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i_read_whatSo last time, Arithon got the fuck out of Merior just in time before Lysaer swarmed in and basically won it all over. (Except of course, Jinesse and Tharrick, who also managed to get the fuck out of dodge, and are off being Joyce Byers and Rick Grimes and looking for the kids.)
At the start of this chapter, we rejoin Arithon and Dakar. We're told that Arithon makes a brief pitstop in Innish to "renew select friendships" and set up some folks to deal with the Khetienn (the completed brigantine), before setting sail once more, this time to a place called the Cascain Islands.
We get some helpful description:
Like everywhere else on the Vastmark coast, the shoreline was all hostile rock. Galleys made no ports of call there. Captains who plied the trade routes gave the chained islets with their reef-ridden narrows and foam-necklaced channels a nervous, respectful wide berth. Forbidding slate cliffs stabbed up through the froth of winter breakers, black, jagged-edged and desolate. Their knife-bladed faces, clean polished by storms, slapped back every sound in meshed echoes.
Neat. So Arithon's pretty out of sorts. Losing the shipyard at Merior is a big fucking deal, and he's scrambling for a countermove. Dakar seems to be enjoying the sight.
Never more patient, Dakar passed his days in coldblooded discontent. Arithon caught out in ignominious retreat was novel enough to be fascinating. The options left to choice were all mean ones. Lysaer's warhost, so brilliantly reduced, now moved southward, pared down to its most dedicated divisions. Once the weather eased and more companies arrived to bolster the strike force at Merior, the Shadow Master dared not be caught cornered. No quarter would be shown by the specialized troops trained at Avenor for this war, Duke Bransian's seasoned mercenaries and the hotly partisan garrison divisions lent by Etarra and Jaelot would vie to be first to claim his head.
'Your tactics have only burned away the dross,' Dakar pressured as Arithon tinned the sloop's second anchor line on a cleat and flipped in a sailor's half hitch. 'You now face the eastlands' most gifted commanders. They won't make misjudgments for the season and the supply lines. They'll know to the second how long they can expect prime performance from an army in foreign territory.'
He can't be too happy though, because he's still stuck following Arithon around. And unless he wants to be "crushed like furniture in the thrust of Lysaer's campaign" he has to be able to know what Arithon intends to do and use it.
It's an interesting and very subtle character beat here, but it seems like, on some level, Dakar is starting to be aware that Lysaer isn't his friend anymore, and won't remotely care if Dakar gets killed so long as Lysaer can get to Arithon.
Unfortunately, for Dakar, of course, Arithon's not telling his plans. All Dakar knows is that they're off to the mountains of Vastmark. (He does nag Arithon a bit about bringing warmer clothing. Heh.) Anyway, it SOUNDS like Arithon intends to use Vastmark as his new shipyard, though how THAT's going to work without money (Maenalle's gift is long spent) is an interesting question.
In distrust and suspicion that Arithon's excursion must be plotted as a feint to mask a more devious machination, the Mad Prophet snatched up his least-battered woollens, crammed them in a wad in his cloak, and in a clumsy boarding that rocked water over a gunwale, parked his bulk in the stern of the tender.
I do enjoy Dakar's constant suspicion of Arithon, and then his complete, disbelieving offense whenever Arithon does reveal himself to be scheming.
So they venture out. It sounds pretty fucking miserable. Cold and wet. They end up cooking a thin hare and bunking down on rock. Dakar is definitely not enjoying it. He tries to taunt Arithon into a rest by pointing out that if Arithon slips and falls, his legendary lyranthe (from Halliron, noting his Masterbard status) will be destroyed. But Arithon is distracted by something else:
The landscape was not empty. Sinister and black above the rim of a dry river gorge, creatures on thin-stretched, membranous wings dipped and soared on the wind currents. The high mountain silence rang to a shrill, stinging threnody of whistles.
Dakar identifies them as wyverns, smaller and less dangerous cousins than the Khadrim they'd met in Mistwraith. (When the sword first proved itself to be Too Awesome To Bear.) They seem to be hunting something though, and Arithon wants to see what it is.
'It's likely just the carcass of a mountain cat,' Dakar carped. 'Mother of all bastards, will you slow down? You're going to see me trip and break my neck!'
