Grand Conspiracy (87 page)

In irrevocable commitment, he lowered poised hands, rested palms and fingertips against the hot, swollen flesh of Fionn Areth's torn knee. The touch was less substantial than the brush of a swan's feather, fallen. No force and no mystery resided in the
contact. Yet as though an unseen dialogue had opened, Arithon flushed with a passion too forceful to bridle. A frisson ripped through him. As swiftly, he spent his reserves and contained it, though not without snapping his web of false peace to a turmoil akin to anguish. The flooding color ebbed from his face, until tensioned pallor described every angle of bone that stamped his ancestral bloodline.

From that moment, the room might as well have ceased to exist.

Become the tuned instrument of his high art, Arithon saw wholly inward, mind and talent aligned to a lens of absolute clarity. No man, now, but Masterbard, he gave over his whole being as sounding board for the frequencies sealed in the chained sigils a Koriani enchantress had left imprinted under his hands.

The seals were, heart and mind, the work of Elaira. Her signature rang through like dark water and moonlight, an essence of womanly mystery that transfixed his spirit and raised a cry all the hours of eternity could not answer. She was the one love he could never embrace; not without breaking her vow to the Koriani Order, which cold binding would bring her destruction.

Nor could he retreat, not now. Once before, Arithon s'Ffalenn had partnered her efforts to accomplish a difficult healing. The fusion of sound and spelled magic had left a link beyond time to erase. As his sensitized skill traced the map of the sigils that underpinned her fine spellcraft, stark dismay plucked his nerves like a dousing chill. No touch of his could be stealthy enough not to arouse her awareness. She knew him too well. Her song partnered his in a union that held the same need as life and breath. From the first instant Arithon touched her linked spellcraft, Elaira was simply
there
in his mind.

Nor could he spare her his pain in return, as the instinctive welcome that surged in response was jangled to recoiling fear, then a desolate, shared understanding. She knew why he must act. Once again his free choice, and hers, must become the string-tied puppet of circumstance.

‘I'm sorry,' the words spoken, unthinking, aloud. His agonized headshake whipsawed the silence. ‘Beloved, forgive me. May you be somewhere far removed from Jaelot, in a haven both sheltered and private.'

For a boy's life relied upon their paired talents. Fionn Areth's survival perforce must take precedence over the fury and blind pain, that the cast lot of fate forced them separate.

Then the agony, redoubled by the gift of her gratitude, that he had not been too proud to reach out, and ask help from her strength out of principle. Her love became the more poignant in renewal, for his trust, that she would not, now or ever, stint the needful burden of sacrifice.

‘Oh beloved.' There were tears in his words, a bitterness of brine where the touch of her should have been honey.

Arithon wrenched in a shuddering breath. All the while, his hands had not shifted position. They trembled only slightly as he completed his mental sounding to find the tonal frequencies of the magelight that bound each drawn sigil to its chain of harnessed energy. That signature chord, lowered the exacting, requisite octaves, became accessible as sound he could replicate with the instrument of his voice. His whole body sheathed in the discipline of his art, he opened his throat and sang the first pure note to initiate the succession.

The lusterless sigil under his hands reawakened and warmed with shared resonance. He shifted the pitch, a sweet, gliding rapture of tuned force that spoke, and refigured the ritual magics which called primal power from the elements. Nor was that bright forging recaptured on a surgically precise intonation. His own vital humanity could do no less than color the pitch with emotion. His love for Elaira was caught like spun gold in the exacting grace of execution. His unadulterated regard, and its twin partner in pain, for the passion unshared between them, framed a tangible force. Melody poured from his heart, blazing and bright as the fractured light trapped in the planes of cut diamond: agony and joy that knew no limits, twined as one inseparable thread.

Arithon sang. His art was his master. He gave himself over to the demands of the moment, yielding and clear as a stream of fresh water poured formless, out of a jar. The notes of his making cascaded in phrases of a cappella simplicity, a beauty of sound shot warp through weft with words phrased in lyric Paravian. All over again, as he had once done in Merior, he became voice and instrument for the loom of Elaira's spellcraft.

