black thread from the embroidery stitched through his cuff. The strand flickered bright as contained lightning as he knotted it into an intricate bracelet. “Lady, push back your sleeve and give me your left wrist.”

Her arm quaked, despite her hard-set resolve. The Sorcerer cradled her hand, his touch tenderly brisk as he slid his enchanted cincture over her skin. A quick movement noosed the weave firmly in place: nothing more, after all, than a frayed linen thread, except for a pattern that defied sight and sense to discern.

“Most brave,” Davien challenged, “you are quite certain?”

She dared not pause. Second thoughts would destroy her: love’s question, unanswered, would haunt her the worse if she failed to rise to this test. “Yes.” Consent melted the construct into her flesh. A wave of heat followed. Then a flush like high fever, while her ears rang through a barrage of dizziness.

Deft support rescued Daliana’s reeling balance as the firm bounds of her body seemed to dissolve.

Dimly, she realized the Sorcerer’s handling laid her down gently onto firm ground. His words echoed across a chasm of distance and chased her fall into reeling black-out, “You will waken refreshed. Spend enough time alone as you need to adjust. I will leave you with more than sufficient provisions to supply your journey from here. When you wish to restore your true form, the change back will become irreversible. Simply grip your left wrist. Repeat your birth name three times, and break the circlet as it resurfaces.”

Early Summer 5923

Pitfall

The country rose steeply beyond the pebbled moraine that lined the lake-shore of Lithmarin. Here, where a great fault-line bisected the continent, the Storlain foot-hills shattered into slopes of slab-sided rock. Stunted trees knuckled into the cracks, crabbed branches yawed over the shadowed gorges. A region riddled with bolt-holes aplenty for a hunted fugitive, including the desperate bands of deserters who fled the True Sect ranks from the warfront. A man alone set upon by such brigands survived by the sword, else, mage-gifted, slipped through the rugged vales undetected.

Such stalker’s cunning let Arithon move swiftly. He slept lightly by day. Travelled by night to elude the two-legged predators, who would cut a sleeper’s throat for his boots or be drawn by the glimmer of fire-light to steal a scrap of charred meat. Criminals under crown justice in Havish, the worst of them fled across the north range towards the backwater towns in Melhalla.

Arithon bent his solitary course due south, into the western spur of the ranges.

The desolate land climbed under his furtive steps, sap-green tangles of scrub oak replaced by black fir and interlaced balsam. Thinner air wore the perfume of pitch pine, lent the mineral tang of wet stone where the springs welled over the flanks of the gulches. Alert for human voices, Arithon re-entered the bounds of Havish. He climbed the baked ramparts, reared upwards into serried ridges where the snow-toothed peaks carded the summer clouds into ice-crystal wisps. Under the jagged spine of the Storlains, he sought a particular small cabin tucked into a sheltered vale. The site where the stuttering pulse of the flux lines still whispered the imprint of a woman’s presence.

With his journey’s end a short league as the crow flew, Arithon forged ahead as though drawn by a beacon. He ached to restore his memory of her, no matter how tenuous the fragment.

He crested a ridge-top lightly as wind. Breeze from the far side slapped his face like wet felt, stiffened with storm scent. He breasted the buffet, a cut silhouette punched against a wracked sky that spat lightning in actinic bursts. The descent plunged him back into pine forest that shuddered and tossed overhead. Snapped off needles smacked into his leathers. Such seasonal squall lines broke over the Storlains with tumultuous ferocity. Too far to bolt for the cabin’s dry roof, Arithon pushed to seek shelter before the deluge unleashed and stymied his subtle senses.

He could not trace her through the lane currents while the elements snarled in rampage. Better to wait than to wander astray and plunge off the brink of a gulch.

That moment, he heard a woman’s scream through the roar of the inbound gale.

Arithon altered his course toward the cry, odd though it seemed, that a Sunwheel deserter might push this far south. Few town-bred rogues owned the woodwise skills to outstrip his pace through these wilds.

