Traitor's Knot (34 page)

Gifted that firm affirmation of trust, Sulfin Evend returned the hint of a smile. ‘The appeal was met, and without laying claim to your Blessed Grace's autonomy. If I might presume? Then rest assured, I've already brought back your protection.'

The Koriani Senior hissed through her teeth. ‘A clever half-truth! My lord Prince, listen now and avoid a betrayal! Your commander at arms is no longer yours. His loyalty is compromised, and now he plays an insidious game of deception. Ask why he wears a fresh cut on his wrist. Protection, he claims! What bargain was struck? What binding was sealed by his own let blood, in formal oath to a Fellowship Sorcerer?'

‘Forgive me,' whispered Sulfin Evend, flushed before the sharp startlement that hardened Lysaer's straight regard. ‘This is no equable hearing, Blessed Grace, but a fight over spoils involved in a feud that divided me from my family long years ago. By your leave, I ask to defend myself.'

Lysaer s'Ilessid inclined his head. Fairness commanded him. His deliverance at Erdane demanded that much, whether or not there was privacy.

Sulfin Evend confronted his grim row of accusers: a father, whose hard-set expression suggested no tactic was too cruel to compel a son's shirked obligation. His mother, a poised doll in her high-wire head-dress, whose tight-laced hands masked a rapidly breaking composure. Lastly, by far the most ruthless of all, the unified row of Koriani enchantresses, whose grasping subterfuge had no limit. No cost was too high, and no ploy too low, in their bid to depose the constraint of the Fellowship Sorcerers.

Committed beyond risk for his personal integrity, Sulfin Evend shattered the last, fragile hope he might reconcile with his past and come home. ‘The oath I accepted binds no one but me. Its terms were not made in demand by the Fellowship, but fulfilled as a promise to a blind seeress whose help I required in Erdane. My service is given beyond power to revoke, to this land and the weal of its people. As Regent of Tysan, and Divine Prince, Lysaer's interests
are one and the same. Therefore, I stand steadfast at his right hand. Compromise him at your peril.'

From Lysaer, no word; from his father, checked fury; from his mother, a flood of silenced tears for a grief grown too harsh to bear. For that, Sulfin Evend swore he would have blood, provided the vicious reckoning ahead did not come to destroy him.

For the deadliest enemy would not back down. The fifth-rank enchantress stepped forward, incensed. An upstart male had obstructed her order's interests, and she would spare nothing to see him cut down.

‘Your s'Ilessid has compromised himself well and fully without any move on the part of our sisterhood. Since your sword can't defend against vile assault by the cabal that's choking Avenor, what have you sold in exchange for a covert Fellowship backing?'

‘There is no such backing,' Sulfin Evend insisted. ‘I asked for a Sorcerer's stay of protection
for myself alone.
That risk, I bore for the sake of necessity, in line with my duty as liegeman. The Light of his Grace is in no way affected.'

‘Then stand back, little man.' Beyond scornful, the rankled senior's dismissal gouged for a deeper reckoning. ‘Leave your birth obligation and Hanshire's interests forsworn! You may have balked the will of your father, but not ours. Your Blessed Prince must seal his own fate. Leave his safety to us. Or dare you lead him naked into Avenor, a blindfold lamb to the slaughter?'

‘How you ladies hate to admit that Athera holds living powers other than yours.' Sulfin Evend reached into his jerkin and removed the deerskin-wrapped knife from its thong. ‘Here is Lysaer's protection. My charge to stand watch and guard for his safety comes to him without any strings.'

A stir whispered through the packed seats at his back. The council would not recognize a Biedar knife; nor did his father, whose beet fists and clamped jaw still displayed overt irritation. But the Koriani witches must acknowledge defeat. Their fifth-rank senior could probably name the seeress whose wise counsel had arranged for Lysaer's deliverance.

‘I have no more to say, here!' Sulfin Evend pronounced. ‘My loyalty and my close affairs are not yours to question at whim. The birth ties I once owed to Hanshire were stripped on the hour I gave my blood oath to the realm. I rest my case. The matter of my integrity must lie between me and the prince who carries my grant of feal service.'

