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

This, the woman before him would see: as initiate master, he knew how to infuse his presence with genuine calm …

Which emotional balm poured through the scryer’s construct intact. While Elaira suffered the wrench of separation, a close lightning stroke in the Storlain wilds hammered the crest of the ridge and excited the flux currents. Electromagnetic chaos unravelled her established connection to Arithon.

Shaken, the enchantress closed her fist over the emerald ring and fought welling tears. Closed in the dim cellar, plagued by formless anxiety, she waited for her wheeling senses to settle, while the rushed blood pulsed through her veins, and her quickened breaths stirred dust from the casks.

Fleeting as the contact had been, the flash-point awareness cut with aching clarity: Arithon was hungry and cold to the bone. Hunted by enemies for far too long, he was tired and altogether distraught, unexpectedly saddled with helpless company against his marked preference for solitude.

Blood bound to compassion, he could not turn away. Even for self-preservation he would not ignore an abused woman’s need for comfort and shelter.

Elaira had no cruelty in her nature. Her healer’s instinct understood trauma. The battered person just rescued from rape was too wretchedly hurt to be left to fend for herself. Whatever motive had prompted a town-bred female to brave the Storlain wilds alone, the victimized wound to her spirit was real.

Elaira swore softly. Too well, her dread measured the vulnerable entanglement. Arithon’s forthright ethic left no one in need, even when hounded by covert enemies. Though caution ought to question why such a forlorn innocent crossed his path, Rathain’s prince answered to empathy first. He would smother the cry of his heart and take the destitute creature in tow.

An hour passed, two, while the squall raged apace in the Storlains. Elaira sought to restore her smashed contact as serving-maids came and went on the stair, and the electromagnetic chaos of weather smote the reactive lane currents.

Through the hours, she netted glimpses of vision: of Arithon, working beyond his safe limits, picking a tenuous path through the turbulent elements. She felt his slipped steps on slicked rocks and roots, while the sodden trees thrashed in the wind, and the woman shivered in her ripped skirt and borrowed jacket, blinded by rain in the relentless dark and reliant upon his talent-based lead.

She followed, dependent, while his guidance led down a rock-cliff and through the ravine, infallibly drawn by the whisper of a love that tormented him for its absence. Guiding flame to his yearning, Elaira shared the piercing desire by which Arithon extended his overstrung faculties. He followed the remnant trace of herself, as lightning gashed the sky overhead, and the downpour sapped his vitality. The toll of exposure forgave no mistakes. Survival relied on the abandoned cabin tucked in the lee of the ridge.

Midnight came and went within the dry cellar. Elaira stayed wakeful in the musty gloom, while the drudges swept the tap-room overhead and the boy rousted out the stupefied drunks. The stout landlord made his final rounds and closed up. He extinguished the lamp at the stair-head, then shut and locked the strapped door to the wine-vault.

Secure from interruption at last, Elaira bundled up in her mantle and catnapped. Fitful Sight wracked her sleep: of Arithon’s spare words of encouragement, pitched to lift beaten morale when the woman’s strength faltered. Inched across a slippery deadfall, he saw her safely over the swollen spate, raced to froth in the sunken ravine.

The little cabin perched on the far side, up a steep path shored with cut logs, puddled under the forest canopy. Above dripping firs, the angry clouds shredded to patched indigo scattered with stars.

Wakeful in the calm aftermath, Elaira shared the intimate flare of anticipation as Arithon mounted the cabin’s plank stair. His thrill when he lifted the latch banished weariness, then dissolved into pain as he flung wide the door and discovered the place had been ransacked.

Nothing of value remained. The floor wore a mat of soaked leaves. Oiled-hide windows chewed through by mice had tattered from prolonged neglect.

Elaira suppressed the hot prickle of tears. Her beloved would find no meaningful trace of her. The possessions that mattered had long since gone with her, light enough to be carried. On departure, she had picked everything clean: scoured the cracks and swept all the crannies, then burned every last stick of furnishing. By such rigorous measures she had foiled the Koriathain, who would have seized the ruthless use of her leavings to anchor their divination.

