The Ships of Merior. Janny Wurts

in the strands was most clear. Not only would separation trigger the dissolution of bodily substance, but the wraith in possession could unkey the quickened flesh and impose wilful change with impunity.

      Aghast, Verrain whispered, ‘You think Desh-thiere’s curse upon the princes may work in a similar way?’

      Sethvir looked up, the strand-wrought, desecrated patterns imprinted in frosty reflection upon his emotionless eyes. ‘That’s what we’re here to determine.’ He succumbed to a shudder, as if his detachment gave way and the horrors reeled off in cold augury overcame him in one slamming wave. Then he blotted damp palms on his sleeve cuffs and spoke a single clipped syllable. The knit mesh of forces that energized the strands bled off in a crackle of sparks.

      Asandir drew a racking breath and stirred, while Traithe stepped aside and dropped into a chair as though his knees had failed him.

      For an interval spanning several minutes, nobody cared to try speech.

      Verrain finally pushed upright and made his unsteady way to the hearth to unshield the fire and brew tea. The toxins in the tienelle had left him dehydrated and queasy; spurious starts of vision still snatched through his senses like flares. Tired to his bones, his hyper-sensitized awareness cringing even from the rub of the grey tom just returned to bask by the settle, the spellbinder struggled for the self-command to weather the withdrawal and transmute the herb’s fatal poisons.

      Behind him discussion continued, Fellowship voices mazed in grim echoes as comparisons were drawn from their study of the methuri, and the Mistwraith’s curse on the princes. Verrain rubbed stinging eyes, unable to quell his ripping shudders as true-sight relived the hideous aberrations the strands had etched into memory. The hissing splatter of boiled over water yanked back his straying thoughts. Cold and sick unto lassitude, he bent to mind the cauldron. He could never regard the monstrosities of Mirthlvain in quite the same fashion again; dangerous as they were, and vicious, still, they deserved his full measure of pity.

      The chance that two sons of Athera’s royal lines might suffer a similar disfigurement offered horror beyond sane belief.

      Braced by hot tea and determination, Verrain reclaimed his chair. He realized with renewed disquiet that the Fellowship prepared another scrying. Though this next divination was simple and harmless, an image drawn from straight recall, Asandir looked hollow-eyed. His craggy profile jutted into hot light as his large-knuckled hands attended the task of striking fresh flame to a candlewick. The wrist Traithe raised to put aside his raven trembled in apprehension.

      Even Sethvir seemed on edge. Mantled in tawdry burgundy velvet, his collar caught with hair like snagged fish line, he raised eyes touched to fevered brilliance and regarded each of his colleagues. ‘We’re caught in a critical moment.’ To Asandir, whose part was to draw the scrying, he said obliquely, ‘Will the reliving in depth be too much?’

      ‘Ath have mercy, it will become so, if uncertainty leads me to procrastinate.’ Asandir’s distress was noticed by the cats, who streaked from dim corners to crowd his lap, lace through his ankles, and vie for the chance to offer comfort. His strong hands moved, returning their attentions in rueful, saddened irony. ‘Little brothers, I’m truly grateful. But our night’s work isn’t through yet.’

      The sorcerer’s words reached triangular pairs of ears and imparted uncanny understanding. As clear in their disdain of spell currents as a chance-met douse in cold water, the cats dashed off in a twitching flinch of back fur, a shaking of paws and scything jerks of offended tails.

      Verrain might have chuckled at their haughtiness had the moment been less distressed. Whatever troublesome development was afoot, the sorcerers gave no explanation. Asandir set aside the rusted striker and poised in concerned stillness. While his fierce eyes closed, that alone had witnessed the moment when Desh-thiere’s curse claimed its victims, the oddity recurred: this same exhaustive search had been accomplished years since, in the hour the disaster had befallen.

      The spellbinder’s puzzlement became crushed aside by a rising wave of bright force. Power coalesced, great enough to melt rock or ignite metal like a twig of dry tinder. Over the dusky weave of Traithe’s cloak, carved out by will and clean conjury, Asandir’s augury reformed the sphere of the candle’s fire, to recreate an event six years past when Etarra’s teeming thousands had turned out to celebrate the crowning of Rathain’s sanctioned prince…

       Spring sun flooded over the royal banners, streamered in Rathain’s colours of silver and green. On a gallery overhanging the city’s wide square, above the surge of a multitude, one man’s gold hair and fine jewellery flared in caught light as he raised his arms in sudden violence. His words scribed no sound in the window of Asandir’s re-conjuring; the instant Desh-thiere’s fragmented wraith enacted its possession over Lysaer s’Ilessid, he raised his gift in a lightning-bolt attack against an enemy singled out…

      Despite knowledge that the Mistwraith’s vengeance had exploited Lysaer; that its meddling distortion of the justice a benevolent past conjury had grafted into the s’Ilessid royal line had lent it the leverage to wreak ill, nothing could prepare for the naked, wasting passion launched against the Master of Shadow. Racked by a spasm of visceral revulsion, Verrain watched, riveted, as the moment continued to unfold.

      The light-bolt sheared on, a fateful, white arc of fire that tore a scream from roiled air. The black-haired victim who was its sure target thrashed to escape, while two terrified, burly merchants held him pinioned at wrists and knees. The sword he might have turned to cut his way free as well had not been in his hand. He ignored his captors’ efforts to wrest the blade away. To Arithon s’Ffalenn, all else lost meaning before the attack set against him by his half-brother.

      Pinned like a moth to a card by a needle of sick fascination, Verrain saw the crystalline flicker that sheeted through the burn of Lysaer’s assault: an unexpected, warning blaze of Paravian spellcraft released by Arithon’s heirloom sword. Then the weapon was wrenched away, to fall in mute motion to the pavement.

      As Rathain’s disarmed prince raised his hand to shape shadow, Sethvir interrupted like the slap of a whip striking flesh, ‘Stop it there.’

      In control that disallowed pity, Asandir locked the scrying. Like a reflection cold frozen in a mirror; or a jewel spiked through a ravelled plane of darkness, he held a fragment excised out of time.

      The result felt as rendingly ghastly as a dying man’s drawn out scream. Again, Verrain wondered why the Fellowship sorcerers should distress themselves to launch this irrelevant review.

      Arithon s’Ffalenn had tipped his face skyward. Eyes widened to a tourmaline blaze of anguish, he tracked a raven that arrowed in flight above the mob etched motionless in the square. The hand cocked back in the first blooming burst of cast shadow showed his fingers flexed in concentration. The directive to guide the spell’s homing was set for Traithe’s bird, dispatched at need to find Sethvir. A heartbeat shy of disaster, the prince’s concern lay unmasked, not for himself, but for a wasp’s nest of ramifications: that if the Fellowship sorcerers went unwarned of this crisis, far more than his own life and destiny were going to fall forfeit in consequence…

      The farsight of s’Ahelas!’ Verrain looked up, shocked by the evidence before him. ‘No one told me Rathain’s prince had inherited the marked gift of his mother’s line along with s’Ffalenn compassion.’

      To his sorrow and that of his half-brother also,’ Sethvir affirmed in quiet grief. ‘Both carry the attributes of two royal families.’

      Across the table, embattled by raw recriminations, Traithe sucked a fast breath and shut his eyes. ‘Ath’s blessed mercy, I should never have lent him my raven.’

      The bird’s guidance changed nothing,’ Asandir disagreed in jarring firmness. Distanced from emotion by the fearful discipline he needed to stabilize the scrying, he added, ‘You’ll see as much once the vibration is refined to show a clear imprint of the aura.’

      Unhappiness dwelled like a sore point, that such redefinition was required only to match the shortfalls