Caithdeinen
offered their lives to test princes. Sulfin Evend withstood the rank pressure of fear. He did not give way to his mother's heart-break, or apologize for his father's overpowering rage. His case must stand or fall in the end on the strength of s'Ilessid justice: a virtue warped by the Mistwraith's curse, that could foul the most stringent perception.

Lysaer said nothing. The quiet spun out. Sulfin Evend endured through the hard-breathing rustle of finery from the rows of town officers ranked at his back. As ruthlessly public, his mother's bowed head received no grace of
reprieve amid cracking tension. The Koriathain maintained their adamant discipline. They would justify him with no saving word, that the flint knife was a genuine talisman. All ears strained to hear how the Blessed Prince would choose to call his ruler's power of judgement.

Sulfin Evend
would not
turn his head in appeal. He knew,
too well
, the fierce majesty that cloaked Lysaer's form through those times when the law called for a harsh consequence. From brushed gold hair, to dazzling jewels, to the fall of immaculate clothing, his Grace was the blinding epitome of authority and attentive poise. Beside that dizzying, unearthly charisma, the traveller rough from his overland journey could not seem other than discredited: an unshaven ruffian in his muddied leathers, with a primitive knife offered up by a beggar's hand.

As the silence extended, he swayed on his feet. He had ridden without a snatched moment for rest; twenty-five leagues through the haunted wilds, on post-horses bartered from drifters. The great oath just sworn at Althain Tower had reforged the core of his being, perhaps to die here as a branded traitor, under the eyes of his heirless parents.

Pride ruled him, at last. He had not broken loyalty. Sulfin Evend sustained accusation, the flint blade his naked, last testament.

Cloth stirred at length, then a whispered breath, drawn against the glass-etched stillness. ‘They wanted your child?' Lysaer asked, too quiet.

Sulfin Evend swallowed. ‘In exchange for arcane service to my family. Yes.'

The blunt question followed. ‘By your Lord Mayor's knowledge, the Koriani Order has placed demands such as this one before?'

Stiff under the weight of his father's shame, Sulfin Evend spoke out. ‘The sealed bargain with Hanshire's ruling council is renewed with each generation. Before the obligation demanded of me, the sisterhood has asked no more than buildings, or land, or sometimes a tithing of labour. The obligation began in the years of the uprising, when our mayors asked service, and provided a safe haven for enchantresses who were in flight, or left homeless at large on the country-side.'

Diamonds flared like white ice; the Blessed Prince had stepped forward. ‘Liegeman, your life is bound under regency law. Give me the knife.'

Sulfin Evend did not recoil from the touch as the weapon left his willing hand. Sworn man to master, he held still for the sentence: exoneration or execution of a summary justice. One thrust might finish his life in a second. Sulfin Evend clamped down on his shuddering nerves. Somehow, he kept himself standing.

From his side came the verdict, glacial in delivery. ‘I will take my protection from those I can trust. Not from factions who think to play me for a game-piece. Once, on Corith, I gave the Koriani Order my warning. I will not have my Alliance suborned!
The needs of my people are not put to usage for gain.
Ladies, consider this audience closed! Meddle outside your soft nest here at Hanshire, force any man
for his seed in duress, and I promise, such dealing will see you arraigned! I will tear down your sisterhouses, stone from stone, and put your ranked seniors to fire and sword for criminal oppression and acts of dark practice!'

Stunned himself by the resounding force of that closure, Sulfin Evend startled to the incongruous, warm touch as his prince placed a steadying hand on his shoulder. ‘Come away, Lord Commander. You'll retire to my galley. There, be assured, you'll receive your due rest and the courteous welcome that this town of Hanshire and your own blood-kin have denied you.'

Early Winter 5671

Two days after their Matriarch's failed effort to capture the Prince of Rathain, Forthmark hospice's high-ranking senior enchantresses remained exhausted and beaten limp. Stiff with the bone-deep ache of defeat, the Prime Circle lately called back into session kept to the comfort of their cushioned chairs. They might yearn for the sleep today's duty denied them. Yet the tradition surrounding a novice's oath-taking required their presence as witness.

