Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts
mindless work, before the crippling blow ground his spirit under the weight of stark sorrow.
Arithon ran. Downpour soaked him, and lightning flared, silver-white in the grey dawn. But the cruel severance could not be escaped, unequivocally framed in betrayal.
Summer 5923
Personation
The breezes stirring midsummer’s brass heat still carried the tang of defeat out of Havish. Rampant talk sown by Sunwheel deserters spread vivid accounts, embellished by the disaffected anxiety still building apace since the past spring’s explosive flux surge. Few townsfolk doubted an outbreak of sorcerous Shadow had broken the True Sect invasion. If rumour claimed the Light’s avatar also had vanished from the field in the after-shock, as dust settled in The Hatchet’s retreat, port towns along Instrell Bay moved more reliable news in sealed dispatches. These confirmed the Master of Shadow’s escape. Fewer, kept secret, traced Lysaer s’Ilessid’s reappearance in anonymous seclusion at East Bransing.
While Sethvir at Althain Tower strained errant hearsay from truth, news of the war trickled eastward across the continent, hampered where Athili’s bounds and the haunted pass through Lithmarin thinned the hectic flow of town trade across the Storlain ranges, and stalled altogether where the merchant guilds’ influence languished at Backwater. Itinerant tinkers crept word of mouth northward. Morbid fears and suspicion spread from Daenfal Lake gradually through Araethura’s back-country herders, where Iyat-thos Tarens and his youthful clan companions traversed the open steppe.
Footbound for weeks in an isolate vista of grassland and quicksilver streams thatched with briar, the party had been run off by vicious dogs. Where the goats grazed, unfenced, they were stoned on sight by furtive boys wielding hide slings.
Distance from the settlements added rank distrust. Appointed as spokesman for his friendly smile and crofter’s accent, Tarens found his most polite knock met by a screech from the cottage matron who answered her door. His honest request to trade for a waxed cheese was put off by a meat skewer, the uproar unpleasantly quick to draw riled kin from the byre brandishing hay-forks.
“You’d think I’m a sorcerer in league with Shadow!” he vented, chased to breathless flight. Returned to find that morning’s campsite stripped down, and no sign of his furtive companions, he required a clan tracker’s skills to ferret out their direction.
Tarens caught up with Siantra at midmorning, soaked to the neck and flushed after crossing the swift-running creeks that furrowed a landscape riddled by narrow ravines. “Slinking weasel!” he accused. “You knew my reception was going to cause mayhem.”
Sidir’s willowy descendant fingered her strung bow and shrugged. Seal-dark hair and the fey glint in pale eyes accented the wolfish cast to her cheek-bones. “Why the injured surprise?” Daughter of her lineage, she evaded with truth. “You look like a ruffian inclined to steal eggs.”
In fact, thieving was the most likely aim of a townsman this far off the beaten track: a large stranger scarred by a broken nose and armed with knife and sword posed a threat great enough to inspire hostility. Perhaps shamed she had played that advantage and bolted, Siantra flicked her sly glance askance. “You swam to throw off pursuit? That’s foolhardy.”
More than wet clothes prickled Tarens to chills. Warned he ruffled more than the young woman’s poise, he bristled with incredulity. “This near the Arwent Gorge? Brazen sneak! Don’t mock me with the belated concern that I might have drowned in the current!”
The vixen blushed. “If you’re all that wise to the lay of the land, why risk your life?”
“Because I don’t trust the pair of you out of my sight.” The glib request to restock supplies in hindsight should have been questioned. “Esfand’s gone ahead,” the frank crofter accused, doubly annoyed to have fallen for the transparent deception.
“I stayed.” Guilty, Siantra defended, “You can’t fault us! Esfand rightfully should report first as his sire’s heir apparent.”
“More than my own sensibilities would argue,” Tarens flared back.
“You can’t overtake him,” Siantra protested, hot on the crofter’s heels as he passed her. “I held back only to stop you! If you manage to find the way down to the gorge, Esfand’s alert will have warned the patrol scouts.”
But Tarens possessed in full measure the past memories of Jieret, once caithdein to Rathain and High Earl of the North. He required no guide. Unless two hundred and fifty years of weather had crumbled the gap through the notch, he knew the hidden access into Halwythwood better than any.
Tailed by Siantra’s dismayed footsteps, Tarens glanced backwards and spat in the dirt. “That, for cold-blooded murder! Your choice.”
Then he sprinted. Shocked, nearly tearful, Siantra could not check a grown man twice her weight, short of taking him down with an arrow. Which the forest scouts’ vigilance might well do anyway, denied their due chance to verify the outlandish twist: that this affable stranger who spoke in town dialect was not the bumpkin he appeared but a feal liegeman to Prince Arithon of Rathain.
Siantra shouted, distraught. “Esfand went to break the news that the clan relay through Halwythwood may be overfaced. And he’s right! We can’t grasp how deeply the True Sect’s defeat has gutted treaty law, or what oppressive policy’s arisen since Lysaer abdicated the mayor’s seat at Etarra to Canon Law.”
The recent lane shift unleashed hard against the disastrous campaign to fight Shadow had recoiled into fanatical hysteria. Distrust fed the Light’s cause, while the volatile terror stirred by the heightened flux incited still more widespread purges. Old blood-lines were pursued under bounty again as True Sect doctrine inflamed the south. Irruptive outbreaks of latent talent at Backwater unleashed the renewed predation of trackers with dogs, funded in force by the head-hunters’ leagues and the temple’s coffers. Hounded under blood-letting unrest, the free wilds’ scouts would be primed to kill any outsider on sight.
When Iyat-thos refused to wait upon reason, Siantra shed her cumbersome pack roll and raced in scared desperation to flank him.
The snare dropped with barely a slither of warning. Twine mesh weighted with stones netted Tarens halfway down the notched path, zigzagged through the cliff where Araethura’s plateau dropped off sheer at the central fault-line. The cleft where he tumbled swooped a hundred yards downwards, straight for the rocky ravine that channelled the snaked froth of the Arwent. Banged and cut as he fell, unable to save himself, he slid at frightening speed towards the precipice.
A spindly, stunt fir snagged him short of fatality. Subject to a rough rescue, spluttering the spray inhaled from the white water boiling down the river-course, he swore vengeance in outraged Paravian. Siantra’s shouts, more than his fluent insults, forestalled the scouts’ ready swords. Murderous still, unimpressed by his grasp of old language, the clan patrol guarding the fringes of Halwythwood preferred distrust over lenient caution.
They trussed his hands, no surprise, given such callous handling deserved the honest retort of his fists. The gag that followed imposed an indecency Tarens fought tooth and nail.
The scouts jerked the knots brutally tight, while Siantra sniped from the side-lines. “Well, what did you expect? You’ve trespassed without leave, and not only that, crossed the honour of Esfand’s ancestral name.”
Which provocation Tarens already had acknowledged in unvarnished words. Restraints alone forestalled his scathing redress: Jieret’s outrage demanded due reckoning. Dharkaron Avenger’s Black Spear take the hour he should face High Earl Cosach s’Valerient: a blood chieftain, a father, and unconscionably terrifying, an invested caithdein whose cowardice had let three youngsters hare off after the realm’s rightful duty to Rathain’s crown prince.
That dangerous trek into enemy territory had led onto the red field of war and entangled their fates, with one feckless boy’s life lost untimely.
Where Esfand’s rebellious