head, his large hands with their capable callus and the worn tracery of scarred experience now lowered and quiet. ‘Impasse. I rest my case.’
No more could be said. He would not lie. Even by inference, he dared not tip his hand. His last wild card must stay invisible: that the secret truth, and all of the facts still in play with regard to Prince Arithon’s issue, were not, and never had been, made known to Selidie Prime. Terrible, the self-restraint that checked Asandir’s urge to speak his mind; overwhelming, his fury for the twisted practice that permitted the abomination he confronted on the dais to live. He capped his latent rage for the abhorrent abuses that kept Selidie’s creamy skin smooth; smothered his heart’s need to let fly with rebuke for her cruelty, which once had commanded the separation of a three-year-old girl from the arms of her widowed mother.
While Selidie drew out his agonized wait, well aware how her practice offended, Asandir checked his torrential emotions. His nerves must withstand the terrible course!
Exposed, he endured the grueling pause, as the Prime prolonged the climactic chance to snatch her long-sought recompense. Too viciously clever to act on rash eagerness, she expected to cede him a failure to trump the annals of abject defeat.
For her crowning blow, she chose insult. ‘I shall not rely on your spoken word.’ Unable to resist the temptation, she meant to bond him with the validation demanded of common petitioners. Her tight gesture encompassed the gleaming white marble that paved the floor under his feet. ‘Seal your promise, Sorcerer. As was done before at Althain Tower, I would have your surety set into stone.’
An offence, past impertinent, fashioned to desecrate every clean ethic he cherished! Asandir bent his head. This was no time to give way to weakness.
‘Do this on your knees!’ Prime Selidie crowed, enraptured to vindication.
But the matter at stake did not stand or fall upon the blows to his dignity. Asandir knelt. His height made the gesture convincingly awkward. The long fingers he laid flat were a workaday labourer’s, the strong, weathered knuckles strangely naked against the pale mineral. No artifice masked his humility as he begged the stone slab to grant him forgiveness. His requisite permission was asked with apology for the betrayal: that the quarried marble came from a mountain under the sovereign charge of Rathain.
Asandir braced his will. He must proceed! The past’s cruel balance had to be served, despite the unknown course of the outcome. Nothing could be raised out of ashes if he failed to shoulder the crux. Under a loyalty commandeered by the dragons, his obligations had been fixed long before the dread purpose that brought him.
The quartz vein in the marble gave to his need, fearless in generosity. Into its patient suspension, the Sorcerer spoke a phrase tuned to yielding compassion. Light flashed. Between his spread palms, the firm slab blazed red and ran suddenly molten. No heat attended the empowered change. His flesh was not seared, while substance embraced transformation.
‘Stone as my impartial witness, behold!’ intoned Asandir, hammered steady. ‘The terms of the Fellowship’s stay of execution for Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn are withdrawn. Crown debt to Rathain, sworn at Athir, is confirmed. Koriathain are freed to determine his Grace’s fate, henceforward.’ The Sorcerer flipped back his right sleeve and bared a silver bracelet incised with runes. Deftly, he rolled the metal across the cherry red magma.
A swipe of his hand quelled the rouge glow. When he straightened, the paved floor underfoot subsided to its former polish: except the impressed string of ciphers remained as irrefutable proof of his vow.
‘I stand on my word,’ declared Asandir. ‘The hour is yours for the reckoning.’
Prime Selidie’s venomous gesture acknowledged the challenge that thwarted her passionate drive to claim unlicensed autonomy for Koriathain on Athera. Denied yet again, she would wreak the full score of havoc in retaliation and deny the Sorcerers their sole hope of requital.
‘Bring me the closed coffer!’ she commanded the enchantress in silent service behind her state chair. While the summoned Senior came forward, obedient, and proffered the requested item, the Prime’s icy study of Asandir’s face never wavered. ‘Open the lock.’
Inside, darkened to black by the sigil fashioned to end life, rested a prepared crystal. The artifact radiated a halo of dire cold. Unfazed by its unpleasant proximity, Selidie directed her female attendant to remove her embroidered mitts and place the enabled jewel into the crippled stubs of her hands.
‘Now, bring the filled basin,’ she ordered, though usually others performed her brute work to spare the fumbling embarrassment of her deformity. ‘I shall align the spell of fatality myself.’
Asandir looked on, eyes open, unbending, although the practice enacted before him wrenched horror and sickness down to his viscera. He held on, lips sealed against outcry, as Arithon’s imprint was taken from a dried blood-stain, soaked out of a ripped scrap of cloth. The same shirt, torn off on the ruinous hour the prince had been run down and captured, now framed the foul means to target him as the Prime’s victim.
By force of character, Asandir did not flinch though all could be lost! The moment brought agony as Selidie dropped the crystal with its lethal directive into the turbid solution swirled in the glass bowl…
* * *
Far to the west, in the garden of the ruined earl’s palace where the shards of another crystal had lately been buried, a black ring of energy darkened the ground. The blight spread like ink, rippling outward, then stopped, contained by the hands of a hooded crone. She who still waited in steadfast vigil spoke no word of incantation. Shrouded in nothing else but fast silence, she let the blood heritage in her own veins intercept the vile binding, then absorb the spell’s lethal directive. The hideous taint crawled up her arms. Its vicious passage blackened her flesh, then razed skin and muscle to instant corruption. Stripped to a cadaverous horror, she toppled into a grisly heap as the final breath left her lungs. Shortly, naught but a tangle of bones lay wrapped in the rags of singed clothing. Above her grotesquely murdered remains, the violent release of her spirit stirred autumn brush and rattled the frost-brittle grasses…
Within the grand hall at Whitehold, the basin exploded. Water whined into a cloud of white steam, and the spent crystal crumbled to powder. At Prime Selidie’s shriek, her slavish attendant beat showered sparks from her hair and rich gown. The Fellowship Sorcerer observed her distress, impassive, his fierce eyes relieved.
‘What have you done?’ the Prime Matriarch shouted.
But, of course, upright upon bonded stone, Asandir had not lifted a finger: at his shoulder, wrapped in ephemeral spirit light, came the ghost of the departed crone. Gravely direct, his heart saddened, the Sorcerer bowed to the flame of her transient shade. ‘Have I your leave, Teylia?’ he asked, gently reverent. ‘Your remains properly should be returned to be blessed by the Biedar tribe in Sanpashir.’
The crone’s discorporate imprint smiled, fleeting, but like her wayward, importunate mother, without any shred of regret. ‘Kingmaker,’ she answered, ‘look after your own. My birth purpose has been accomplished.’
She faded then, fully, her subtle light snuffed like a candle.
Through the chill vacancy left by her passage, the gathered sisters exchanged whispers sharpened by uneasy fear and suspicion. Prime Selidie glared above them, her soaked finery dusted with chipped quartz and glass, her volatile rage beyond perilous. ‘We demanded custody of the child to vouchsafe your Fellowship’s intent,’ she accosted the Sorcerer. ‘What did you plant by your endless deceit but a serpent into our midst?’
Asandir sighed. ‘Your accusation carries no substance. Or did you brush off Sethvir’s statement when you struck your vile contract and demanded a hostage of us, back at Althain Tower? Our Fellowship has never endorsed, or permitted, the parting of child and mother! Teylia chose to dedicate to your order. She declared her destiny with her first words, long before that unkind fate was asked of her.’
‘As an infant, under three years of age?’ The Prime Matriarch rammed straight, seethed to outrage, while her coterie of Seniors drew hissed