Peril’s Gate. Janny Wurts

the mayor’s guard from Jaelot pounded hard on his trail, swallowed at length by the fall of fresh snow and the gloved ink of solstice night.

       Winter Solstice Night 5670

      Retaliation

      On the hour before solstice midnight, the vintner’s shed where the Koriani enchantresses in Jaelot held their headquarters lay in flickering gloom, the reek of cheap tallow stewed through the tang of stirred dust. The flames in the dips hissed and dimmed to the drafts whining through ill-fitted shakes. Sifted snow let in by the cracks sheeted glittering residue in the corners. Only one of the circle of women who manned the crude outpost rejoiced for the upset to the order’s covert plotting. Well accustomed to the ramshackle joinery that made the rough shelter a misery, Elaira lay curled in her cloak. She had finger-combed the worst tangles from her damp glory of bronze hair. Undone by the relief of Prince Arithon’s escape, she slept through the first peaceful moment she had known since Fionn Areth’s unjust incarceration.

      Lirenda viewed her younger colleague’s repose with distaste. Less inured to tough setbacks, too riled to accept the wormwood of defeat, the senior enchantress paced the shed in mincing steps and balked tension. Her hands shook. Agitated reflections snapped through her rings like actinic sparks in the flame light.

      Her assigned circle of peers maintained stiff decorum. Anxious lest her shortfall brand them in shame, they endured her irritable commands in strict silence.

      Lirenda rebuffed their probing questions. She gave no explanation for the monumental lapse in propriety that had allowed Arithon s’Ffalenn to bolt through Jaelot’s cordoned walls.

      ‘You must find him!’ she exhorted her overworked seeresses, still bent in trance over a water-filled vat once more joyously used to mash grapes.

      Failure to secure the Shadow Master’s capture framed a setback of calamitous proportions. In peril of ruin, Lirenda demanded another spell-driven sweep of the countryside. Her foul mood stayed relentless, as though by persistence she could expunge the memory of the branding kiss the s’Ffalenn prince had bestowed to unravel her upright character.

      ‘You realize we waste time,’ Senior Cadgia pointed out, her steadfast patience frayed ragged.

      ‘Search wider,’ Lirenda lashed back in hissed sibilance. ‘I won’t hear your excuse for the static thrown off by a mere winter storm. The s’Ffalenn bastard can’t go far on foot in such weather. I’ll know where he shelters, no matter how thorny the setbacks!’

      Deliberate before such needling superiority, the elder seer addressed the frosted white image that rejected her skills in the scrying vat. The sigil she sketched with competent briskness did not frame the seals to generate ordered renewal. Instead, fingers snapping, she engaged the chaotic rune of dispersal.

      The spelled binding that framed the construct for tracking dispelled as a sheet of blank light.

      Ahead of Lirenda’s explosive rebuke, Cadgia let fly her long-suffering temper. ‘No! Enough of this foolery.’ She pushed to her feet as though her back ached. ‘I told you before. Your fugitives lie under Dakar’s warded protection, no easy barrier for our skills to break through, even under auspicious conditions! My circle of seeresses are all bone weary. Your fruitless schemes have exhausted their strength, and I won’t see them down sick by extending them further. Until this storm lifts, accept the harsh fact. Nothing more can be done.’

      ‘How dare you ignore the Prime Matriarch’s directive!’ Smoothly groomed, her sable hair imperiously pinned since her demeaning affray by the wall, Lirenda advanced in a swish of damp silk.

      Yet Cadgia folded broad arms, unintimidated. ‘Don’t start. Not now. You’re behind on events. The old balance of power has shifted.’

      ‘You’ve had news?’ Paused as though doused by a pail of chill water, Lirenda drew a sharp breath. ‘What are you saying?’

      ‘That when the wards you had set over Jaelot’s walls were breached by the Shadow Master’s passage, we received urgent word from the lane watch.’ Sobered now, without petty smugness, Cadgia delivered the tidings withheld by the Prime’s express command, until Arithon’s escape was past salvage. ‘Your hope is ashes. The succession is already accomplished.’

      Lirenda blinked, gold lit as an old painting against sepia shadow. The impact of meaning took moments to crumble her adamant wall of denial. ‘Prime succession? Then Morriel lost her last faculties?’

      Sensitive to the porcelain-frail note of vulnerability, Cadgia broke the shattering gist. ‘Morriel is dead. We bow to the will of a new Prime Matriarch, who bears all the powers of her predecessor.’

      Lirenda felt emptied, as though earth itself had dissolved from under her feet. ‘Who?’ she forced out in a glass-edged whisper. ‘Which initiate has come to stand in my stead?’

      Cadgia masked pity as she spelled out the cutting truth. ‘Selidie, of course. She was the appointed Prime Senior.’

      ‘But that’s impossible!’ Lirenda’s disbelief uncoiled to rage, her heartbeat a drumroll within her. ‘That lackwitted girl knew nothing at all. She never completed even a fraction of the requisite course of training!’ Granted blank stares from the onlooking seeresses, who abandoned their posts one by one, Lirenda stemmed her shocked fuming. The disparities she mentioned were not self-evident. She alone had once held the candidate’s position within the Koriani Order. Of all ranking seniors, only she had successfully mastered eight of the trials of initiation.

      ‘Nonetheless,’ Cadgia said, matter-of-factly. Informed by the avid stillness that Lirenda’s defeat was too public, she snapped a prompt order to dismiss her subordinate seers. Mantles rustled as the women filed out. While the blast of the storm through the rickety doorway spilled in and tattered the tallow flames, the ranked senior resumed speaking. ‘Should the outcome surprise you? Beyond every doubt, you failed your test here in Jaelot. I have not asked to know how the Master of Shadow managed to make his escape. Nor will I concern myself further. My seeresses tried, but their best efforts cannot salvage your gaffe. For the future, no one yet knows if Prime Selidie will renew the mandate for Arithon’s capture. She has sent her summons. We are all to present ourselves for audience in the coastal city of Highscarp.’

      Lirenda did nothing but close tortured eyes, a futile gesture. She had guarded against every setback but this, to be supplanted by an idiot initiate who could scarcely be trusted to silk wrap a quartz crystal; a mere child she knew had never progressed to the point of mastering even the least potent of the order’s array of great focus stones. Still stunned by the shock of monumental betrayal, Lirenda fought to muster a civilized response. ‘Go. Leave me. I need time to accept what has happened.’

      Cadgia curtseyed. Her large-boned frame and careful tread crossed the dust-shafted glow of the dips. A barrage of raw wind and the clang of the latch saw her gone, leaving Lirenda to choke on the aftertaste of defeat.

      She had no comforts, here; no soft carpets; no hot bath; no warm, perfumed mantle to ease the frayed rags of her pride. While the crawling spill of flame light cast overlapping haloes across the uneven floor, and the water abandoned in the scrying vat puckered to paned ice in the cold, Lirenda stood huddled in fine silk and grade wool, shivering through crushing disappointment.

      The nadir to which she had fallen lay beyond words to express. Cast from the pinnacle of needy ambition into an abyss of total anonymity, Lirenda beheld the death of her most cherished hopes. She could live for six centuries on longevity spells, and at best earn the title of Second Senior. Always, forever, she must stand behind Selidie, whose interests she had blatantly spurned, and whose youth must inevitably outlast her.

      ‘Life does have more than one facet, you know,’ observed someone in gentle reproof.

      Lirenda spun in recoil, to find Elaira awake and regarding her. The unranked initiate she had always despised sat erect in the shadows, the auburn hair she seldom troubled to plait spilled