Arithon called over his shoulder, cheerful. 'Do that and you'll just have to roll your fat self off this mountainside. No trees grow within a hundred and fifty leagues to cut any poles to make a litter.'
I ship it.
So it's a tricky climb, and at one point Arithon leaves his lyranthe and Dakar higher up to get a closer look:
In the deep shade of a fissure, on a ledge lower down, a shepherd in a stained saffron jerkin crouched braced at bay against the cliff face. One arm was muffled in a dusty dun cloak. The streaked fingers of his other hand were glued to the haft of a bloodied dagger. Heaped to one side like a sun-shrivelled hide, the corpse of a wyvern lay draped on the scarp. The gouged socket of the eye that took the death wound tipped skyward, stranded in gore like a girl's discarded ribbons between the needle teeth that rimmed the parted, horny scales of its jaw.
Huh, there's a dude. Well done, dude.
Arithon helps out with his bow and arrow, shooting another wyvern that had been hovering just outside of the new guy's weapon's reach. He and Dakar still manage to bicker:
Arithon nocked and drew a second arrow. 'I thought you said they never fought in packs!'
'They don't.' Morbidly riveted, Dakar watched the weapon tip track its descending target, the twang of release left too late to forgive a missed shot. Arithon's shaft sang out point-blank and smacked home. The wyvern wrenched out of its plunge. It cartwheeled, the arrow buried to the fletching beneath its wing socket.
His envy compounded with unabashed regret for such nerveless, exacting marksmanship, Dakar qualified. 'That was the mate of the one you killed first. The creatures fly paired. They defend their own to the death.'
'I believe you.' The edged look of temper Arithon threw back bruised for its knowing, poisoned irony. 'But if you happen to be wrong, you'd better do the same.' He thrust his bow and his unhooked quiver into the Mad Prophet's startled grasp.
And then:
Unable to mask his raised hackles, Dakar glared as Arithon hurled himself over the lip of the ledge. 'You think I'd bother? I don't care how often you're reminded. It's no secret I'll rejoice to see you dead.'
Arithon's reply slapped back in hollow echoes off the sheer walls of the ravine. 'I'm not quite the fool I appear. With eighty leagues of mountains between here and Forthmark, if you don't fancy climbing, you're stuck. Unless you find the sea legs to single-hand my sloop.'
Seriously guys? Have you considered hate sex? I feel like it'd be good for you. So anyway, Dakar does scramble down to join Arithon. And he sees what Arithon presumably already knew (the scene had been from Dakar's viewpoint):
His words died unspoken. A shudder of horror swept through him as he saw: the shepherd with the knife proved no man at all, but a boy not a year more than twelve.
The child stared at his rescuers in uncomprehending shock, eyes dark and round in a face of vivid angles, drained to wax pallor beneath its scuffed dirt. Straw tails of hair stuck in matted hanks to a bloodied shoulder. The stained, cloak-wrapped wrist used to fend off teeth and talons was rust with the same stiffened stains. His shirt was more red than saffron. The one bare foot visible beneath the ripped cuff of his trouser lay swollen beyond recognition.
Oh. Poor kid.
It gets worse though, because when they get to the kid, and Arithon gets him cradled against his chest and is checking his ankle, the kid starts begging them to "look to Jilie."
'Merciful Ath!' Dakar dropped to his knees, his antipathy eclipsed. Closer inspection showed a face and a small hand inside the mass of shredded clothing. Behind the boy lay a second child, a girl no more than six.
Oh, poor kids.
The little girl is still alive, and when Dakar lifts her "pitiful, torn body into the open" she wakes up and asks for her papa.
The Mad Prophet clenched his jaw in helpless grief. 'If I could command even half of what Asandir taught me, I could help.'
'Never mind that.' Arithon loosed the boy with a murmur of encouragement, turned aside, and cupped the girl's tear-streaked face.
'Papa,' she repeated as his shadow crossed over her.
'Your father is with you, believe it,' he assured in the schooled, steady timbre earned in study for his masterbard's title.
'Ghedair said he would come.' The girl gasped. Blood welled and trickled from the corner of her mouth. Her chest heaved against drowning congestion as she forced in another pained breath. 'It hurts. Tell my papa, it hurts.'
