Grand Conspiracy. Janny Wurts

a sultry, actinic yellow. As its matrix imprinted and magnified the transmission, a pale flower of illumination touched the skin at the center of Fionn Areth’s forehead.

      Lirenda murmured the incantation to waken only the mind. The words of her litany were framed in a tongue whose origins came from a world far removed from Athera.

      Young Fionn Areth opened his eyes, but not to the autumn night he remembered. No moon shone above him, no stars. He did not perceive the bare branches of the fruit trees that shivered in the moan of cold winds. The spell seal cocooned his conscious awareness, and his senses stayed suspended, netted into disembodied quiet. The etheric web of a jewel’s charged lattice enclosed his sight like glass walls.

      ‘Where am I?’ His voice fell echoless and flat, splintered against that imprisoning silence.

      ‘You are in dreams, but awake,’ a woman’s voice answered. Her vowels struck through consonants edged with high-pitched harmonics.

      Too distanced to be frightened, Fionn Areth searched the planes of the crystal’s lit heart, trying to make out the speaker. ‘Where are you?’

      ‘Here.’ Her laugh rang like glassine slivers of ice. ‘You shall see.’

      A shimmer bit through the blank vista of perception; and he made out a dim figure muffled in dark purple silk. Veils of softer violet light shimmered amid the radiance thrown off by the activated quartz. Fionn Areth beheld a dark-haired woman with a face of marble serenity. She had lips of bleached coral and hands too ethereally fine to have toiled at birthing goats, or spinning fleece, or stirring an iron pot to render raw fat into tallow.

      ‘I know who you are,’ the boy ventured, determined not to be craven under her steady regard. Her brows were fine arches, and her eyes the rich, ruddy amber of the whiskey his father bought from the backwater traders. ‘You’re an enchantress. Why have you brought me here?’

      ‘To ask if you’re ready to lay claim to the fate your tribe’s seeress prophesied at your birth.’ The lady’s amused gaze seemed to measure him. ‘Are you brave?’

      ‘My sisters don’t think so.’ Fionn Areth gave their opinion his scornful dismissal. ‘I had to climb to the top of the ash tree by the brook to show them that girls don’t know anything. Are you like Elaira, the enchantress who saved my life the night I was born?’

      ‘She is there,’ said the lady, and pointed.

      Fionn Areth noticed the second figure then, this one clad in the laced leathers and jacket she wore when she called bringing simples. To the woman he recognized as a friend, he need not cling to appearances. ‘You look sad. Why is that, lady?’

      Inside that prison of crystalline walls, Elaira stepped forward. The spectral light made her features seem strained. The rich, russet highlights in her hair were erased, as if she had become but a shadow of herself in that place of carved ice and moonlight. ‘I am saddened, Fionn. The time’s come when I’m asked to give over your birth debt to the higher power of the Koriani Order. This cannot be done without your consent, but Lirenda insists you are old enough. She would have you speak and arrange for the terms of your sacrifice.’

      ‘What do I say?’ Fionn Areth asked, plaintive. ‘I could give her my knife, but Father told me if I lost it, I couldn’t have another for a year.’

      Elaira wiped leaking eyes with the back of her wrist. ‘Keep your knife, Fionn. The lady wants nothing more than your word. Say if the Koriani Order may lay claim to your fate in my stead.’

      Fionn Areth’s eyes narrowed. ‘She wants this, the lady?’ He considered with the gravity of a child too young to respond as an adult. ‘My mother would say to give nothing for free. What will the Koriathain trade in return?’ His voice firmed as he stiffened his small spine. ‘I’m going to need an expensive, sharp sword.’

      ‘You shall have the very best, fabricated by the hand of a master armorer.’ Lirenda gestured encouragement with the magnanimous assurance of one who had never eaten someone else’s table scraps or missed a night in cosseted comfort. ‘Not only that, but a tutor at arms will be sent to Araethura to school you. Give your consent, and our bargain is sealed.’

      ‘Do I get a scabbard too?’ Fionn Areth said, distrustful enough to be shrewd.

      ‘A scabbard, of course, child.’ Impatient with young ones, Lirenda tapped her foot. ‘You have only to give your consent.’

      ‘Then yes!’ Fionn Areth followed his shout with a whoop that rattled his dream to echoing exuberance.

      But for Lirenda’s twisted plot, plainspoken speech was insufficient. ‘Swear, then. Heart and mind, give me your formal permission for the record to be set in crystal.’

      Elaira turned away, unable to watch, as, still fearless, the boy gave away his autonomy. The words of his oath rang through the frost-cloaked silence of the night. In too brief an instant, the act stood complete.

      Tied by consent to a Koriani quartz focus, Fionn Areth now belonged to the order as irrevocably as any young initiate inducted for vows of life service.

      In the orchard, released from the grip of spelled dreams, Fionn Areth’s body fell limp inside the fleeces of Elaira’s borrowed jacket. For a drawn-out moment, the unnatural trance kept his pupils dilated, their depths an uncanny, fathomless black in the frigid spill of the moonlight. Then Lirenda inscribed the seal for deep sleep. The boy’s wide, staring eyes hazed from focus and fluttered closed. His lips parted in a sigh, while an uncaring breeze bearing winter in its weave flicked the jet ends of his hair. A pen stroke ruled against darkness, the beam of pale light from the crystal seemed to drill through his unmarked forehead.

      ‘He’s sworn oath of debt.’ Lirenda’s satisfaction held triumph, a chilling indication that Morriel’s command matched the grain of her personal involvement. In a guarded move, she raised lily-scented hands and tugged the hood of her mantle to shelter her high-cut cheekbone. ‘Not even the Fellowship of Seven can argue the validity of a vow sworn and sealed as a bargain.’

      ‘You should be proud.’ Elaira made no effort to curb her raking sarcasm. ‘Your victim is only six years of age, and a tutor and a sword are a paltry return for enslavement.’

      ‘Given the choice of a life raising goats, I much doubt the child’s going to care.’ Lirenda’s rose lips bent upward in secretive satisfaction. ‘Don’t think you’re finished here.’

      Elaira huddled, shivering. She knew very well that the coming spells of transformation should not require her presence. This spiteful play to force her participation framed a more than disturbing oddity. Raised on the street as an orphaned child, Elaira had never welcomed authority. Now, her deep, primal instinct gave warning: the strained relationship shared with her senior had somehow grown beyond the surface disparities of social station and character.

      A closer study of Lirenda’s demeanor revealed where rice powder and eye paint could not quite mask her evident strain. The flesh over its beautiful template of bone seemed fine drawn, as though for weeks her sleep had been restless and her thoughts a turmoil of distress.

      In a sure burst of insight, Elaira said, ‘What has Arithon s’Ffalenn ever done to antagonize you?’

      Lirenda recoiled. Her amber pale eyes flicked up in a match flare of rage. ‘How dare you!’

      Chilled as she was, and sick with self-loathing, Elaira damped a grin of ripe devilment. ‘Touché. He’s difficult. I know far better than any. Was his influence why Morriel set you aside in disgrace?’

      ‘That’s none of your business!’ Lirenda’s frustration rankled, that she no longer wielded the ranking prerogative to quash prying questions and insolence. ‘My right to the privileges of prime succession shall not stay in question for long. Have a care. Cross me again, and your lot could be miserable.’

      ‘I’m miserable now,’ Elaira pointed out. ‘You’ll need to threaten with more imagination