perceived by his inner awareness might be just a wishful figment. To shatter a dream of such exquisite purity surely might wound his spirit deeply enough to destroy him. More than silence, he dreaded his flawed human voice might be found lacking in range and tonality.
Perhaps vicious uncertainty ripped a sound from him.
‘Are you all right?’ Tarens cried, from the dark. ‘Arin? Save us both! Are you injured?’
‘No.’ The word burst from his lips, half gasp, half whisper, a cork unleashed by a torrent. Arin’s concern could do nothing else. Only stem Tarens’s poisoned depression before sorrow blighted the man’s open heart and stunted his generosity.
‘Listen to me!’ Forced past reserve, the phrases burst free in a crisp, antique accent. ‘Your sister was never content as a crofter! She will serve out her year’s term at the temple, embroidering vestments and altar-cloths. Her fine needlework will bring her a skilled job at a quality dress shop. Your brother will never return to a farm. His loss of the boys cannot rest in that setting. He will find a new life as a clerk, enjoy songs with a circle of erudite friends, and marry a good woman for comfort.’
Tarens’s staggered amazement was palpable. ‘Arin! My friend, whoever you are, how can you claim to know this?’
The question floundered into tense quiet. The uneasy answer was not safe to broach since the truth implied seer’s gift. Such had happened before: prescient visions also had forecast the inquiry of the Light’s diviner. Which suggested a faculty that out-stripped intuition. Content to stay Arin, beyond fearful of Tarens’s righteous distrust if such talent branded him with the wickedness of proscribed sorcery, he retrieved his jacket and rifled through its bundled contents. The flint striker and bronze clip were too easily found: more damning evidence of a breadth of vision unimpaired in the dark. Frantic to salvage the man’s benign faith in him, Arin fashioned a rushlight.
He hoped that the wavering flame unveiled an innocuous presence: of a lean fellow with tousled black hair and green eyes, earnest with care and uncertainty. ‘Friend,’ Arin said gently, ‘by all that I am, whatever that is, I promise I won’t ever harm you.’
His assurance was not rough, or grating, or flat, but instead possessed a mellifluous lilt that all but unmanned him with gratitude. The elusive remembrance of a bard’s ability might not be a delusion, after all.
The rushlight steadied. Its honest exposure should reveal the terror that shadowed his unknown origins.
Tarens returned an unruffled regard from a hideously battered face. He saw no reason yet to shy from the fearful thorns of uncertainty. Crofter, he had been. But his fighter’s temperament sprang from a loyalty solid as bone. He said carefully, ‘We found you where the old lane leads to the ruin of the ancient earl’s court south of Kelsing. The Koriathain sometimes make use of that place for their private rituals. Have you an active connection to them?’
‘If I did,’ Arin answered, stung to leashed rage, ‘I was held as their captive, most likely for an unclean purpose.’ He shuddered, hesitant to broach the nightmares that troubled his sleep. ‘By no means would I let them retake me.’ Shown Tarens’s appalled consternation, he added, ‘Your question is forthright! But if I don’t remember, I can’t guarantee you don’t walk in dangerous company.’
The awkward moment spun out to the hiss of the fluttered flame. How to account, that no recall existed? Or explain an experience that lurked outside reason, formlessly venomed by the latent horrors of a term of helpless entrapment?
While Arin struggled for tactful language, Tarens eased the tense pause with the innocence of human decency.
‘Since you don’t know what set you to flight, let’s not rush to press judgement. You may be the marked quarry, but I’ve been condemned. Survival has joined our fate.’ Before that recrimination could wound, Tarens added, ‘I regret nothing, do you understand? In your own way, you took risks for my family. All of your acts have done right by them.’
Last gesture, the crofter snuffed out the rush lamp. In patent reassurance, he settled and slept, deliberately vulnerable to the busy works of his mage-sighted companion. Surely he heard, as he nodded off, the purposeful strokes of edged steel being honed across a scrounged whetstone.
At due length, three broken kitchen knives were refurbished as daggers. Arin’s cut-leather belt wrapped the grips, with his oversized breeches retied at the waist with a braid made from scavenged string.
Stretched out to rest, tensioned yet by unease, Arin listened as the gusts winnowed the thickened snowfall outside. Musty air filled his nostrils. He could not shake off the haunted impression of another prior experience: that somewhere before, the hitched breaths of an injured friend had been sealed by a blizzard inside of a root-cellar. The cramped ambience spun him a gruesome dream, stark with the memory of desperate straits, and more vivid than uncontrolled prescience…
Then, the reiving cohort of lancers had worn black-and-gold surcoats blazoned with entwined snakes and lions. The innocent’s cottage just put to the torch crackled in red conflagration, whipped under a white-out blizzard. In that day’s frigid air, amid drifts trampled pink, sprawled the large, honest man their knives had tortured to find him. Heart-sore, he strove with his healer’s skills to stem bleeding and bind riven flesh. The damage lay beyond any remedy. Even so, he rejected the dying man’s plea for abandonment: ‘For your gift of feal duty, my charge of protection; for your loyalty, my spirit shall answer, unto my last drop of blood, and until my final living breath, Dharkaron witness.’
He finished the dressing for honour alone. ‘You didn’t betray me,’ he told that wounded man, whose agony, suffered in his behalf, came to refuge in the comfortless chill of a root-cellar.
Amid winter’s freeze, sheltered in earth-bound quiet, the reliving carried the same fetid smells: of breathed air and wrapped wounds, congealed blood, and the hounding dread of uncertainty.
That man’s fatal anguish had wrung him to voice the bitter extent of his sorrow: ‘You failed nothing and no one. I could name you hero, gild a plaque in your memory that proclaims the cornerstone for a crown that will stand on the strength of your sacrifice. But the truth casts down rhetoric. A man who holds hospitality sacred is worth much more to the land than a king.’
‘Long life, and my blessing,’ said the ghost in his nightmare. ‘The Fellowship Sorcerers are right to restore you.’
Arin wrenched awake with a gasp, shuddered by the throes of after-shock. Somebody’s callused hand gripped his arm, and another muffled his screaming.
‘Arin?’ The concern was Tarens’s, not some long-dead trapper. ‘You shouted in your sleep.’
Carefully tactful, the crofter released him. Respect did not rush to ask probing questions. Yet the fabric of pretence had shredded. As fugitives roped together by destiny, one man understood that he was the sole cause of his fellow’s hapless endangerment.
Worse, the relentless peril that stalked them trafficked in blood-letting stakes. Arin sat up. Arms wrapped over tucked knees, he rested his forehead against his crossed wrists.
Tonight’s outbreak of recall suggested a history his spirit cried out to disown: chased as quarry before, he had survived because a strong man with great heart had died for him. More, his own peal of sorrow restated the lines of a prince’s oath to a feal liegeman. Incontrovertibly, he had a past and a name: dangerous facts all but certain to drive the committed factions that hunted him. Though to the last fibre, he viewed such a royal legacy as abhorrent, for the worse, Tarens was already ensnared in the weave of that intractable heritage.
Scalded, Arin reaffirmed the past vow hurled into the teeth of his enemies. ‘I don’t leave them my wounded.’
If the selfless kindness that brought Tarens to shelter a destitute stranger was not to share a dog’s end, the misery of their cooped quarters must be sustained throughout days to come. Just as before, the diligent searchers would leave no stone unturned, and no weedy field untrampled in their manic furor. Therefore, no quarry’s tracks must be found in the pristine