He rode with his ears sometimes ringing with fever, the relentless ache of his wounded right hand slung in a pinned fold of his cloak. Under dressings he had been too hard-pressed to clean, a raw sore leaked pus where the traumatized flesh refused to close over and heal. His chin was a stubble of uncut, black beard, and his shirts stank of unwashed sweat. By day, the sun lit flash fires in his brain. By night, the fierce stars of Athera’s vast heavens pierced him with limitless emptiness.
He felt like a vessel sucked hollow of dreams, until the dread moment he chanced to look up to establish a routine bearing. His fate lay before him. Against the scribed ribbon of the horizon, he beheld the upthrust scarp of rock that bore Ithamon’s ruin like the battered rim of a diadem.
Just as before, the sight struck his heart like a blow, leaving him winded and breathless. No less poignant for the forewarning of memory, the eloquent testament of smashed lives and broken dreams in the stark, tumbled stone of the wreckage. Then the four towers arisen among them, still pristine in grace, pure as a cry amid the tumbledown battlements. The ruled fall of sunlight struck their façades, raising fine sound like the chiming tap of a bronze mallet against keys of crystal and glass.
A man raised to the powers of a masterbard’s art would have to be deaf not to hear. Arithon gasped, smote to the heart by that soundless chord of vibration. Four pealing notes, whose fifth register was absent, a void like a wound into darkness; for of four towers raised to anchor the tenets of virtue, the fifth one had been cast down. The King’s Tower was crumbled, reduced to a weed-grown foundation on the hour a Paravian king had been murdered.
Hunched on his horse, his fist crushed to wet mane, Arithon bowed his head, shattered. He wept unabashed. The nerve in him faltered, for what lay ahead. Though blinded to sight of the spirits, the practiced maturity of his bardic perception laid him wide-open all over again. There would be no escape. He would hear in song, pouring from broken stone, the bittersweet echoes of beauty and truth, cut down by violence and bloodshed. The call would sing to him, sinew and nerve, and shackle him to the future. As the last surviving s’Ffalenn prince, his was the born burden to shoulder the promise of crown rule and restoration.
Never mind that the very thought of that role ripped him to mangling agony. The ruin sustained protest, endured against time. Its state of desecration could not alter its set law, or its ingrained fire of inspiration. Here, the unseated stones themselves rang to the foundational chord of compassion and undefiled mercy. That imprint waited with the blank patience of time, to be reclothed in its rightful, lost harmony. Arithon tasted the salt of his tears, reduced to abject humility. While he lived, Ithamon would never release its ancestral hold on the blood and the bone of him.
Torn open, exposed against silver-clad hills, with the winter’s harsh grip embossed foil on black rocks, and the wind a honed dagger to flay him, Arithon fought for the necessary courage to prod his thin mare forward. The ache in his spirit would not be assuaged, nor the guilt that rode at his shoulder. There were too many dead for his name, since Tal Quorin, then those casualties multiplied manyfold more, at Minderl Bay and at Vastmark.
Those ghosts would bind him to the seat of s’Ffalenn sovereignty, and hound him to desolate madness.
A more cruel moment could not be conceived, for enemy riders to sight him. Attached to the garrison men encamped by the ruin, the party of five had been sent foraging for game to ease the scarcity of supplies. Their shout of discovery from the crest of the next hilltop caught their quarry defenselessly vulnerable.
Arithon snapped face around. Shot erect by dousing, shrill fear, he took in at a glance the ragtag black surcoats worn by Jaelot’s city guard. He drew Alithiel left-handed. While the enemies who charged to kill drove downslope in a spray of burst snow, he reined his mount, staggering to meet them.
‘Go back!’ he pealed out, a cry that distilled his raw tumult of unanswerable pain. ‘Ath pity your families, desist!’ Through the trained timbre of his Masterbard’s voice, the hills spoke in echoes to shiver the spine.
Here, his blood tie as Rathain’s sanctioned crown prince could not fail to be recognized. Where the current of the fifth lane sang through the kingdom’s ancient heartland, the flux line itself bore the stamp of the Fellowship ceremony that had sealed his affirmation. The light striking off Ithamon’s high towers peaked in resonance and burned, raised to a beacon flare of wild magic.
Then that errant burst snuffed out like blown flame as Arithon clapped down a defense wrought of merciless shadow. Through a darkness to freeze living flesh to dry powder, he reined about and urged his horse to a stumbling gallop.
Downhill he raced, toward his pursuit. To reach Ithamon, he must pass through them. His mare was too spent for a circuitous chase back through the open countryside. Heedless of bad footing, he forced reckless speed. The guidance that steered him was the jingle of mail, and the bewildered shouts of the armed men who blundered, equally blinded, to take him. If he held slight advantage for his trained grasp of sound, they were five to his one, and mounted on horses that were decently fed and well rested. Raked by thorns, slapped by branches, Arithon smashed through the gully. The heave of the horse’s shoulders beneath him informed him of rising ground. Armored horsemen thrashed headlong down the slope. The shod hooves of their destriers struck red sparks from flint rocks, and their curses were all but on top of him.
Arithon sifted the oncoming barrage of sound, the whine of wind sliced across someone’s bared steel, and the jink of roweled spurs, and a bearded man’s labored breathing. He angled Alithiel, braced to thrust as he passed, prepared for the shock as Paravian steel sheared into armor and bone. His worst risk, the chance the blade might bind fast, and tear from his grasp in the wrench as the maimed rider tumbled.
One stride farther on, his mare misstepped, slid a foreleg on ice, and crashed sidewards. Arithon tucked into a roll before impact. He struck full force on his shoulder. The air slammed from his lungs. His grasp on the shadow screen lapsed for one second. He saw light strike through, flash in dazzling reflection off the bared runes of Alithiel, outthrust away from his body. Then the hooves of the enemy horse thudded over him, and a blow to the head sundered him into the yawning void of unconsciousness.
Winter 5670
Whitehaven
Turned off the steep, winding road that climbed the North Gap to Eastwall, a left-branching goat track led to the hostel of Ath’s adepts. The trail was narrow, a rough staircase of flint rock, hedged by the stunted firs that clung to harsh life at high altitude. Overhead, jagged summits scraped the roof of the sky, ripping the hems of the fast-moving storm clouds, or else capped by fair-weather ice plumes condensed from the sea-warmed, westerly currents that combed through the teeth of the ranges. The rare traveler attempted that route in deep winter, though the scouring north winds often razed off the drifts that mired the lower passes. Fewer still, the wayfarers who braved the upper peaks in solitude. The rigorous ascent in thin air could inflict vicious headaches and nausea, or spells of blackout faintness.
At first, Elaira presumed she had succumbed to such wasting sickness. The sheet of glare thrown off white snow stabbed like knives to the brain, distorting her overtaxed sight. Then vision failed utterly. Her perception disintegrated as though a thousand shot pinholes suddenly let in the dark.
She stumbled. Thrown to her knees, the enchantress grabbed blindly to save herself from a tumbling fall. Sharpened edges of stone gouged her shin, despite her thick hide leggings. As her outraged flesh recorded no more than the ghostly impression of bruising, she realized, through a split second of terror, that this was no ill effect from thin air. Then the side of her skull burst and exploded, as if someone clubbed her full force with an iron-studded bludgeon. Her cry, as she dropped, was no call for help, but the name of Arithon s’Ffalenn.
Linked by the tie of awareness between them, she shared his cold, inert sprawl on the snow-clad ground of the barrens. Then that fragile impression shattered as a gentle hand clasped her shoulder.
Vision snapped back into clarity. Elaira beheld a white mantle furred with a lining of