Which puzzle must wait. A second cry sheared through the wind-tangled greenery. Even raised to hair-trigger alert, a mage’s tuned senses could not measure the danger he faced. Already, the storm charged the flux into tumultuous static. Arithon slipped his sheathed sword off his shoulder. Hand on the hilt, he ducked through the stunt trees. He heard a man’s grunt of exertion. Through the tossed boughs, veiled in gloom, someone’s curse guided him towards a scuffle screened by the undergrowth.

Slowed to quiet his step, pelted by icy raindrops, Arithon peered through the thrashed branches. Lightning flickered. Flash-lit to grey upon mercury, the hollow beyond held the grappling form of a man. Crushed underneath, struggling with pinned wrists, the woman he forced fought him, weeping.

Arithon drew the sword, tensed by expectation: but the star-song within the black steel stayed quiescent. The gleam of the Paravian runes failed to ignite the sound-and-light chord of enchantment imbued at its forging. Without time to question, Arithon moved. He grabbed the man’s shoulder and hauled his bulk off the violated woman. While he angled the weapon as a deterrent threat, the compromised female jerked her pinioned wrists free.

She thrust her attacker away and rolled clear, a blur of pale limbs in the gathering dark. Terrified as a wild thing sprung from a trap, she scrambled and fled, clutching her rifled clothing.

Arithon let her go. Wary, he faced her assailant, who did not bellow, or rally in response to her surprise ally. Instead, the lusty fellow writhed on the ground. Lightning flared again and illuminated the blued flash of metal sunk to the hilt into flesh.

The game little vixen had stuck him with a skinning knife.

Arithon rebounded from startled shock. He sheathed the sword, bent, and bore down to constrain the man’s agonized thrashing. His explorative touch marked a forester’s dress: a sturdy leather jack, belted overtop of a town-woven jerkin sodden and warm with let blood. Guided by mage-sight, he assayed the dagger protruding between neck and shoulder. The artery had been severed deep down, where no skilled pressure might stem the gushing spurt. Life fled, catastrophically. Under flux patterns storm-charged to uproar, scant seconds remained to interpret the man’s fast-expiring matrix.

Arithon cradled the dying man’s frame. While the sky opened up into torrents, and thunder slammed earth and sky, the tempest scattered his refined senses. He could not plumb the imprint of the ruffian’s Name. Helpless, except to lend human comfort, he offered what gentle condolence he could to ease and hasten release.

The stricken man battled the throes of extremis. The erratic flicker of storm-light recorded the wracked struggle of his last, urgent effort to speak. Wide eyes stared, imploring. The corded throat worked. But the dagger had gashed the dying man’s windpipe. Convulsed, rendered helpless, he passed without requite. His desperate message perished along with him though the stranger who kept vigil through his gurgled, last breath stayed until his contorted hands loosened.

The tormented spirit crossed over at length.

Arithon laid the lolled head to rest. Rocked back on his heels in the thrash of the downpour, skin-soaked and shivering, he closed the slack eyelids against the rain. As he straightened the contorted limbs, he noted the snares looped at the man’s hip. The pulled knife, wiped clean, had the curved edge to dress pelts, suggesting a trapper’s livelihood. With nothing else to be done to lend succour, Arithon abandoned the corpse and shoved off to find the distraught victim still living.

Flight had turned her eastward, spurred by a panic that left a swathe of snapped twigs and thrashed greenery. Arithon traced her through the crack and slam of the storm, while rainfall sheeted the pocks of her footsteps and puddled them silver. His arcane talent stayed unreliable, though fitful bursts of her graphic distress pierced through the chaotic flux. He followed with deliberate care, first not to lose her tenuous trail and also to let her traumatized nerves settle at least enough to withstand the approach of a kindly stranger.

Something had changed since the storm struck at nightfall. Elaira scrubbed at the gooseflesh that puckered her nape, anxious to unriddle the source. With the trade-road through Orvandir’s flats windswept and open, and the cross-roads at Durn teeming with the encampments of the silk trade’s northbound summer caravans, even the late hour thwarted her need to find solitude. The bad call had to be faced without flinching: that distance from the dense, brawling noise increased the grave risk of interference by the Koriathain.