This is not good at all.
Arithon soothed back crusted hair to bare the mauled ruin a wyvern had left when its front talons had raked and grasped her face. The rear claw had sunk through her shoulder and chest; deep gashes had torn when it flew. Ends of separated bone and ripped cartilage showed blue through the shreds of her blouse.
Very very not good.
The little girl tells them that it's not Ghedair's fault. Presumably her brother. He'd been watching, but she'd run off and the wyverns came. Arithon reassures her and her "one eye slid closed." Jeeze.
Masterbard trick, to help her sleep.
The boy's somewhat better off. Punctures and gashes to his arm. Broken ankle that needs to be splinted. They need to triage and move the kids now. Arithon knows his poultices and herbal healing from Elaira, but he needs water and shelter to build a fire to do it. Fortunately, Dakar thinks there should be springs at the base of the cliffs.
'Then we'll find a path down.' A leap and an athletic slither saw Arithon up to the ridgetop. He returned with his quiver and spare shirt. Before need that disallowed the indulgence of his hatreds, Dakar lent his hands to the grim work of splinting and binding.
The big difference between Dakar and Lysaer when it comes to somewhat irrational hatred of Arithon - Dakar is able to prioritize. He'll betray Arithon, sure. But he won't endanger innocent kids to do it. I respect that.
So they get the boy splinted. Dakar's pretty sure the girl's wounds are mortal, but Arithon thinks they might be able to save her. Dakar points out that she has five bones in her ribcage separated form cartilage and one of her lungs is filling up with blood. But Arithon asks him to keep her alive until they get to a spring. He asks Dakar to trust him.
And actually...this does have an effect:
Dakar clamped his teeth. The Prince of Rathain had never asked his help; never before now bent his stiff royal pride to admit that other company was better than a burden to be managed in blistering tolerance. If Asandir's geas hounded Dakar to sheer misery, for Arithon, the bonding was a nuisance.
Tempted into a sympathy that felt like self-betrayal, Dakar ground out the first rude word to cross his mind. Then, stubborn in prosaic disbelief, he passed the doomed girl into Arithon's waiting grip and dragged his plump carcass back up the rim wall to the slope.
...Arithon's never made a decision that hasn't come back to fuck him over in so many ways. Maybe he's been handling Dakar all wrong after all.
So two hours later, they're at a sandy bank beside a rock pool. Poor Ghedair's getting his wounds treated. Jilieth is getting worse though. Dakar's pretty sure all they can do is keep her warm and sheltered until she dies.
So what is the plan to save her?
Magic. He wants to combine Dakar's "longevity training" (from what it sounds like, it's basically hyper-advanced healing knowledge) with his own bardic ear for "true sound". Basically, Dakar builds the spells to initiate the healing, and Arithon uses music to link them to the "signature vibration" that defines the girl's "true name".
He explains what we already know, that he and Elaira had done it once before.
Dakar HATES the idea. It means a mindlink and he could end up exposed to every part of Arithon's mind. Including the parts twisted by the Mistwraith's curse. It's admittedly a scary prospect.
Rathain's prince at least had the decency not to stare while the Mad Prophet pondered the unkindly reach of later consequence. The faltering life held sheltered in his arms became tormented testimony to the list of his personal shortfalls. Dakar stood as a man on the edge of an abyss. One word in consent, one misstep in weakness, and his self-awareness might become forever skewed.
Worse, success could not be guaranteed. He could agree, and shoulder his whimpering fear, and still fail. The girl was far gone already. She could end a cold corpse beneath a shepherd's stone cairn, surrounded by her circle of weeping kinsfolk.
Dakar closed his eyes against a thorny barrage of selfish thought. He could equally well master the sacrifice and see Jilieth walk whole in the sunlight.
Oh Dakar.
Because at heart, Dakar IS a good person. He points out, with some bitterness, that there's no real risk to Arithon. Just exposure to debauchery and vice. But there's a kid in Dakar's arms who is struggling to breathe, and well...
There remained only malice toward the man who laid that irreversible crossroads before him. 'Damn you,' Dakar answered to Arithon s'Ffalenn in a tone very like the one Tharrick had used before swearing his oath in Jinesse's cottage. 'I cannot refuse, as you're fully aware. Ath's pity on us both when we come to regret this hour afterward.'
