Grand Conspiracy. Janny Wurts

back, and not one single moment too soon,’ Luhaine carped from a backdrop of tenantless landscape. ‘Of course the Koriathain used the months of your absence to their unscrupulous benefit.’

      ‘You refer to the shepherd boy set under a change spell last autumn in Araethura?’ Sethvir raised eyebrows the ice had grizzled like magnetized clumps of steel filings. His sharpened gaze tracked the invisible wraith flanking him. ‘Fionn Areth was beyond our protection from the moment of his ill-fated birth. Since Elaira could do naught to cast off the life debt he owed her, she was most wise to entrust his fate to Prince Arithon’s devices.’

      Luhaine rattled through a gorse thicket hunched under a leading of sleet. ‘Then you’ve already seen what Lirenda’s wrought on the flimsy pretense of his innocent word of consent?’

      Sethvir said nothing. The unnatural seals of regeneration which guided the transformation of Fionn Areth were too bitter a subject for talk. ‘First tell me how long Asandir was convalescent before he left Althain Tower.’

      ‘Four days.’ Luhaine whirled in place. ‘You’re evading my question.’ Presented with Sethvir’s obstructive inattention at its worst, he stormed into motion again. ‘Asandir asked for his stallion to be––’

      ‘… sent on to the master of horse at the Red Water Inn,’ Sethvir finished, unperturbed. The hostler there knew the stud’s habits, and kept a clean stable with glossy, contented occupants. ‘I already saw,’ he added, before Luhaine could drone through every mundane detail surrounding Asandir’s departure. Mirthlvain had brewed up a new strain of predator, and no colleague’s lingering weakness could excuse the dismissal of unpleasant facts. The spellbinder who stood guard as Methisle’s warden could never have curbed the late outbreak of aberrants without a Sorcerer’s help. ‘Just say whether Asandir was fit enough to be on his feet when he left.’

      ‘He blocked your inquiry also?’ Luhaine poised, a circle of seized stillness where the downfalling sleet changed course in midair and slashed like white needles straight earthward. ‘That’s worrisome.’

      ‘But scarcely the first time,’ Sethvir pointed out.

      The vortex of Luhaine’s presence poured headlong through a barrier of blackthorn. ‘Stop hedging. I see how you’re vexed.’

      Althain’s warden hunched his shoulders as the experienced stud plowed ahead through the winter-stripped branches. His answer came muffled behind his raised forearm as he rode a rimed gauntlet of storm-burdened sticks. ‘Asandir’s never been foolish.’

      ‘Well, foolish or not, I couldn’t hold him,’ Luhaine retorted. ‘We stand too shorthanded for any one of us to mismanage the limits of our personal resources.’

      Sethvir disguised an untactful snort by wringing the ice melt from the draggled ends of his beard. The earth link exposed the residual glimmer of the warding maze Asandir had set on his back trail. In trying to eavesdrop on his progress through scrying, his discorporate colleague had been spun in blind circles for three days.

      Flustered and embarrassed, Luhaine snapped anyway. ‘Don’t act so smug. Of us all, you know you’re the only one who can match him and win.’

      ‘Not always, and never in a contest of straight force.’ Sethvir stared back, his blue-green eyes wide in his guileless effort to invite a diversion through trivial argument.

      But for the sake of the shapechanged child in Araethura, Luhaine fastened on like a terrier. ‘We should curb the plotting. That boy can’t be left as a Koriani puppet to lure Arithon s’Ffalenn into jeopardy. Morriel’s meddling nearly drove his Grace to insanity the last time! How dare she presume to risk triggering Desh-thiere’s curse again.’

      ‘We cannot interfere.’ Sethvir’s words were hammered iron. ‘Misled or not, Fionn Areth gave his unconditional consent.’

      A silence weighted with terrible memories settled between the two Sorcerers. The brutal wind howled, while its freight of barbed ice tapped and bounced off the spears of browned sedge, and the frost-turned canes of wild briar. For a time, the only living sound in the world was the grate of the stallion’s shod hooves against the glazed crust frozen over the primordial slabs of scoured limestone.

      However the Fellowship mages might be tempted to use power to stop the abuse of a child’s innocence, they had no grounds. The Law of the Major Balance disallowed any choice which obstructed the course of free will. Unless Fionn Areth came to ask their assistance, the Sorcerers could not act, could never engage the force of grand conjury against the informed consent of the spirit.

      Sethvir regarded the knuckles of his hands as if the streaks of unforgotten, past bloodstains remained branded into wet skin. ‘We cannot step back and resume our old ways. The boy’s fate is Arithon’s, now.’

      Though his agonized whisper seemed masked by the storm that whined over the barren landscape, Luhaine heard. ‘You’re shivering.’ The discorporate mage asked a permission of the elements, and shifted the brunt of the wind. ‘Have you given a thought to finding shelter for the night?’

      Sethvir regarded the slow slide of moisture from the crusted rime on his sleeve cuffs. This time the grain of a desperate weariness let all his sorrow break through. ‘There’s a farmwife nearby who hid an herb witch from crown soldiers. If she knows me for a Sorcerer, she won’t turn me out.’

      For her kindness, Sethvir could set wards of concealment on her cellar. He might lay a blessing over her livestock that would encourage them to bear twins for the next five years. The small comforts he could bestow for a night’s hospitality chafed against sensibilities left outraged by other, immovable bounds of restraint. Timeworn wisdom granted no comfort. Against the entanglement planned for Arithon s’Ffalenn through the fate of an innocent child, the uncertainties ahead posed too graphic a peril to dismiss. At least Luhaine chose tact and suppressed his need to list the appalling facts: that Arithon was no match for Koriani plots, not since the hour of the atrocities at Tal Quorin, when he had gone blind to mage-sense in remorse. The Mad Prophet could remain at his side to protect him only so long as his spellbinder’s powers could be spared by a Fellowship caught critically shorthanded.

      ‘You’ll return to Althain Tower to regroup?’ Luhaine asked.

      ‘Not yet.’ Diminished by the desolate landscape, Sethvir squared his shoulders against the flaying edge of the wind. ‘For the sake of the Etarran men-at-arms still spellbound by the dreaming of Caithwood’s trees, I intend to demand a state audience at Avenor.’

      On that point, the compact gave the Fellowship Sorcerers clear entitlement to act. Balked as they were on all other fronts, Althain’s Warden resolved to wring merciless advantage from that narrow chink of opportunity.

       Midwinter 5654

      Developments

      Just past his seventh birthday, the herder’s son, Fionn Areth, returns from a scuffle with a peer, one eye bruised black, and a cut on his lip; and is dispatched to his blankets in the loft without supper while his father snaps to his goodwife, ‘Well who wouldn’t pick fights with him? No child in this valley, nor even his own brothers can bear the arrogant look that boy’s learned to wear on his face …’

      Far south of Araethura, a wizened desert seer recasts his third augury in bones on the sable sands of Sanpashir, and his reading affirms the arrival of Shadow, and the living future of his tribe; his instructions to his people carry the weight of action as he concludes, ‘We go now to the ancient ruins to stand guard …’

      On the east shore of Melhalla, a galley flying the scarlet bull of Alestron embarks for Avenor, where the duke’s brother, Parrien s’Brydion, will attend the wedding of Prince Lysaer s’Ilessid and post an ambassador to relieve Mearn, whose appointed service to the Alliance of Light has kept him from home for eight years …