“Come in,” Arithon urged the fraught woman, who shrank into the shadows behind. “If there are no comforts, the roof appears sound. I can kindle a fire, close up the shutters, and get ourselves warm and dry.”

Banal talk to steady the female stranger: but Elaira’s tender perception sensed his suppressed note of desolation. Unable to bear his forlorn disappointment, the enchantress flung off her mantle and paced the wine-vault like a caged beast. Her steps riffled the cobwebs in the cramped space, while the slow hours unreeled towards dawn, and the stutter of the Storlain flux patterns smoothed enough to refigure her scryer’s array …

… the bowl’s image cleared to show Arithon, seated on the floor, with his arms tucked over his drawn-up knees. His drenched hair, rinsed clean, was neatly tied back, and his damp shirt half-unlaced in the carmine fire-light. Belt and baldric had been stripped off to dry where the heat would not crack the leather. The black sword, unsheathed, leaned against the board wall beyond reach, a firm statement of neutral disarmament.

The woman huddled nearest the hearth, her dishevelled bodice still swathed in his jacket. The dead man’s blood stained the blouse underneath, and her muddied skirt clung to scraped ankles. Trapped in cramped quarters, shame and misery exposed, she feared to turn her back, even to mend her frayed laces. Her fixed regard blazed with distrust, while his gaze in turn read every nuance of her hostile rage and discomfort.

Arithon asked gently, patient enough to overlook her antagonism, “What is your name?”

Hoarsely, she answered. “Vivet.” A shudder raked through her. Eyes blue as a glaze on fine porcelain glinted back through tear-swollen lids. Then she ducked her head, her heart-shaped face veiled behind tangles of red-gold hair. Bruises on her wrists marred creamy skin, delicate in the grain as veined marble. Her alto tone coloured by a mountain dialect, she added, defensive, “I was on my way home.”

“Alone?” Arithon asked, his Masterbard’s timbre velvet with calm.

Her shoulders moved, a shrug of stiff impatience. “I was born in the region. These peaks have been native soil to my family for generations.”

She pinched her lips, terrified. The strangled pause stretched.

Endowed with a healer’s tactful restraint, Arithon displayed no inclination to pry …

But the surge of his unspoken compassion raised a piercing ripple of pure emotion. The water in the scryer’s bowl shivered, while Elaira reeled in wrenching empathy.

Ath on earth, how she missed his testy company!

The fact Arithon was free in the world, and untouchable, threatened to break her in pieces. Relief came, ridden by desolation as the unstable flux sawed through the clear linkage and cut off rapport like a mercy stroke. The scried image winked out. The puff as Elaira released her seized breath extinguished the fluttering candle.

Plunged back into fusty dark, she blotted the emerald ring dry, then restored the band to the chain hung from her neck. Trembling, distraught, she sheathed the hawk’s quill in her sleeve. Then, wrung ragged, she leaned against the stacked casks. Face shuttered, she released the pent storm of sheer longing and helpless resentment. The Biedar crone’s warning given at Sanpashir haunted her: “Can you let Arithon go beyond your control? Do you love enough to keep faith in him, even afflicted by your own loss? For he will seek his fate. If he can invent a fresh course by his wits, he will try to resolve his own happiness. Stand or fall, his life’s path will be forged in this world. The gifts of his birthright will claim their full due. He will find himself, with or without you.”

Elaira firmed her shaken discipline. She packed up the tools of her practice. Sorely as she wished otherwise, she dared not forsake love’s inviolate trust. Arithon must be left to rely on his instincts. If she wavered and intervened without cause, her selfish weakness would come to destroy him.

His state of ignorance shielded them both.

For as long as Arithon did not know her whereabouts, and while the sequestered recall of her identity stayed lost to him, Koriathain could not use her as the weapon to smash his defiant free will.

Whether Vivet’s straits engaged his heart-felt sympathy, the Prince of Rathain would be safest from the reach of his enemies left upon his own merits.

