Peril’s Gate. Janny Wurts

       Winter 5670

      Proving

      Outside the barred door to the Prime’s private residence, Elaira braced her back to the courtyard wall. She sucked in steady breaths of chill air to slow the raced beat of her heart. Around her, the sounds of routine industry filed an edge on her acid-stripped nerves. She could not shake her looming sense of disaster. The facts all converged, unremitting: in the white wilds of Daon Ramon Barrens, five cities dispatched armed companies on forced march to take down Arithon s’Ffalenn. Yet no pending sense of the world’s smashed equilibrium ruffled the winterbound city of Highscarp. A silvery trill of horsebells jingled down the lane beyond the gate. A servant banged open a second-story shutter and slapped the dust out of a bolster. Overhead, an ice crystal scumbling of cloud diffused the pyrite gleam of noon sunlight. The gusts turned northeast and smelled of the sea, sure signs that a gale would rage in before nightfall. The high mountain passes would lie sifted in snow, while the ridges shed their cover of drifts like fumaroles of blown smoke.

      Storm and heartache came in lockstep with her mind-linked awareness: Arithon s’Ffalenn was still crossing the Baiyen, the conditions he suffered soon to become an onslaught of unalloyed misery.

      As cuttingly cold, to Elaira’s bare hand, was the quartz sphere Prime Selidie had given her. The binding directive attached to its custody offered no chink for compromise. The new Matriarch had matched her most desperate move, and her wits still recoiled on the outcome.

      ‘The bitterest enemy is myself, then,’ Arithon had once flung back when the Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir, had pinned him on a fine point of principle.

      For Elaira, who loved him, flesh as one flesh, understanding of his anguish bore down without mercy, the razor edge of her predicament resharpened by Sethvir’s past assurance that she would be party to the Prince of Rathain’s final salvation or downfall.

      ‘Was this what you meant?’ Her appeal to the Warden’s earth-sensed awareness went unanswered, while the unkind wind off the bay tore her voiceless, and her knees refused to stop shaking.

      ‘Oathsworn?’ a boy’s timid voice addressed, breathless. ‘Initiate, do you wish a horse saddled for riding?’

      Elaira stirred and regarded the young groom, her slate eyes still deadpan with shock.

      The boy chewed his lip, then plowed ahead, gallant. ‘The mare that brought you needs rest and feed. Should the house loan you a fresh mount?’

      ‘Thank you, no.’ Elaira pushed away from the wall, resolute as the first, unwanted decision snapped scattered thoughts back to focus. ‘I won’t be going anywhere I can’t walk, but thanks for your gentleman’s kindness.’

      The quandary posed by her changed obligations presented a future fraught with bloodletting thorns. Where Arithon was concerned, she knew better than to trust Selidie’s oath on the Great Waystone. Lirenda’s warning concerning the new Prime had not been mentioned lightly. Wary of every unseen subtlety that might lurk to entrap her, Elaira chose to make her way without help. She dared not accept either post mounts or shelter from the too-open hand of the sisterhood.

      ‘You have a mother? A family?’ she asked of the horseboy.

      His grin showed missing gaps where his lost molars grew in.

      ‘Take this for their comfort.’ She pressed a worn copper into the child’s palm, offering the courtesy due from a guest stranger, and not an initiate sister whose order demanded unstinting service. ‘Off you go,’ she added, before he could shout his effusive gratitude. ‘Fetch me the pack off my saddle, and see that the mare gets the rest she deserves.’

      The delay to reclaim her belongings chafed at her ripe sense of urgency. Elaira gauged the entangling pressures that might offer pitfalls and setbacks. If she wished to forestall the obligations her low rank would allow the sisterhouse peeress, she must act now, before Highscarp’s seniors discovered the Prime’s grant of autonomy, or caught wind of her unorthodox assignment.

      She descended the high road from the bluff on foot. Whipped by rising wind, she threaded between a cake seller’s cart and two wagons and sheltered behind a smokehouse’s woodpile. There, in brisk care, she bundled the burdensome scrying sphere into a silk scarf from her pack. Next, she counted her handful of coins, earned in the honest practice of dispensing simples and cough remedies in the wayside taverns. Two silvers, eight copper were scarcely enough to meet her critical needs. She would have to drive desperate, hard bargains to test the scope of the Prime’s two-edged promise of independence.

      As her first defined act to invoke that autonomy, Elaira tore off the bronze buttons she kept for luck, then gave her thick, purple cloak to the first beggar she found whining for alms in the street. ‘Just turn the damned thing inside out,’ she insisted, as the shivering creature fingered the distinctive color in apprehensive distrust of its Koriani origins. ‘You’ll stay just as warm, the lining’s bleached wool, and no one will pay much attention.’

      She asked for directions, found the common market, and spent her store of silver on a sturdy, used cloak of good weave that would be respectable once it was cleaned. From the smith’s, for a half cent, she acquired a tarred leather bucket with a broken strap. The winds now were rising, and tasted of spume. Puddles wore glazings of rime ice. Like chalk marks under a poured-lead sky, gulls roosted on rooftrees and pilings and chimneys, breasts fluffed against inbound bad weather. Elaira pressed on to the dockside stalls, where seamy old women with crabbed hands and sharp eyes sold oddments of bone and glass jewelry, pomanders and luck charms, and the fish-scale talismans made to ward drowning prized by enlisted sailhands.

      The ramshackle awnings cracked in the gusts. A shrill couple argued in the tenements overhead, while a dog pack nosed garbage in the gutter. Elaira perused tables of knucklebones and brooches, her flyaway hair tucked under her cloak, and her saddle pack guarded against cutpurses. Craftsmen and tosspots jostled their way past, and a street minstrel scraped jigs on a fiddle. At length, she found the item she sought amid a stall with tied bundles of cedar, and braided lanyards with hens’ feet, and fiend bands of stamped tin and strung pebbles.

      ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘I’m in need of your help.’

      The old woman wrapped in faded plaid shawls perked erect, both eyes pearly with cataracts, and her arthritic hands clasped to her wash-leather satchel. ‘Dearie, speak up. Henlyie’s deaf as a post.’

      Elaira smiled. ‘I could whisper, and still you could hear me.’

      The old herb witch blinked. She loosened a crabbed fist, and reached out, unerring. Her swollen fingers jinked the quartz crystal nested like a frost shard among her ragtag array of queer wares. ‘Stone speaks, for you. How much can you pay?’

      The ancient bronze buttons scored Elaira’s clamped palm as she answered in trepidation. ‘I can offer two coppers, and your pick of the rarest herbs in my satchel.’

      Old Henlyie sucked a breath through gapped teeth. ‘That desperate, are ye?’

      Elaira shut her eyes, while the wind whined through the carved eaves overhead, and the thrash of the breakers against the seawall muttered under the boisterous shouts of the stonecutters on leave from the quarries. ‘Mother, if you only knew.’

      The old woman peered through fogged marble eyes, attuned to some cue beyond sight. ‘Healer trained, are ye? Then ye know well enough,