Since the sisterhood’s seat at Whitehold wielded a very long arm, the peril of isolation outstripped the town-based threat to trained talent posed by the Sunwheel fanatics. Scarcely a wise refuge to practise her arts, Elaira currently knelt on the scuffed flagstone floor in a wayside inn’s fusty wine-cellar. Silence and dust weighted the stifled air, encased by walls of dense brick. Sunk deep into earth, the site naturally muffled the rambunctious emotion that stewed in the jammed upstairs tap-room. But not the flaring unease arisen from Arithon’s sharp change of course.

Enroute to the cabin that once housed her herbalist’s work in the Storlain ranges, he veered west: not chased in pursuit but lured. Elaira shivered again, her hands shaking. The pitch-darkness lent her no ease and no clarity. Determined, afraid, she laid out the bowl, then the corked flask and the candle stub filched from an unoccupied room. She worked quickly while her beloved’s changed straits threw her fitful impressions: of wet skin and harsh gusts, icy rain and rife urgency, fragmented by static disturbance where the flux stream crackled over the fault line.

The region posed her a scryer’s worst nightmare. Even without the tempestuous squall, natural interference disrupted the electromagnetic currents. The same jagged bursts once utilized to advantage to balk her order’s invidious prying also upset the innate gestalt of her emotional link with Prince Arithon.

Perturbed enough to chase her apprehension, no matter the risk, Elaira unstoppered the flask and filled the brass bowl, listening against the boisterous noise from the tap-room: for the tread of the serving maids, coming and going to fetch and carry for customers, and for the noisier boots of the cheerful lad who tapped beer kegs. She dreaded disclosure, despite the cobwebs that curtained the arched brick vault, where grain spirits and wine aged in casks.

However removed, the niche was not safe. Caught at arcane practice, Elaira might suffer a branding, or worse, be dragged off in irons for the priests and the scaffold at Durn.

The upstairs door opened. Warm light sliced the gloom, followed by the boom of clogs on the stair. Starred beams from a candle lamp jittered and swayed, while grumbling over a cranky patron, the bar’s ham-fisted wench collected a wheel of cheese and retreated.

Elaira expelled her stopped breath. Masked in the dark, she laid a half-consumed crust of bread to one side of the bowl, a thin effort to disguise the arcane array illumined as she sparked the candle. Misconstrued as a vagrant, she might be tossed out, or perhaps be made to wash pots with the scullions in recompense for illicit shelter.

But no such innocuous pretence might excuse the black-and-gold hawk’s quill she smoothed in the tremulous glow of the flame. Stone floor, for earth, the vessel of water, the taper for fire, and feather for air: she dedicated the ritual with a whispered cantrip. Then she palmed the emerald signet of Rathain, wrought of white gold and imbued with the live charge of Arithon’s past amid its layered tapestry of ancient history. Elaira passed the band over the flame, whisked it under the feather, then touched it to the surface of the brim-full bowl and asked earth to complete the connection.

Last, she cupped the set gemstone between her palms, invoked Arithon’s Name, and awaited the vision engaged by the energized construct. When the connection flowered, her sight of the candle melted away. The surface of the water darkened to night and unveiled the storm broken over the Storlains with unsated ferocity …

Wild gusts thrashed the tree limbs, while the deluge pelted the ground to frothed run-off. The huddled woman did not hear Arithon’s step through the crash of tossed branches. Forlorn stranger, to him, she could not know the silence of his movement, guided by his attuned sensitivity. Her first warning of his approach became the drummed punch of the rainfall, interrupted by the flick of spread cloth as he cast his hide jacket over her shivering frame.

She recoiled in terror. Sobbing from the after-shock of another man’s violence, she surged to her feet, a wary creature lent panicked strength to take flight.

Whatever Arithon said to disarm her drowned under the drum of the rainfall. But lightning revealed the trapper’s knife, reversed handle first, and extended toward her.

The traumatized woman snatched up the peace offering. She brandished the blade and lunged to fend him off, while he melted back, his palms raised. Although he remained armed, the black blade, Alithiel, stayed sheathed and secured at his shoulder. Small, chilled as she, and quite as miserable as his shirt soaked through, Arithon posed her no threat.