Grand Conspiracy. Janny Wurts

of Rathain taken captive. To that end, she has ordered that his double should be raised as the decoy to draw out his enemies. If Fionn Areth stands trial for the Shadow Master’s misdeeds, outraged politics will brand him guilty. We believe the threatened execution of an innocent will lure the Teir’s’Ffalenn back ashore. He has an infallible heart, so you say. I know the arrogant pride of his line will not let him suffer another to die in his place. Whichever trait answers, his fate can be played straight into our hands on the puppet strings of his royal-born tie to compassion.’

      Elaira felt as if every bone she possessed had been opened to let in the cold. ‘What of Lysaer?’

      The amethyst rings on fingers and thumb flashed to Lirenda’s dismissive gesture. ‘Be sure we’ll find means to see him detained when the moment comes to take action.’

      Dizzy, sickened, all but crushed by despair, Elaira snatched at straws. ‘What of the child’s parents? How do you intend to gain their consent, and how many scheming truths will you hide on your course to persuade them? It’s a dangerous strait, to wear Arithon’s face, with the merchant guilds now funneling gold to arm Lysaer’s Alliance. Every headhunting band of unattached mercenaries is hiring itself out for the chance to spill s’Ffalenn blood.’

      ‘Why should the boy’s parents ever know?’ Lirenda inspected the cot, her dark, cut-silk lashes pinned wide in disdain. ‘These moorlands are isolated, long leagues from the trade road. Since the child is not yet six years of age, the sealed enchantment to remake his features can be tuned to unfold over time. No ignorant herder would distinguish the change from his normal growth to maturity.’

      Outlined by the leaping heat of the fire, Elaira let her stunned silence speak for her.

      ‘You have vowed to serve,’ Lirenda reminded. Her regard turned fixed in cruel fascination; as if, deeply hidden, she had a personal reason to savor her victim’s unfolding pain.

      ‘I have vowed to serve,’ Elaira agreed, her expressionless face feeling brittle as the crackled glaze on porcelain.

      The clear, topaz eyes of her tormentor stayed pinned on her, unrelenting. ‘But a vow is no guarantee of right action.’

      ‘You wouldn’t imply I’ve a choice in the matter?’ Elaira let sarcasm ignite into venom. ‘There’s a herdwife who lets rooms. She’s a wonderful cook. Stay here, and you’ll get nothing better than a half portion of stewed hare with pepper.’

      ‘Whatever unsavory supper you have planned, you need not share a morsel with me. I’ve dined already.’ Lirenda poked under the mismatched layers of bedding, then fluttered her hand to disperse the dust that wafted from the grass ticking. ‘Regarding free choice, your options are limited since the Fellowship can’t intervene.’

      She looked up, lips curved to a stabbing smile at Elaira’s wooden stillness. ‘Oh, be sure that’s accurate. Morriel made certain no Sorcerers would meddle. The Warden of Althain is this moment immersed in rebalancing the protections on a grimward. His earth-sense is deaf. By the hour he emerges, through your help we’ll have Fionn Areth’s clear and willing consent.’

      Elaira held firm through the wreckage of hope. While the wind moaned and hissed through the thatch overhead, she offset her distress with the tenacity taught by the arthritic old thief who had raised her. What use to dwell on the damning array of insupportable consequences? In the end, she must decide which part of herself to betray: the Koriani Order, with its merciless penalty for oathbreaking, which would obliterate her last conscious vestige of character. Or a price for survival that came dearer than blood: the coin of her love for a man who had become her very self, since one fated evening in Merior. Perhaps worse, she must violate a child’s blind trust, misuse his very flesh as the vessel to shape the design of her Prime Matriarch’s ordained purpose.

      ‘You’ll have a few hours to think and decide,’ Lirenda said in dismissal. ‘For the interval, I wish to rest.’ She flicked out her mantle and arranged its rich folds over the cot’s tumbled bedding.

      ‘I thought we agreed, there was no choice to make,’ Elaira bit back in acerbity. Staunch in the face of explosive despair, she added, ‘If you’re dead set on pursuit of this evil, say when you wish to begin.’

      ‘Wake me in the hours between midnight and dawn.’ Lirenda plucked out the tortoiseshell combs confining the sleek fall of her hair. ‘At least, I presume by then the herder boy’s parents will be snoring the soundest in sleep.’

      Black hair cascaded in waves down the prim slope of her shoulders. Lirenda fluffed the crimped ends with crisp fingers, then settled herself on the cot, her limbs arranged in exquisite wrapped comfort in the thick folds of her mantle. ‘You do stock valerian? Then mix a soporific. The steps will go harder if the boy cries in pain as the shapechanging is sealed. If you agree to keep your sworn faith with the order, be ready when the quarter moon breaks the horizon.’

      Lirenda closed lids the delicate, shell blue of a songbird’s egg, and settled herself into sleep.

      So brief a time to measure a decision that held the potential to rock every facet of the world; Elaira reclaimed her seat and sank down in limp shock at the trestle. Around her, the tools of her trade seemed transformed into items of damning remembrance. Here, the stone knife that Arithon had once borrowed to slice the galls from an oak branch; there, the small chip in the enamel jar she had made in that fateful, first hour he had chosen to cross over her threshold.

      Knotted round her wrist, warm against the sped pulse in her veins, she still wore his leather cuff lace, with its unassuming abalone beads. That treasured, soft length of deerhide had been left behind as a thoughtless gesture; in the safety of dreams, she still savored the competent, steadying touch he had used to bundle her rain-sodden hair and tie the length into a plait.

      Each detail hurt now with unbearable force.

      Elaira gripped the round stone she used for a pestle, a futile effort to draw comfort from the river-smoothed grain of the granite. The crossroads she faced was unalterably plain. She could fail to arouse Lirenda at moonrise; for disobedience of a Koriani senior’s command, she would pay the ultimate penalty of losing all ties to conscious awareness. Forced enslavement would follow. The power of her free will would be called forfeit through the bonds of the initiate’s oath she had sworn into the matrix of the Skyron aquamarine. That option offered her peaceful surcease through the painless void of oblivion.

      The stone under her palms made her flesh ache with cold. Trapped in the knife-edged coils of irony, Elaira squeezed back angry tears. She could not live the lie. If she allowed her spirit free rein in defiance, that would be the easy way out. Her personal stake in the future might be absolved on a word of defiance, but Lirenda’s uncanny sharp interest had laid bare the fallacy behind simple refusal.

      Elaira set down the rock, reamed to the bone by the tireless drafts that sang through the chinks in her casement. She held no illusions. She was expendable. Her cooperative contribution became little more than expedience within the larger pattern of Koriani design. Should she yield up her identity, Morriel Prime would simply appoint her replacement. The Skyron crystal would retain a full record of her memories and experience. Given that borrowed template, another enchantress would study her perception of Arithon s’Ffalenn and replicate her personal insights of his character in her stead. Fionn Areth would come to suffer the same fate. The plot to arrange the Shadow Master’s capture would proceed, with or without her consent to become the tool to enact his betrayal.

      The jaws of the quandary bit insidious and deep. Elaira raged, helpless before the inexorable truth. She wanted to rise, scream and rant like a madwoman, then break anything within reach in a manic spree of vindication. There seemed no justice, that the greatest sacrifice under her power to make would spare no one and nothing but her own peace of mind.

      She could wish she had chosen the good sense to die before this sorry hour should visit her. That misery recalled another night in chill drizzle, when she had walked the beachhead at Narms in fear for Arithon’s safety. Then as now, she had railed against the order’s restraint with seething rebellion on