'There's always the chance that we won't,' Arithon said; but his pained snap of sarcasm showed his dearth of faith.
The fact such doubt was justified hurled Dakar over the edge. His consent was flung down like a duellist's challenge, as much to spite the scorn of an antagonist as to save a failing child from certain death.
'Make me the butt of your hatred all you like,' Arithon baited in maddening, nerveless composure. He fetched his lyranthe and in fierce, hard jerks began to unlace its fleece wrappings. 'But unless you wish to tempt disaster, let your feud with me bide until later.'
Dakar's got it rough though. Because while he's got the training and isn't incompetent, he never particularly cared for the "grand conjury" part of magery. He prefers debauchery as his escape, rather than clear, still quiet. (To be fair, that tended to poke his gift of prophecy, so it's hard to blame him.) The result is that he doesn't have the knowledge to initiate the poor girl's healing himself.
In contrast, Arithon's ability is damaged, but he has the intuitive experience to know how to approach the situation. They're stuck working together.
I love it. I really do.
So here we go. Another catch is that Arithon is essentially magic blind. Dakar is going to have to be his eyes as well as the source of energy. And they have a moment:
Dakar swallowed back awe, unable to match such resignation. 'Why ever should you do this? You know how I hate you. Anything I capture in the backlash from your mind will later be turned hard against you.'
Arithon glanced up, his eyes deep and terrible with distance. 'You don't gloat for justice? I thought for certain you'd say I've a reckoning due for the young ones who died by Tal Quorin.'
Since no more vicious a subject existed to rip back in rejoinder, Dakar was caught short. Before he was ready, the last remaining bass string was fussed and brought to true pitch. Arithon feathered through an acid progression of major chords, then launched into dancing, sprightly melody.
Oh, yes, I can see that, like the Elaira healing chapter, this will be a recap with a LOT of excerpts.
Then the music's fierce honesty slapped him speechless.
For what Arithon described in the stunning command of his art was the signature pattern of a whole and healthy little girl. His melody captured Jilieth in her fabric of fresh innocence, extracted from one minute's fleeting, splintered view through the window of her sole remaining eye.
The bard's perception was an untamed awareness, unrestrained as the lofty flight of falcons; it did not judge, but accepted. It made no demand, but set free.
Dakar felt the small, contorted body in his grasp settle and ease across his knees. A tiny, stray smile bowed up the corners of colourless lips. Even through the fogs of unconsciousness, Jilieth met the song that was her living self and responded to the promise that lilted in light harmonics through each measure. In tripping runs, in fiery-sweet tangles of ascending and descending arpeggios, even Dakar could sense a glimpse of the woman she might become in the unfolded promise of later life.
The effect was to wrap the spirit spellbound.
And then the real work begins. They go into trance, Arithon lets down his barriers and...
The first contact all but disarmed him. Deflected and sent reeling by a vulnerability of shattering proportion, Dakar found his animosity disarmed, then submerged in a rush of expanding discovery: the forced gift of compassion lent to this s'Ffalenn prince a limitless capacity to forgive. Arithon owned no defence against hatred. He could do nothing before railing slights and prejudice except bare his heart in understanding. For a scion of his line, there existed no half measures; against misinterpretation and betrayal, even cold steel in the back, he had only temper to shield him. The pained patience that rooted his sarcasm became a lacerating revelation to upset Dakar's entrenched hostility.
Even through the sweet pull of the music spun for Jilieth, Arithon was not unaware of the Mad Prophet's distress. Solidly delicate as a wall of blown glass, constraints were offered to bolster him.
Against a lifelong assault to wide-open feelings, and the demands his own sympathy set against him, Arithon had learned to covet privacy. In the clear-cut solitude of a master's restraint, he carved himself space for peace of mind.
We get a lot of purple prose about the beauty of Arithon's mind, of course. Which I always enjoy.
Oh, and get a load of this bullshit though:
The foundation of his learning followed Fellowship precepts: all change must begin with consent. Jilieth herself must agree to her healing. In a girl too young to grasp adult implications, permission must be garnered in stages.
