field day if he were at liberty to offer comment.’ Not least, for the back-handed reverse, that the traits instilled into Athera’s crown blood-lines had bred so perniciously true. But, of course, no one dwelled upon Davien’s hung fate, wedded to the perilous whim of a dragon.
The bleak pause after that might have gathered the dust displaced out of Sethvir’s cupboard, but for the shuffled step on the outside stair, and the cursory bang at the library door that forewarned of another arrival.
‘My unfinished business come flocking to roost,’ the field Sorcerer observed, beyond tried, as the latch tripped.
A plump, brosy man with a salt-and-ginger beard shoved over the threshold with a laden tray. He wore a sober brown tunic, neat as a clerk’s but for the haphazard knots that snarled his laces. The inquisitive dart of cinnamon eyes picked up Asandir’s presence and narrowed.
‘I wasn’t told you returned!’ the fellow accused, while several fortnights’ freight of injured offence precipitated a minor disaster. Something crunched under his left-footed tread. Then he tripped on Sethvir’s chunks of river stone and escaped falling flat by a hairbreadth.
‘Hello, Dakar,’ greeted Asandir. ‘The bluebirds will lay a fresh clutch by next spring, and your stubbed toe will recover. Before you waste further breath in complaint, we could use a tranced prophecy telling us where the Prime Matriarch plans to wreak her next round of havoc.’
Once, the rebuke would have flustered Dakar scarlet. But tempered living and wisdom, painfully gained, at long last had established decorum. The tea-tray came to rest on the table without the crash of unbridled pique.
‘Could I offer an augury without knowing the facts?’ The spellbinder also known as the Mad Prophet snatched up a cloth napkin, bent his stout frame, and scooped up the pulverized egg-shells. He slid the offended rocks to one side with a genuine word of apology, then accosted the sore point headlong. ‘You didn’t invite me to the Koriani summons at Whitehold! Neither would Sethvir share what occurred or tell me the terms you relinquished to win the Prime Matriarch’s appeasement.’
Asandir extended lean legs and answered the gripes in strict order. ‘I didn’t. He won’t.’ Reclined with his capable fingers locked behind his tipped head, the field Sorcerer trampled the incensed retort. ‘You stayed here because, on formal terms at the time, you were no longer subject to my apprenticeship.’
Dakar shut his gaped jaw like a fish revolted by a distasteful morsel. Appalled, then suspicious, he shot a glance sidewards.
Sethvir answered, his air of innocuous innocence absorbed as he poked through his displaced belongings. ‘You were signed off and sealed as your own master before Asandir ever left to square the debt held against the Crown of Rathain.’ The crock with the spider was removed from harm’s way. Benignly agreeable, the Warden added, ‘Enjoy the autonomy. Pursue your own fate. All your Fellowship ties have been sundered. The parchment was formally entered in record, which means by my count, you’ve been free-loading here for two months and a day.’
A mild turquoise eye peered askance as though startled to catch Dakar dumbfounded. ‘Do you wish,’ Sethvir mused, ‘to question the surety of the star-stamp I placed on the document?’
The high flush of fury drained fast as the impact struck home: Dakar faced his discharge from an eight-hundred-and-fifty-year term of formal apprenticeship. More, the severance came vouchsafed under Sethvir’s titled standing as Warden of Althain.
Dumped unceremoniously on his arse, the Mad Prophet leaped to pick a fight with his erstwhile master.
‘No one informed me!’ he fumed to Asandir. ‘Why the blatant surprise? Is this some new test? Or, dare I suggest, a secretive manipulation?’ Stung beyond sense, Dakar renewed his festering grievance. ‘Since I stood for the oath you just brought to closure, in fairness, I should have witnessed the finish.’
‘Oh, you started the dismal affray, beyond question!’ Steel eyes half-lidded, Asandir let his former protégé squirm. ‘If you thought I’d be lenient, Sethvir doesn’t forget.’
Denial was futile. Dakar’s maladroit usage of Fellowship auspices indeed had saddled Rathain’s crown with the ruinous obligation to the Order of the Koriathain in the first place.
Asandir was not finished, though the accusation lay over two hundred years in the past, and nary a word since had broached the disgrace, or faulted the spellbinder for prior misconduct. ‘The discharge of your jumped-up initiative at Athir has set Athera’s future on tenterhooks and cost a gifted woman her life through an ugly act of self-sacrifice. Don’t trouble to add the misery that a sanctioned s’Ffalenn prince has endured, caged in conditions of inhumane horror throughout centuries of captivity!’
‘He’s survived to win free,’ Dakar argued, jaw set. ‘You assured me that Arithon’s mind was not broken.’
Sethvir’s retort produced three succinct images derived from the earth-sense bestowed by the Paravians. The first replayed the ancient memory of a bereft mother’s tears as her only daughter left Althain Tower at three years of age, by adamant free choice bound to swear service to the Koriathain; the next displayed the terms of Asandir’s oath, lately sealed by stone’s witness at the Whitehold sisterhouse as surety for Fellowship noninterference on the matter of Prince Arithon’s life. The third image, concurrent, wounded the most: of the world’s most brilliant born talent, sanctioned as the last living heir to Rathain. That view showed Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn huddled under an ox manger, bereft of the natural recall of his identity.
‘What else could I have accomplished alone, that dark night when the crisis faced me at Athir?’ Dakar blurted, culpable and defensive for his role in that ruinous past string of betrayals. ‘You’ll recall, at the time, your crown prince was dying! When Elaira, or I, tried to contact Sethvir, we were granted no shred of grace! No response came in that hour, and no succour arose from any other Fellowship Sorcerer—’
‘What made you think that we could?’ Asandir snapped across vain protestation.
It fell to Sethvir to respond to the Mad Prophet’s interrupted appeal. ‘Elaira wished me to secure Arithon’s survival, a call that was not mine to make. Clearly so, Dakar.’ Calm, ink-stained fingers carefully lifted the paper wasps’ fragile nest. ‘His Grace’s free will was not compromised! Only his choice to live hung in question, and by the Law of the Major Balance, mortal death is not a matter under our jurisdiction.’
Dakar paled again, hurled backwards into the agonized recall of the untenable crux thrust upon him, hard on the heels of the ghastly defeat that ended the siege of Alestron. ‘Don’t claim your Fellowship planned to do nothing! Not after you held Arithon’s blood oath to live, no matter the cost or the consequence.’
‘We expected the Biedar would step into the breach,’ Asandir corrected, ungently. ‘And the tribe’s eldest did that. But after you had taken rash action first, with the sorry result that the options thereafter were limited.’
Dakar looked worse than weak at the knees. His desperation found no handy place to sit down. Sethvir’s displaced sea-shells crammed the cushioned window-seat, and stacked books occupied every chair. ‘You might explain why I’m being tossed out! I may have created a grievous set-back, but I promise, my botched efforts stayed within form. No one who was conscious had their preferences compromised. I took care to secure the consent of all parties before the first ritual was undertaken.’
‘Did you?’ Asandir sat forward, quick as a coiled snake.
‘I made sure!’ Dakar insisted, tinged sullen by stress. ‘You held the power to stake Arithon’s survival. Therefore, I did not turn on him without grounds.’
‘Then who is responsible for what happened at Athir?’ Asandir probed like struck iron.
The silence turned suddenly dense as poured lead. Dakar floundered, aghast, while Sethvir blew the dust from the paper wasps’ confection and restored its frailty to the cupboard. As softly deliberate, Althain’s Warden listed the damning facts from a memory impartially