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.