Before their worn faces and critical eyes, Lirenda did not share the suffocating panoply of their formal red-banded robes, or a weighty mantle of purple and silver. Demoted to the grey shift of low service, she shouldered the brute work of screening the young girls gathered for their induction into the sisterhood. Five had been presented for today's review.

The paltry number displeased the Prime. Enthroned on her couch, flushed under draped silk and the jewel-strung net confining her jonquil hair, Selidie confronted the last of the untested candidates with slitted, lynx eyes. Her blame for the short-fall wore an enemy's name: Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn had instilled the changes that reshaped the surrounding territory. The Vastmark tribes that once had backed him in war were no longer severely impoverished. Ships now moved the wool trade, disbanding the network of brokers. In the hard years, when misfortune and shale slides reduced the flocks, shepherd parents no longer sent daughters to Forthmark to spare them from wasting starvation.

Today's applicants ranged in age from four years to ten, lined up in a shivering row in the hospice atrium. Streaming light from the windows struck their brushed hair and scrubbed skin, and hazed the coarse nap on their clothing. They stared at their feet, or fidgeted, faces pale with a justifiable nervousness.

Amid silence that tagged the least movement with echoes, a creeping chill
pressed the air: the Great Waystone itself lay unveiled to record their novice's oath. Since the induction process could not be rushed, the jewel's raised focus would not be released for somewhile yet to come. Through the lengthy pauses, the day's petitioners to the Prime came and went, their low talk a droning back-drop.

Lirenda endured the unbearable tedium. Attached to wealth, and fine clothes, and the cosseting of high position, she detested the depth of the probes required to determine each candidate's fitness. The intimate sounding of a girl's inner faculties felt like the pinch of tight shoes, replete with the mental suffocation left from their disadvantaged backgrounds and former experience.

The two cherubs gone first had been gutter-snipe orphans, charity cases taken in from the dock-side stews of the southcoast. Their minds had been dim, cluttered with memories of hunger and sores, and summer rains spent huddled under piles of fish-rancid packing crates. Neither child showed a glimmer of curious thought. Life's hardships had already crushed them. Oppressive fears wounded their brilliance of spirit; malnourishment stunted their hope.

Lirenda told over the time-worn, sad patterns. Here again, the imaginative sensitivity that fore-promised arcane potential had been ground too far down to break out of stoic resistance.

Now finished with the third child in line, the disgruntled enchantress aroused from her disciplined trance. She wrapped the paired quartz spheres that held the child's imprint and passed the bundle across to the waiting peeress. Then, slaved under the Prime's directive, she declared the candidate's fitness. ‘A grey robe, and no schooling for rank. Her destiny lies with the hostels.'

The girl curtseyed, trembling, as the peeress's touch guided her on to Prime Selidie's chair. At eight years of age, she knelt to swear oath: to grow up and shoulder the menial tasks of laundry, or cooking and child-care, or to fill some minor niche of secretarial work. If she developed gentle hands and a kind nature, she might progress to assume convalescent care of the infirm.

‘Next, please step forward,' Lirenda intoned.

The skinny, older candidate presented herself. Her hair hung dull brown, and her chilblained hands were a crafts child's. She could have been expelled from apprenticeship for laziness; or her parents might have offered her up in exchange, to fulfill a past oath of debt. The rare applicant, these days, would be a volunteer, encouraged to serve by her family.

Moved to yawning distaste, Lirenda selected two more quartz spheres cleared to a state of blank dormancy. Careful to keep her touch shielded in cloth, she said, ‘Give me your hands, child.'

The paired crystals were placed into the offered, chapped palms. ‘Hold these, place your thumbs on their surface, and wait. When I ask, give them back over to me.'

Those basic instructions might last for minutes, or extend as long as an hour
if a child's grasp lacked the vigor to imprint the stones' matrix. Throughout, Lirenda endured her cramped perch, forced to wait in subservient boredom. To her right, the frightened girl-child now taking oath knelt and laid her palms against the faceted Great Waystone. Standing opposite, the house peeress gloved her hands in white silk, then touched the imprinted spheres to each side of the unshielded amethyst.

