rag in her face.
But not yet. Poised as an indrawn breath before change, the electromagnetic currents in the high Storlains surged into a lucid stream.
The connected touch of her distant beloved raised Elaira to flash-point gestalt. The tumultuous wave of Arithon’s recent past and the burden of his entangled present threw her a jumble of impressions, the charge of emotional turmoil a surprise punch to the gut. Rapt mastery alone let her anchor until the morass settled into cohesion.
The impact of Vivet’s pregnancy surfaced first, her dread fear and vulnerability warped into a selfish demand for protection. The result wove a snare to bind the tenets of any s’Ffalenn born true to his lineage. The price wrung Elaira to empathic tears. “Don’t,” she gasped, helpless. “Arithon, don’t give way.”
Yet he would, he must: even as once before he had staked his life to spare Fionn Areth.
Elaira knew his true heart, as no other. She grasped the deep-set revulsion that savaged his dignity: the bitter trial laid on his spirit, suppressed under pressure through forty-eight days since the storm had compelled him to share the decency of charitable shelter. Woman herself and healer-trained, the enchantress stripped the false tissue from Vivet’s clinging need and exposed the manipulation behind the beguilement that fuelled this moment’s trapped anger.
The unstable flux in the Storlains rang to Arithon’s stifled revolt as he bent to appease his inflexible heritage. The sorrow driving his resignation stamped the crux like a granite engraving: what gave an extended life its self-worth? Where could a man go to find peace of mind, relentlessly hounded by enemies? What better priority ruled him if he could not commit a mere dozen years to salvage an innocent life?
Elaira shuddered, wrung in the crushed turbulence of his emotion as her beloved divested himself of his blades and stepped from the smoke-house in surrender. His own, or hers, the sense of suffocation and bleak foreboding? The hour felt lidded in darkness, each movement sealed in jet glass. Again blindfolded by Vivet’s possessive touch, Arithon resigned himself to the escort of four Ettinmen, three padding a wolf’s pack tread at his heels, with his bound wrists leashed to one in the lead. Their route skirted the nearby settlement, chased by snarling dogs and breezes sooted with woodsmoke from an open-air spit.
No offered meal assuaged Arithon’s hunger. Beyond water, no comfort had eased him. Tired, light-headed, discomposed, and ungroomed, he stumbled over a rootlet.
The cascade of connection wavered and broke. Dissipated, the thread of rapport frayed away in the thrash of the Storlain flux currents …
Elaira surfaced, enraged. Discipline shredded, she pounded the dusty ground with her fists. “Fight them!” she gasped. “Sweet man, for your own sake, and mine, lose your temper and damn that brazen hussy to the fruits of her own devices!”
Yet Arithon would not. Torbrand’s legacy bound him to wretched silence. Elaira bowed her head, overcome. “Don’t fall to the flaw that killed King Kamridian,” she pleaded, undone by enforced separation. Arithon would not hear: had in his past hour of desperate peril cut off his recall of her steadfast partnership. Lost at this terrible crux, the counterbalance that once shielded him from the inborn flaws of his character.
Elaira plumbed the bleak pain that stifled his innate perception. She knew, oh, she knew! the ache was sourced in the agony of her absence. Heart and spirit, she raged at her helplessness. For female instinct screamed warning that the hidden cost might impact far more than a child survivor and a vain woman’s dishonour.
That same night in the deeps of Halwythwood, the clan seeress retired, worn after three days spent in trance. Her arduous effort had unearthed no meaningful insight to suggest Prince Arithon’s whereabouts. Talented resource stayed stymied, while blood-letting change whetted the Canon doctrine for death, and choked Etarra with dedicate troops.
The danger of inaction chafed tempers, with the Earl of the North and Iyat-thos Tarens faced off like male wyverns, scales bristled in territorial challenge.
Big men, too well matched to cross steel without the risk of crippling injury, they hammered out their contention with practice sticks, each bout fought to a ferocious draw. Both were left wincing and mottled with bruises. Yet Cosach’s imperative question was satisfied, that Jieret’s skilled legacy left Tarens no weakness in training at arms. Measured through Jieret’s perspective, in turn, the realm’s current caithdein lacked the ruthless years of survival under persecution. Battered to welts, Tarens allowed the brute strength of the man’s constitution was not deficient.
Other arenas stayed open to challenge. The scouts’ dismissive regard for all town-born sparked the latest: a test of the upstart guest’s mettle through a knock-down contest at drink. Cosach pranced over his wife’s objections. To blindside his impressionable heir, and side-step her complaint that the boisterous noise would aggravate their teething infant, he sited the affray on the grassy knoll carved out by the meandering Willowbrook. There, where the summer crowns of the oaks wore tiaras of constellations, Rathain’s caithdein and his fettlesome rival took opposite seats at a massive table, hewn from a fallen tree ancient enough to be known by Name to the lost centaur guardians.
Between chieftain and guest, clumped like rain-sprouted fungus, spread the hoarded stash turned out of bunks, chests, and blanket rolls. In casks, corked bottles, and heirloom flasks, a liquid banquet for inebriation: beer, cider, honey mead, and cherry brandy, and worse, the evil, colourless poison that generations of hung-over misery had dubbed Dharkaron’s Redress. The raucous scouts crowded the stream-bank as witnesses. They tousled Tarens’s cropped hair while the merry fellow appointed as arbiter presented two ram’s horn flagons.
The antique rims were embossed with silver. Ornamental knobs at the pointed ends spurned the practicality of a flat base. The curved vessels might be rested upside down, but only if they were emptied.
“All right, listen up, hear the rules!” The gleeful speaker addressed the contestants. “The contest opens with beer. You’ll match drinks with your rival, flagon for flagon. Once you get sodden and can’t hold your piss, first penalty switches your refill to honey mead. The second time you void your bladder, you’ll step up to brandy. White spirits, third round, if you haven’t puked. Whoever heaves up his guts first or falls senseless becomes the loser.” Enthusiastic, he walloped the townsman’s back. “Accepted, Iyat-thos? Then cross wrists in a double handshake with Earl Cosach to seal your sober agreement.”
“Might we have an arbiter who’s not staggering soused?” To hooted laughter, Tarens shared a farmer’s ham-handed grip with the caithdein’s nutcracker fists. He hefted the cavernous flagon pressed on him, surrounded by ribald advice and reproof. A petite female scout wearing an acorn strung on a hoop earring tapped the selected cask, to the chink of coin placed on last-minute wagers.
“You’re all barking mad,” Tarens mused, while a prankster poured beer till the head foamed over his wrist. “This is how a rag-sop caithdein steers the kingdom’s affairs during royalty’s absence?”
But upright duty cut no bait with Cosach. “Case in point, swear that your unnatural memory doesn’t play devil’s advocate. In his time, Earl Jieret dumped the realm’s woes on his captain, Sidir. This occurred more than once, even while the clans were beset. Claim my ancestor didn’t chase Arithon’s shirttails and drag his Grace by the scruff out of fatal trouble.”
“Your cantankerous forebear succeeded,” said Tarens, and licked off his dripping fingers. “By his proven experience, I’m better equipped to shake your prince back to his senses.”
Provided, forbye, that anyone could. The impasse that dead-locked the quarrel was that nobody knew where to look. The search for a desperately hunted man, damned to fire and sword by the Canon, could not light off for the hinterlands without direction. Given the seeress had scried herself blank, theory argued his Grace had holed up in the most forbidding terrain on the continent.
“If Prince Arithon’s gone to ground in the Storlains, he won’t be found till he shows himself.” Cosach flourished