polished stick.
Davien picked it up, laid it flat on the boulder. His stride kept the grace of a predator as he paced before her, still speaking. “Lysaer does not confide in his servants. However, with time, the ones who are faithful do earn a measure of trust. They handle his person. Come and go when he sleeps. How strong are you, lady? Have you the fibre to lurk in the background, watch his struggles, his failures, and even, the ghastly course of his short-falls? Could you wait, hold your tongue, keep to the shadows behind his affairs and bide without snapping? Can you live for the day that unforeseen destiny might grant you the perilous opening?”
As she measured herself, wrung by trepidation, the Sorcerer stopped before her. Features in shadow, his regard could be felt, searing as coals on her skin. “You would be alone as never before. None would know your identity. On the days you suffer in pain and despair, no one’s kindly word will support you. While you watch aggrieved, your beloved may destroy himself. His worst hour might break him. Can you survive? Is the purity of your love deep enough?”
Daliana swallowed. “Didn’t Dakar just warn that my decision to let him go would murder untold thousands of innocents?”
The Sorcerer regarded her, bleak. “But you were not blind to the danger inherent in the fool’s intervention the spellbinder proposed.”
A knifing breath, snatched into seized lungs. “Then we agree? Lysaer is a good man, yes, with human flaws that have been unconscionably pressured and twisted!” Daliana swallowed again. “Somebody has to stand by his character. Else watch the last fragment of his true grace fall to wrack and ruin.” A second justification, no steadier, “Asandir sent me into the breach already aware I was overfaced. So Kharadmon informed me, too late.”
Davien’s teeth flashed, not a smile. The line of his shoulders reflected no humour but only the indomitable steel that bore the weight of two ages. “Asandir did as he must. The options he had were most likely fatal. Lady, most brave, do not miscalculate the purpose that drives the Fellowship! Mankind on Athera walks the razor’s edge. All the more as the True Sect gains sway, humanity’s long-term survival is threatened. Against that disaster, you are hope itself. Or else the frail straw cast into the breach to buy a brief margin of time. Never doubt, Daliana, we Seven are ruthless.”
She shivered. “I accepted Sulfin Evend’s oath, willing.”
In whip-crack retort, Davien’s pacing resurged. “Did you know the bad odds? The best years of your natural life could be lost!” He spun and regarded her. “I will not lie. Nothing can guarantee the victory you seek.”
Daliana took up the hairpin. Defiant courage reached up, determined, and restored her braid into a coil. “You would make me appear as a man?” Despite iron will, her hands trembled. “Would I be so, in fact?”
Davien raised his eyebrows. “Enough to pass close up scrutiny, and not as a figment for show. You would need to shave, or the lack would raise questions. More, your aura must withstand the Sighted scrutiny of even the True Sect’s most gifted diviners. To alter your signature presence that deeply means, yes, you would have to bear a measure of masculine responsiveness.”
The idea made her choke. “Then what if—”
While her blush heated scarlet, Davien chuckled. “The young women need not be a problem, I think. As you wish, I could fashion a form that makes you seem older in years.”
Daliana reeled under suffocating apprehension. “Would I even know myself?”
“You will hold your self-image, but only in Name. And only the fullness of that true identity could sunder the binding. Few but the most wise own the vision to sound your true essence. No man alive, beyond Athera’s Masterbard, or through a human love great enough to surpass the awareness of flesh and blood. I would not leave you helpless. The means to free yourself will remain under your command, always.”
Daliana skewered the braid, wound too painfully tight as gooseflesh prickled her nape. She scrubbed her hands over her face, rattled by atavistic reservations. Sensible caution knew her experience was inadequate to plumb the enigma Davien represented. His motive could not be read in the hands casually hooked at his belt, with the sparkle of citrine set in his ring a captive spark under starlight. Unable to fathom his greater purpose, and hag-ridden: since only one choice upheld Asandir’s charge, Daliana picked at the flaw in the Sorcerer’s terrifying proposition.
“How many years would I have before death? Would the effect of your glamour shorten my lifetime? Lysaer does not age as a natural man.”
Davien’s snapped fingers dismissed the concern. “This point can be redressed without consequence.” Shown disbelief, his peaked eyebrows rose. “Ah! You’d have proof? Dakar never informed you? My hand engineered the Five Centuries’ Fountain that crafted your liege’s longevity.”
Rocked by that admission, Daliana leaped to mad impulse and bargained, “Then you’ll match that advantage since I gave my heart-felt promise to Lysaer that I would never desert him.”
“With your due permission?” Davien yanked a black thread from the embroidery stitched through his cuff. The strand flickered bright as contained lightning as he knotted it into an intricate bracelet. “Lady, push back your sleeve and give me your left wrist.”
Her arm quaked, despite her hard-set resolve. The Sorcerer cradled her hand, his touch tenderly brisk as he slid his enchanted cincture over her skin. A quick movement noosed the weave firmly in place: nothing more, after all, than a frayed linen thread, except for a pattern that defied sight and sense to discern.
“Most brave,” Davien challenged, “you are quite certain?”
She dared not pause. Second thoughts would destroy her: love’s question, unanswered, would haunt her the worse if she failed to rise to this test. “Yes.” Consent melted the construct into her flesh. A wave of heat followed. Then a flush like high fever, while her ears rang through a barrage of dizziness.
Deft support rescued Daliana’s reeling balance as the firm bounds of her body seemed to dissolve.
Dimly, she realized the Sorcerer’s handling laid her down gently onto firm ground. His words echoed across a chasm of distance and chased her fall into reeling black-out, “You will waken refreshed. Spend enough time alone as you need to adjust. I will leave you with more than sufficient provisions to supply your journey from here. When you wish to restore your true form, the change back will become irreversible. Simply grip your left wrist. Repeat your birth name three times, and break the circlet as it resurfaces.”
Early Summer 5923
Pitfall
The country rose steeply beyond the pebbled moraine that lined the lake-shore of Lithmarin. Here, where a great fault-line bisected the continent, the Storlain foot-hills shattered into slopes of slab-sided rock. Stunted trees knuckled into the cracks, crabbed branches yawed over the shadowed gorges. A region riddled with bolt-holes aplenty for a hunted fugitive, including the desperate bands of deserters who fled the True Sect ranks from the warfront. A man alone set upon by such brigands survived by the sword, else, mage-gifted, slipped through the rugged vales undetected.
Such stalker’s cunning let Arithon move swiftly. He slept lightly by day. Travelled by night to elude the two-legged predators, who would cut a sleeper’s throat for his boots or be drawn by the glimmer of fire-light to steal a scrap of charred meat. Criminals under crown justice in Havish, the worst of them fled across the north range towards the backwater towns in Melhalla.
Arithon bent his solitary course due south, into the western spur of the ranges.
The desolate land climbed under his furtive steps, sap-green tangles of scrub oak replaced by black fir and interlaced balsam. Thinner air wore the perfume of pitch pine, lent the mineral tang of wet stone where the springs welled over the flanks of the gulches. Alert for human voices, Arithon re-entered the bounds of Havish. He climbed the baked ramparts, reared upwards into