Fucking Fellowship consent bullshit. Sure, HERE, it matters. The little girl has to consent before they save her life. Because Dakar and Arithon genuinely believe that bullshit. Whereas we've seen how the Fellowship defines consent. Too bad they don't know how to magically alter the little girl's memories and force her to consent.
But bitterness aside, it is pretty interesting to see how they get consent from someone too young to understand. And they do it in stages. First, they get her consent to relieve pain. And with Arithon's power of purple prose, that's doable:
Arithon's deft progression of chords refrained the same vibration, then wove in an aching and beautiful counterpoint through the measures that framed the child's Name.
Tears streaked in earnest down Dakar's plump cheeks. For the span of an instant, nothing alive could withstand the tenderness expressed by the flight-dance of fingers across the length of a fretboard and fourteen silver-wrapped strings. Arithon's talent held true as struck gold, commensurately brought beyond promise to potential by the gift of Halliron's teaching. Jilieth could do naught but respond. Beneath Dakar's hands, her next breath came easier. He dared another sigil for dampening pain, and the lyranthe's song soared through and answered him.
But now the harder part:
Tied by the strictures of his training to the Law of the Major Balance, the child he sought to help possessed sole volition to close the first step. To open within her the conduit to enable grand conjury, to empower her to thwart death, Jilieth would have to embrace change. Her wilful young nature and the pull of heedless passion that urged her to go her headstrong way must yield to wisdom beyond her years and development. She must of herself be encouraged to accept the loving boundaries that skilled parents would instil upon offspring too young to protect themselves.
To recover and rise whole, a six-year-old girl must unmake the decision to flout her brother's care and run off to play alone among the rocks.
Jilieth heard the question that was asked of her. Enfolded in every protection a masterbard's music could draw to set her outside pain and suffering, her spirit shimmered in playful rebellion. She would dance, and court danger, even as her lost mother, who had cruelly abandoned her in childhood; who had ventured out on unsafe footing to save a stranded lamb, and perished in the grinding thunder of a rockslide.
Getting a six year old girl to regret her decision and think about consequences is pretty fucking impossible.
The Mad Prophet despaired for his clumsiness. He scrambled to recover a patience he had never seen fit to cultivate. Jilieth needed the firm-handed guidance of a teacher. The censure and correction dealt out in restraint, that over and over, Dakar had refused from his Fellowship master.
Look dude, you have your vices admittedly. But seriously? Asandir's a fucking dick. Any one with sense would refuse that asshole.
But:
For the first time in life, that failing cut through his thick-skinned obstinacy. He knew how to pleasure the most jaded of his whores, could wheedle his way to indulge in the worst forms of vice.
But in tragic revelation, he saw he owned no clue how to curb the same destructive urge in a child.
Arithon tries to help, but he's got his own issues. And when the lyranthe fails, he tries to break through his mental block to his old mage powers. And bounces off of it:
The shock tore him open, harrowed up his insufferable memories. Strangled afresh by the choices he had seen no moral avenue to escape, he had no control left to shield Dakar from the impact of shared sight.
All over again the children died on the field at Tal Quoiin. Who else but he knew they had been spared a worse fate on the executioner's scaffold in Etarral Their deaths had been sealed, along with the clan survivors he had sacrificed his integrity to spare from the misguided coil unleashed by Desh-thiere's curse when Lysaer had raised Etarra's army.
He lived with the guilt and annihilating fear for the sway the Mistwraith's geas held over him.
He also flashes back to Mindirl Bay, and we get to see what exactly happened that led to his recent oath to survive:
Cornered once again on the desolate sands at Athir, the humiliation bought at Minderl Bay a recent wound in his heart, Arithon had cried out in a despair that unmanned him. 'You wish my blood oath? To hold me to life? Ath Creator show me mercy! You can't know what you're asking!'
Then the Fellowship Sorcerer's unequivocal answer, 'I do know.' Through the Warden of Althain, Asandir was cognizant that one staunch liegeman's hold on an unmerciful duty had spared an untenable reckoning. 'It is all the more urgent that I ask. You've experienced the peril this Mistwraith represents. Whatever atrocities its curse may bring to pass, to spare humanity, your birth-born talents must be preserved for the future. Who dies and who lives cannot be made to matter before necessity as broad-scale as that.'