Cold daybreak brought in the next squall line. A rampaging tower of anvil-heads with gale-force winds broke over the Storlain Mountains. Vivet slept in a corner, outworn by exhaustion, curled beneath her torn cloak. The soaked fabric had dried. Her snarled chestnut hair curtained her cheek. The arms folded over her breasts lay relaxed, fingertips with broken nails flushed pink as a child’s. She did not stir, even when thunder and driven rain rattled the cabin’s rickety shutters.

The coals in the fire-place warmed off the dank chill. Since nothing else could be done for her comfort without the intrusion of touching her, Arithon left her undisturbed.

More, he welcomed the peace. Taxed to the edge of endurance himself, and still wracked by the bound and start of stressed faculties, rest escaped him. Given calm reprieve from the young woman’s strident terror of his male presence, he snatched the chance to act for himself.

The driving blaze of his preference resurged: to relentlessly quarter the cabin and seek the lost memory of his beloved. Vivet’s trauma curtailed a tranced assay through tienelle. The herb’s heightened expansion would mire his wits and sweep him into the magnified pain of her wounded emotions.

Arithon reclaimed his discarded jacket. He replenished the fire, lit a brand, and under the juddering light, pondered his limited options. No trace remained to suggest where his heart’s partner had slept. The soot-stained chimney showed nothing, not even a pot-hook, to define the character of her inhabitancy. In a dwelling stripped unremittingly bare, the weathered timbers themselves presented his only available sounding-board.

Patterns pervaded the flux currents. Over time, repeated events, or an individual’s unique traits combed the structures of stone and wood into sympathetic alignment. Listen deeply enough, and the sensitivity of his Masterbard’s ear might capture the ephemeral imprints. Latent impressions of his beloved should linger even after an extended absence.

Arithon wedged his torch in the cracked mantel shelf. He proceeded, no matter how exhaustively tired. His search must be done promptly. Before the delicate presence of her abraded under the stamp of recent experience, and Vivet’s reactive turmoil clouded the near-faded trace.

Wood’s vibration best amplified harmonic nuance, where mineral’s retentive record endured. Arithon began with the fieldstone hearth. Eyelids half-shut, he stilled into a receptive state and stroked his finger-tips over the masonry.

Fire spoke to his inner ear first, the pungent vitality of fir logs just burned for lifesaving heat. Below the sibilant shriek of live flame, beneath the drummed rampage of weather, he heard rain-song: a wind-driven sluice ringing yet with shrill overtones wrought by the winds of high altitude.

Arithon sounded deeper. Underneath surface noise, he touched a faint pang of desolate sorrow. Loss and regret wove in poignant refrain, beneath which should lie the strata of her more significant presence. But as he reached into the tenuous veil, seeking, a vehement blast of Fire! and sage smoke razed through, a deliberate scour unleashed for the purpose of annihilation.

A ritual cleansing had swept this place clean!

Adamant, thorough, the measure had unravelled the residual record. Gone, the patterns that would have charted the cherished inflections of her personality.

Wrung blank by the purge, Arithon shuddered in recoil. Nothing more remained to be read. With all resonance of her prior tenancy erased, she had fled this dwelling with no ties and no plan to return. Cast adrift where he sorely hoped to find answers, and crushed by desolation, Arithon opened his eyes.

Plunged back into the framework of natural sight, he caught a pinprick flash of reflection: something shiny, wedged into a crack between floor-boards.

Before thought, he seized on the hope a small leaving of hers may have been overlooked. Not glass, he discovered upon closer survey. A tiny, broken sliver of crystal surfaced under his effort.

Crouched with held breath, spurred by careless persistence, he fingered the shard, intently listening. The rush of awareness took him by storm, a leap of revelation that crushed expectation and shattered his incomplete recall with terrible truths: that she was a sworn sister of the Koriathain, trained in the usage of sigils amplified through a quartz matrix. The very same vicious knowledge once had been engaged to seal his long-term confinement. More than poisoned bait, she had made her love the willing tool of her superiors. Attached to his affairs by her Prime’s directive, she had abetted his downfall, her person the infallible leverage behind the capitulation that saw him ensnared.