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.
Facts damned, by stark honesty. The impressions distilled in the fragment of crystal did not lie: he knew her well enough to sting under the bitterness of her heart’s yearning, shackled in oath-tied subservience. She had been a weapon beyond all compare: a danger to him above death itself, her magnetic allure a force fit to level all of his core defences. Even wounded, he ached with irrational yearning. Peerless proof of her secret duplicity did not destroy the fatal attraction. Arithon wept, unable to reconcile his instinctive, flawed trust with the voice of her very self.
He flung the crystal chip into the hearth. He could not bear the message, far less assimilate the black agony that stranded him in separation.
Since rain and cold, and the violent storm matched the bias of his temper, he stumbled erect, yanked open the door, and barged outside to quench his bleak fury.
Practical measures steered his direction. Any anchor to dull a raw hurt that no remedy could assuage. Over the ridge,