Then, prompted carefully, the lisping orphan recited her lines.
‘I, Nayla, declare myself free to bind oath to the Koriani Order. From this breath, this moment, and this word, until death, I exist to serve, this I vow. My hands, my mind, and my body, are hereby given to enact the will of the Prime Matriarch, whose whole cause is the greater good of humanity, this I vow. All states of fleshly desire to renounce, this I vow. All ties of heart, of family, of husband and lover to put aside, this I vow…'

The raw power of words, spoken over by thousands across a history that bridged generations, unleashed the energy of a living force. The ancient crystal remembered: each named initiate, and each former prime, extending back to the dawn of the order, before cataclysmic war had sent a destitute enclave of mankind to beg for settlement on Athera. The amethyst focus that had recorded the order's past origins retained each initiate sister's embedded imprint. The young, open heart and the vulnerable mind could not be less than swept away by the torrent.

Lirenda recalled that branding, first thrill. The answer to every stark longing had seemed within reach on the moment when she sealed her oath. Declared as a candidate for the prime succession, she had never foreseen the shaming failure that would cast her down and deny her the ultimate glory of accession to supreme rank.

Nor would today's girl-child glance aside from her rapture. Enveloped in bliss, she would not yet comprehend the binding scope of her promise, or fully grasp that a single, willed word from the Matriarch could deprive her of life, or limb, or intelligence.

The formal investiture wound onwards toward closure:
‘…And should I weaken or falter and come to forswear my commitment, all that I am shall be forfeit, body and mind. This I vow, no witness beyond the Prime Circle, no arbiter beyond the crystal matrix into which I surrender my Name and my imprint as surety through all my living days.'

As sworn novice, the young girl arose and received the Prime's kiss on both her flushed cheeks. Her smile shone radiant, as Selidie intoned the time-worn phrases of closure. ‘Nayla, may you serve peace and charity with dedicate grace. Wear the order's mantle with pride.'

The hospice peeress released the imprinted spheres into a basin of salt water for clearing, then bestowed a white ribbon, to be sewn on the sleeves of the grey robe today's young initiate would wear until death. The child bent her knee in a dutiful curtsey and received her due leave to depart.

Lirenda looked on, wrung to ferocious envy for that talentless chit's simple
freedom. She suffered the prolonged wait, while the next, raw-boned candidate completed her crystal imprinting. Once the energies in the paired spheres became gravid, Lirenda gathered them back in hand. The girl candidate watched, anxious, as the adult who would determine her future closed the stones in her grasp and engaged trance, then fused her awareness with the replicate pattern imbued within the reactive matrixes that now mapped the flow of polarity between the candidate's right side and left side balance.

For Lirenda, as always, the moment of full immersion felt as invasively horrid as drowning…

…
vision turned dim. As her senses became felted under a muddle of random thought and jagged, disordered emotion, she thrashed to escape the suffocating contraction as her state of trained clarity compressed downwards into tight space and muffling darkness. Imprisoned, Lirenda felt her private self strip away, until her eighth-rank awareness squeezed into a mould that was abhorrently other: she knew abuse and cold; the memory of filthy hands, scratching fleas, and smells that revolted the senses. Sunk into a morass of self-pity and need, she lost even the hardened spark of her rage. Defeat became helplessness that numbed, then putrefied, leaving knots dense and solid as brick. Beliefs became walls. Despair framed a cage. Under the murk, just barely smouldering, she encountered one stubborn ember that survived the strangling defeat of adversity. She touched on that point. All but deaf and blinded, she blew the breath of expanded knowledge against that pinched glimmer of hope.

True talent responded. The small spark became flame. Into that flickering promise of light, reflected in faithful, quartz imprint, Lirenda applied the meticulous discipline of her developed awareness. From raw potential, she mapped the latent channels that opened, then traced where they might be coaxed to expand.

Yet the narrow vessel reached its capacity too soon. The influx of forces jammed still and backed up. Lirenda suffered the wretched constriction, forced to remain in rapport until she had assayed every sigil of testing, one exhaustive level at a time…

In due course, Lirenda recovered herself. The unfettered range of her power resurged like circulation restored through a cramped limb. Breathless and damp, she pronounced the result.