The union this time came bittersweet with foreknowledge that consummation could not follow.
Every tie they had ever held between
them remained, renewed on this hour, reinforced
. She was his, and he, hers, and no other's, no matter the obstacles between them.

His tempered voice broke the limits of passion and held strong, sustained, locked to the parameters of Fionn Areth's healing.

Had a mage of trained stature been present, in expanded perception the dark would have burst and blazed into lines of trued light. The powers called down to realign torn tissues razed dross from the mind and reforged muddled thought into ecstasy. No listener escaped. On her chair, sight-blind, the lady rocked with her arms folded over her breast, the yellow ribbon pressed to a cheek riven through by the lava red scars of old burns.

The Araethurian goatherd sat limp in his chair, paralyzed by a beauty that recast his bones in vibrations of unalloyed sorrow. He wept. The tears fell and fell off a face not his own, as if for that moment he became breathing surrogate for the bard whose concentration
must not snap
under the assaulting force of an insurmountable pressure.

And yet, one male voice clothed over in artistry was not enough to tear the necessary fissure through the veil. Cut off from access to the wellspring of true mystery that linked the full range of his mage talent, Arithon sensed his best effort fall short. Attuned as he was to the buildup of heat under the clasp of his hands, his trained instinct gave warning. The very air surrounding seemed weighted by friction, a pent-back torrent of raised flux that his bardic art could not fully access, or trigger, or release. He had called in the elements; but no sung note in his power could grant them permission to unleash.

Nor could Elaira release him the key to a conjury not of his making. Not through his mind, or their shared mental contact. Consummation demanded her presence.

‘
Oh, beloved!
' his cry never spoken in words, but tapestried into the unalloyed flight of free melody.

She answered, her giving spirit the velvet that disarmed his drawn sword of denial. He could not stop her, not by plea, not by force. Elaira was herself. His love was not made to become the halter to compel her decision to stay safe.

‘
I was called for this purpose
,' her assurance rang in his mind.

She would leave her body to stand at his side, spirit twined with spirit, as before, back in Merior, they had done still enfleshed to spare a young fisherman's limb from amputation. Her laughter resounded like the chime of small bells as she answered his peal of dismay. ‘
And how are the circumstances this time any different?
Either we stay the same course of character that brought us together,
or we become cowards, unworthy of all our shared intimacy
.'

He bowed to her wisdom, which cradled the root of the undying integrity between them.

The song from his throat could not then do other than soar, embracing the joy of her welcoming.

Her touch firmed, then melted him, crossing the threshold that entwined self-awareness with its dense-form housing of flesh. On a breath, she was there, unshielded spirit limned in a light his mage-blindness could never see. Yet her presence enveloped him, a tide of limitless tenderness that made him ache to the bone for a partnership snatched short of the exalted fulfillment of reunion.

His voice could not be kept separate from the tempest. Dark, minor harmonics described burning longing, until air itself lit like a brand for his sorrow.

Elaira touched him back in shared consolation. This time, unlike Merior, her resilience was the force that bolstered his strength to refocus his mind and reclaim the dropped thread of his purpose.

Time bent, stretched, became limpid, the anomaly sustained by the demand of high mystery, and a song that matched and held its true pitch through its shining edge of sharp temper. The spell seals rekindled, though the forge-fire forces that knit their waking were too refined for the mind to endure. Gifted the borrowed lens of Elaira's trained insight, Arithon extended his talent. He reached past the veil and recaptured the unseen, highest frequencies of electromagnetics that bound energy into form and substance. Then he downscaled that tapestry, remade its pattern in sound with a focused expectancy that, in turn, re-created the upper-range harmonics. Form followed function; the traumatized tissues stitched under the sigils had no choice but to refigure through the spelled template of regeneration.

Fionn Areth never noticed the precise moment when the pain dissolved from his torn leg. Immersed in the fabric of Arithon's singing, he felt the ache of enforced separation; of the shimmering dichotomy of transcendent love held earthbound by a restraint that must endure, deathless, a stripped nerve of killed hope and agony.

