within was a man as sunburned as old shoe leather, with a wire beard gathered into yellowed plaits tied off with chunk beads of amber. His voice, when he spoke, was poured honey, filled with a kindness that razed off the pain. ‘Elaira?’ The fact he knew her name was the natural extension of a perception schooled to reach beyond flesh. ‘The hostel’s quite near, just over the ridge. I can call for a litter if you feel too shaken to walk.’
Elaira gulped in the searing, cold air, unable to frame a reply. Her mind unreeled again, still tethered to a field of stained snow under the wild sky in Daon Ramon. There, a dark-haired prince sprawled inert, haplessly thrown by his leg-broken horse. The crippled animal struggled nearby, downed in thrashing agony. A pack of armed riders surrounded the rucked snow. In glass-edged focus, she saw they were unable to approach farther without risk of battering by striking hooves. Then her tortured breath stopped, while the archer among them received the crisp order to string his horn bow.
‘He’ll shoot the mare,’ the adept explained in swift sympathy. ‘Nor has the eloquent hate of the Alliance served its own cause on this day. The name of the Spinner of Darkness now inspires witless fear. Superstition will buy a delay.’ The support at her shoulder was joined by a warm palm that cradled her splitting head. ‘Bide now. Close your eyes. We’ll have you to shelter in minutes.’
Elaira fought out a gasped protest. ‘I can walk.’ The rage seared her, that the one useless gesture was the limit her power could offer. She was helpless, hamstrung, unable to raise so much as a prayer for Arithon’s plight in Daon Ramon. If she still wore her quartz crystal, even had she ranged focused spells of diversion over such distance to spare him, she could not have done so without invoking a Koriani debt, for his life.
Wisely, she had cut off such temptation beforehand.
Nothing left, but to regroup scattered wits; through savage grief, she must make her unruly body take charge and resume the burden of bearing her upright. Yet even that basic discipline failed her. Anguish blurted her heart’s truth aloud, a cry torn from reflexive instinct. ‘Ath’s blessed mercy, they’re going to kill him!’
‘Not yet.’ The adept’s sturdy grip helped her to arise. ‘Listen. You’ll feel him still breathing.’ Yet before seeded hope could flower and buoy her, he added, ‘I’m sorry, lady. Before you ask, no, our kind cannot intervene in ways that disrupt the fate of the world.’
Elaira caught back a wrenching sob. Close as she had never been to being drowned by blind terror, still, she forced the grace to ease his concern. ‘Forgive me, I knew better.’ She managed a step forward in spite of weak knees. Less easily, she stifled the ignominious need, to cast off respect and hound the adept to break faith with a round of tearful pleading.
‘You are far from helpless,’ the white brother observed. Yet if her mean thoughts had touched his awareness, his counsel came sourced in compassion. ‘Belief can imprison. You are not separate from Ath’s creation. Though stubborn reason may insist you can’t reach past the bounds of your bodily senses, your cries for help are heard, always. Each appeal is unfailingly answered. Your inner self extends beyond all constraint, though the outer eye, attached to the world, would impose its limited state of false order.’
Now steadied enough to walk unsupported, Elaira crested the rise. Below her, nestled into the fold of the scarp, a confection of white granite and airy arched cupolas gleamed as though carved from delicate blue shadows and sunlight. The hostel of Whitehaven held a beauty to inspire the soaring flight of waking dreams. Caught by the throat as her pain dragged her earthbound, Elaira shook her head.
‘I swore an oath over a Koriani focus stone,’ she admitted. Through the ache of the cold drawn into her lungs, she said, bitter, ‘Is that not a binding constraint?’
The adept regarded her, his expression benign, and his eyes deep as uncharted ocean. ‘Does an oath chain your wishes? Your emotions? Your desires?’
‘Yes, if I act on them.’ Elaira slipped on an iced boulder, and recovered. ‘Prime Selidie wants Prince Arithon trapped under an obligation to my order. My freedom lies in my steadfast refusal to comply, unless my distress could draw the attention of a passing Fellowship Sorcerer?’ When her wild-card suggestion raised no word of encouragement, she finished her thought out of obstinacy. ‘They seem able enough to act as they please, unafraid of Koriani retribution.’
‘No feat is beyond them,’ the adept agreed. He glanced aside, nodded in salute to the watching presence of a golden eagle, perched in mantled majesty on a broken shaft of dead fir. ‘You seem recovered, now. As you choose, you may pass through our gates. One will meet you there, and escort you into the sanctuary.’
Without even a breath of disturbed air in warning, the adept blinked out of existence.
Elaira yelped, startled. In belated chagrin, she realized the snow by her side bore no trace of another set of footprints. Yet she still seemed to feel the warm grip on her arm that had braced her through the onset of breaking crisis. ‘How do they do that?’ she asked empty air.
No one and nothing replied but the wind, howling in gusts off the summits. Upslope, the stripped fir loomed empty, the eagle apparently flown. That oddity chafed. Elaira had not seen the bird spread tawny wings, or heard the whoosh of its feathers as it launched into upward flight.
Ahead, the switched-back descent to the hostel led between frost-split rock, salted with snow and the hammered-steel glimmer of glare ice. Urgency only redoubled the hazard. Elaira averted another near fall as her boot toe grabbed in a crevice. Whipped on by her worry for Arithon s’Ffalenn, she would not slow her step. She clambered down the last slope in a rush that landed her, winded and scraped, before the gateway to Whitehaven hostel.
There, despite tumult, the massive hush claimed her. She stopped short and stared, as every wayfaring traveler must who would contemplate the act of entry.
The pillars before her were cut from merled granite, veined with quartz like gouged patterns of lightning. The uncanny, whorled symbols crafted by Ath’s Brotherhood marched across the faced stone, bands of ciphers that teased and confounded the eyesight: a shimmering movement that seemed wrought of light, until the blink of an eye changed the formless dance to a play of ephemeral shadow.
Elaira had experienced such carvings before, at the old hostel at Forthmark. Abandoned and reclaimed as a Koriani hospice, the stonework there was as strangely alive. On hot summer days, she had sat by the shaded walls, feasting on wild grapes, while the southern sunlight scattered chipped reflections off the shale scarps napped through the sheep fields. There, the ancient works of Ath’s adepts had weathered with time, a willing ladder for climbing vines, or catch pockets for moss and rainwater. Between the arduous courses of study into advanced arts of surgery and healing, she had paused often to ponder the residual mystery.
These pillars in the lofty peaks of the Skyshiels were as old, and as gouged by the trials of the elements. Yet here, the carvings were not disused. Nor did the forces that rang through them reflect the same gentle state of neglect. The power that greeted Elaira’s arrival was distinct, a delicate touch against thought and skin as precise as the point of a needle. She reeled under the uncanny impression that her clothing, and every item she carried, became subject to exacting scrutiny: as though leather and laces and oyster-shell buttons could speak, and comment on her record of stewardship.
For that unsettled instant, the frigid winds of the abyss seemed to flow straight through her. ‘Merciful maker!’ she gasped, driven a startled step back. ‘What have I done?’
Here, fingered by the uncanny magics wielded by Ath’s adepts, she understood just how far their knowledge ranged beyond the craft worked by the Koriani Order. Such attention to detail became frightening, that a knife or a garment might be held in the same conscious regard as a person. Broken into cold sweat, Elaira understood that all freedoms would be observed without parity inside the bounds of these gates.
Tempted to bolt to escape such a paralyzing self-examination, she held firm. The forces that probed her were intense, unremitting and precise, but not hostile. Only lies would be shredded