‘She is for the sisterhouse.' Shown the peeress's smiling pride, Lirenda added the rest. ‘A first-rank talent, confirmed, with potential for third, if she masters her fear and responds to the training to release her conditioned resentment.'

Yet the candidate was not ushered away to declare her obedience over the Waystone. The morning's proceedings had been interrupted when the seeress who minded the lane watch arrived, bearing an urgent report.

Her hushed phrases threw a scatter of echoes through the vaulted stone chamber, ‘…inbound message from the fifth-ranked, stationed at Hanshire…Morriel's past hope is ended…now lost our option to secure a possible candidate for prime succession off the branch line of s'Gannley We are desolate,
Matriarch. The effort has failed, in no small part due to a new interference engaged by the Fellowship Sorcerers.'

The set-back exposed an on-going sore point: that no talent with ninth-rank potential now trained under oath to the Koriani Order. That short-fall had posed a critical problem for the last prime, caught facing the dissolution of extreme old age. Morriel's straits had been desperate enough to risk forcing the birth of an infant candidate, conceived through an oath of debt. The strategy had been set to cover the deficit, should Lirenda's initiate passage to ninth rank fail: a critical safe-guard, made meaningless after the usurpation of Selidie's life-span. Young again, Morriel had snatched the victory from death and bought herself a twisted reprieve.

Since her heinous crime had gone undetected, the eldest senior delivered her placid opinion. ‘The random induction of orphans eventually should provide us with the requisite gifted talent. Let the wretched idea of planned breeding be dropped. The risks outweigh the benefits. That branch lineage derives from a
caithdein's
legacy, and would tend toward offspring with headstrong will and ungovernable independence.'

Lirenda wrapped and passed off the imprinted quartz, desperately straining to track the course of the on-going debate. Last chance of reprieve, she raged against ebbing hope, that the proven asset of her eighth-rank talent might see her released from her insupportable punishment.

Selidie leaned back in her carved ivory chair, bored composure suggesting the set-back at Hanshire posed no more than a trivial inconvenience. ‘Wait or not, we have set a better alternative in motion already' She gestured her bandaged hand to cut off the tiresome discussion. ‘As prize, or as forfeit, we shall shortly know if the inducement set forth is sufficient. Given development, I fully expect that our sisterhood's short-fall will be most handsomely met.'

Chafed frantic, Lirenda burned to hear more. But the seeress was dismissed to resume her post. Scheduled business would continue: the screened candidate awaited her oath of investiture, and the last child in line had yet to undergo testing.

Yet the snap of Selidie's spoken command halted the ceremony forthwith. ‘All are excused! I require Lirenda. The oath and the last screening shall wait.'

The will of the Prime was held above question. The Senior Circle arose, gave obeisance, and filed out, while the sisterhouse peeress hustled to gather her bewildered charges. ‘Here, child!' she whispered. ‘My dear, ask me later.' Her admonishment silenced the girl's disappointment. ‘Our simple task is to obey'

Once the chamber had cleared, Lirenda was summoned, her powers to be used as the vessel to extend the Prime's eyes and ears. The demand would be arduous, no sharp surprise. By the terms of imposed sentence, Selidie could expend her schooled talent like riches poured out of a jar. ‘You will engage in trance while I align the Great Waystone to cast a scrying over salt water.'

Lirenda knelt as bidden. Puppet to the Prime's least command, she laid her hands on the stinging chill of the amethyst. Contact wrapped her senses in harrowing cold, a brief agony. The Prime's master sigil reached through with clamping force and claimed her receptive contact. Insatiably demanding, it grappled her being and jerked forth a quickened thread. The unravelling plunge dropped her through spinning darkness. Her being became a spun line that hurled through a portal of purple fire. Now nameless and faceless, poised over what felt like the eye of the world, Lirenda received the Prime Matriarch's directive:
‘Find Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn. Watch and listen for as long as it takes! I would have the name of the place where he plans to make his next landfall.'