at puberty.
She helpfully offered her handkerchief to net and secure the live contraband, then doused her spell and hustled up the timber stair with its rickety rope and tackle, originally strung to lower filled vats, before Koriani tenure had uprooted the vineyards to grow herbs.
Elaira opened the stairwell portal. Someone had smeared lard on the hinges, probably a scullion sneaking off for assignation with a milkmaid. The enchantress shut her eyes, swept by unbidden association: of long, musician’s fingers flicking dry stems of hay from her hair. Whether the tenderness in that memory had arisen from instinctive s’Ffalenn compassion, or some deeper need that touched the heart, she might never determine. Her order’s inflexible codes of conduct disbarred her from amorous pursuits. Elaira shook off forbidden thoughts, while the page reassumed his lapsed duty. He preceded her down the corridor to the columned atrium Ath’s initiates had originally used for their devotions.
Before the casements had been paned with stout glass, the chamber had been a terrace garden open to the sweep of mountain breezes. Marble toned like fine, blue-veined flesh had lain under snow through winter’s freezes. In the hot, amber days of Shandian summer, flowering vines had laddered the pillars, shedding sweet fragrance and petals. Now, the cracked stone planters were planked over as tables, or else spell-sealed as vault space to preserve rare scrolls on arcane practice. The fountains and pools were all mortared in, their scars masked under purple carpets sewn in silver with Koriani seals of ward and guard.
Older sigils carved in the walls and the roof groins channelled more potent powers still: a captured resonance of earth song, or the clear, high vibrations spiralled in sympathy with the constellations along the ecliptic. Except for a poignancy instilled by time and death that marked its brotherhood creators as mortal, the currents ran similar to the ghostly, faded harmonies left imprinted upon the land by the mysteries of the vanished Paravians.
But no past solace imparted by Ath’s initiates could bring comfort to the future. Elaira pressed leadenly forward, into sunlight and space.
Unchanged by the grand turn of centuries, a ceremonial fire burned in the squat bronze brazier set. in the chamber’s centre. Nested in the cushioned chair behind, the Prime Enchantress of the Koriani order awaited audience. She was old, emaciated as a dry stick. The scrappily withered features above her winged collar seemed fused with the porcelain bone beneath. Morriel wore her cloudy hair netted in diamond pins. The lavender and purple mantle of high office enveloped her torso like a calyx, and fine knuckles reduced like storm-stripped twigs rested loose in her lap.
‘I heard you clearly,’ she was saying, her voice the reedy scrape of dead leaves against granite. ‘Your point does not signify in this case.’
The tall, graceful Senior she addressed raised her chin. Eyes of tigerish, tawny brown flashed under the silver-wired band of a high initiate’s cowl. ‘The girl is weak and unsuited. Dare we entrust such responsibility to a vessel twice proven to be flawed?’
Morriel Prime gave a breathy scrape of laughter. ‘Are you befitted to judge?’ She folded clawed hands, then restlessly laid them separate since neither position eased their pain. ‘Take heed and look inward, First Senior. Your view could well be as muddled. For a fact, your speech is unwarrantedly careless.’
Quick instinct made Elaira break habit and allow her next footfall to grate.
First Senior Lirenda whirled at the noise. ‘You!’ A flush stained her aristocratic cheekbones, vivid above the pleated robe that yoked her trim shoulders. Her ebony hair was sleeked back in combs, no single strand out of place. ‘Given the nature of your origins, I should expect you would lurk your way here through the cellars.’
‘It’s quicker,’ Elaira provoked in the street drawl of her girlhood. Unrepentant, she hurried her curtsey of obeisance to the Prime. ‘Your will, Matriarch.’
The crone watched her arise with eyes black and colourless as rubbed glass. She did not speak, but studied, ruthlessly practised in the Koriani arts of subtle observation and analysis. Elaira bore up, the more fiercely determined since street-wise bravado could never face down Morriel’s weight of years and experience. As if her very thoughts were stamped into live flesh, the Koriani matriarch could read the question that grieved her; would measure the assault against pride, that eventually must crumple before need to ask outright for the results of last night’s scrying.
Stiff to her toes before the urge to bolt outright, strained to her limits before a truth that held infinite capacity to wound her, Elaira scarcely heard the words Lirenda used to scold the page. Powerless, now, to assume the blame for the grime on his livery, the young enchantress endured while the hidden handkerchief was discovered and shaken out, to the First Senior’s redoubled annoyance as its six-legged cargo scuttled to shelter under her skirts.
A glint too cold to be humour touched the depths of Morriel’s eyes. ‘But our scrying was unsuccessful, girl. We haven’t yet managed to discover the refuge of Rathain’s last prince.’
Elaira could not quite stifle her shuddering sigh of relief. ‘You summoned. How must I serve?’
‘Sit.’ Morriel accompanied the command with a gesture clipped short by exhausted tolerance and sore joints. ‘Coir efforts were bent awry by chance interference from the Fellowship. The timing in fact lent us insight and our order has gained in the counterplay.’
Past the edge of the carpet, First Enchantress Lirenda pulped a last fleeing insect beneath her heel. Intuitively sure the creature’s swift demise was impelled by more than harmless mischief, Elaira clasped her hands in sweating dread.
‘Show her,’ Morriel commanded.
Lirenda dismissed the chastised page. Lips compressed in capitulation that marred her air of hauteur, she stalked across the carpet. The sun at her back scythed her shadow over figured argent sigils and quenched their surface glitter as she knelt in a crisp sweep of skirts before the burning brazier.
Where Elaira’s elemental affinities predisposed her to conjure through water, Lirenda used fire for alignment. At one with the will of her Prime, she closed her eyes and settled into a light trance.
As the matriarch’s successor in training, her powers were impressively tempered. Grazed by a thrum of current across her nerves, Elaira struggled to quell her apprehension. Too soon, the red gold blaze of the embers changed character, became charged to cold blue that threw neither light nor warmth. Across the fire’s altered energy, ethereal at first as the spell-thread stitched into the rugs, a pattern formed, fused, and blazed into a fixed configuration. Revealed in clear focus through Lirenda’s consciousness, Elaira viewed a mesh of visionary artistry, then ironies complex enough to storm through will and reflex, and arrest her heart between beats. She recognized the strand pattern analogue of Arithon s’Ffalenn’s living aura, exposed in the fullness of Fellowship perception.
She gasped. In uncompromising lines, the man’s hidden self lay mapped out in a nuance that damned. As never before, she saw how vision and compassion, power and sensitivity, strength and pity lay paired beyond compatibility. Morriel’s fear was real, that the added burden of Desh-thiere’s curse might anneal the whole into a laceration of spirit with tragic potential to seed madness.
Since the order’s responsibility had never condoned power with any latent bent toward destruction, the Prime would act before threat became reality. Elaira’s rooted faith, that the Master of Shadow was resilient enough to retain his grip on self-command, became exposed as baseless conviction, too likely the blind offshoot of personal feelings held against the wisdom of her seniors.
‘Dharkaron Avenger!’ Elaira blinked through a rising well of tears. ‘How could any man support such a tangle for more than a natural lifespan? Or am I mistaken? Isn’t that arc and counter-seal an imposed pattern for longevity?’
‘Your insight runs true.’ Morriel snapped dry fingers, signal for Lirenda to relax her discipline. The development caught us off-guard, but shouldn’t have. Both Lysaer and Arithon came to this land by way of the Red Desert’s World Gate. Our natural assumption should have followed, that they drank