The flame-scarred lady who shared the performance was aware of the last sigil's closing. Sight-blind, but attuned to the low speech of stone, she sensed the descent, the slow, spiraled recontainment of forces as tonal harmonies were singly collapsed and dispersed. Although no light had impressed her maimed senses for a span that encompassed five decades, she dreamed. Her inner mind showed her, in flash-point-clear vision, a woman wearing a
Koriani mantle reach out to touch her beloved's dark hair where he knelt.

Then the insight fled, the apparition erased like a gale-blown candle. The bard's last line ended. Crippled eyesight locked down, plunging her back into the irremediable prison of darkness the fires had left her.

Unwitnessed by any but the eyes of his double, the singer lowered his hands. His closing note quavered silent. Stillness returned to the heated, close chamber with the opacity of poured lead. All things seemed duller, the fine ivories and gold leaf somehow clogged in the spent tang of incense and the wan flutter of the single candle. The grand chords of high mystery faded and fled; the musician whose art had brought fleeting command was reduced to the framework of his humanity. The moment robbed him of trapping or title. He was no prince, no sorcerer, no masterbard. Just a man, kneeling, burdened by a desolation of spirit no living being might lift from bowed shoulders. Fate's cruelty remained, written into his naked expression, and stamped on the forced, tired lines of his carriage.

For Elaira, the gradual, spiraling fall must end in the dusty, chill dimness of the vintner's shed. The transit plunged her through an ice bath of ink. Much like her past experience in Merior, her senses returned to her piecemeal. Hearing resurged first, snapped back into sharp, unpleasant immediacy by voices clashing in argument across the unseen space over her head.

The sluggish thought followed, not funny at all, that she had likely broken Lirenda's directive not to stray from her perch on the wine tun. By logical extension, she must have overbalanced in trance and fallen prone on the floor.

A patchwork of unhinged impressions confirmed: she lay sprawled on the fusty, damp cold of packed earth. Her left shoulder throbbed, most likely bruised in the limp tumble that resulted when she enacted her rash decision to spiritwalk. Her head ached as well, no less than she deserved for flitting out of body without making the most basic, sensible preparations.

Lirenda was screaming in unintelligible rage. A calmer voice answered, then rose on a fractured note of distress.

Whoever spoke for her, the protest gained nothing. The floor where the debated enchantress lay prone seemed to buckle and move with a violence that negated the staid, grounding properties of earth.

Elaira mumbled a fishwife's curse on the fool who was trying to move her. Raked through by nausea for that thoughtless unkindness, she curled into a protective knot on her side. Eyes open, she could discern nothing as yet but the star-punched black of the void. The tormentor she reviled clamped a grip on her shoulder. Fingers bit painfully into her collarbone, shaking and worrying as though the shock of harsh handling might speed her recovery into full consciousness.

The rage in her burned. Her crystal-bonded oath to the Koriani Order all but choked her, life and breath. Now,
even now
, she was not left her peace. No moment was given to cherish and sort what small memories she retained of her recent contact with Arithon. That, more than anything, tore out her heart, that she had seen and touched him outside of the veil, and could not snatch the chance to reflect and savor the bittersweet gift of the experience.

Then the mind reconnected to outward events, and hearing regained its lost linkage to reason. Lirenda's ranting came clear as a flask dropped on ice, spewing vitriolic frustration. ‘Time is the one option we don't have left! She'll wake up if it kills her, and speak what she knows. If not, you'll be more sorry than tears. Morriel Prime won't be sanguine. Dare you send our Matriarch word that we had both Fionn Areth and the Shadow Master in hand and, through inept fumbling, have lost them?'

Elaira dragged in a breath. The effort fanned a dull ache that seeped down to the lead-weighted marrow of her bones. ‘You can all stop fighting like starved dogs on a carcass. I'm awake, if about to be sick.' She shuddered. Her chilled hands broke into slick sweat as another cramp knifed through her stomach.

‘She should have peppermint tisane and a warm bed to recover from your callous mishandling,' Cadgia scolded in undaunted sympathy.