And so the knife to seal blood oath had bitten irrevocably, forging an unbreakable tie to a Sorcerer and a charge of responsibility to negate change of will. The sting of the steel shocked back the sundered currents of control.
Yeah, the Fellowship are SO ALL ABOUT CONSENT, AREN'T THEY!!
But there you go. Dakar can't reach her. Arithon can't reach her. And as Arithon starts to play again, to ease her final passage, Dakar gets a glimpse, through mage-sight, of a carefree young girl, skipping through a golden flood of sunshine.
Fuck.
So now it's done. It's night now. And quiet. And Arithon offers Dakar some reassurance:
You were all you could be for the one given moment,' the Prince of Rathain said at length. Never more Torbrand's descendant, he stared into the shadowy depths of the pool, too exhausted to care if his heart showed. 'There's no doubt in my mind. You gave all you had. The girl saw her chance and made her turning.'
But Dakar's feeling the compounded waste of every year he had squandered. Poor guy. He asks what there is left to do?
Arithon knows, of course. They'll take the children back to their people. He asks where they should look for them. Dakar realizes that there should be a camp nearby, delayed for some reason from moving their flocks down-country for winter.
Meanwhile, Dakar's processing things:
At some point Dakar recovered willpower to move. He packed up the satchel and wrestled to shed an unwelcome legacy of skewed viewpoint. The imprint of Arithon's consciousness clung to his thoughts like fine cobwebs. Dakar shrank from the coiled question in obstinate fear for another prince: the fair-haired s'Ilessid half-brother he cherished as his closest friend.
Discomfort gnawed him. He dared not re-examine the hour of Desh-thiere's revenge lest he encounter an unthinkable truth, that the past might no longer support his beliefs. The creeping thought answered, that nine years ago during the crisis at Etarra, it may have suited Prince Lysaer not to fight back against the wraith that had twisted foothold through s'Ilessid justice to seed its undying curse of enmity.
Later evidence lent credence. No Fellowship Sorcerer ever stepped back from human need without cause. There would be compelling reason why only one prince had been asked to swear blood oath at Athir.
Poor Dakar. Imagine if someone had ever bothered to TELL him anything.
But there's also an idea that we haven't really seen before. One that may be worth examining. Lysaer was undoubtedly a good man before being struck by the curse. Flawed, of course, but fundamentally good. But...was there a moment when he chose not to fight back?
Maybe only Lysaer, deep down, knows for sure.
Dakar, on the other hand, has decided to retreat into denial:
In a cowardly need to plough past ugly doubts, Dakar resumed conversation. 'If we strike downslope, we ought to find the sheep.' He watched Arithon shoulder his share of their belongings, then hoist the unconscious boy across his back. The bard seemed as he always had, spare and assured in his competency.
On the strength of stolen insight, Dakar realized he could pierce that crafty mask of self-reliance. He was Lysaer's man, always, as Arithon well knew. What came to pass through tonight's unnerving partnership would not be simple, nor freely given. No law insisted that their bid to spare a child had occurred without the underlying subterfuge that trademarked the Shadow Master's style.
Oh Dakar.
He has the thought that his splintered faith in Lysaer's decency could be restored but one way: by testing and prying until he forced out the proof that Arithon had exposed his royal gift of compassion for gain. The possibility existed. In cold calculation as Shadow Master, ruled by Desh-thiere's curse, he might have acted behind cover of Jilieth's need to disarm Dakar's enmity and twist a just hatred in diabolical change to complicity.
Denial ain't just a river, huh?
--
The next subchapter is Ath's Adepts
And here, we rejoin Lysaer and the s'Brydions. Mearn, one of the brothers...I think the smallest one? is frustrated. There's nothing to find. The villagers have nothing to say. And there's only one place they haven't searched for info: the Brotherhood of Ath's Adepts.
Mearn wants to go sailing after him. He's heard that Arithon's had dealings with a brig called the Black Drake. But Lysaer thinks Arithon will be too wily to be caught easily. He's not enthused with this information:
'All right then.' Suspiciously triumphant, as though he had won some obscure point of argument, he grinned at the prince in a sparkling, new depth of malice. 'You can inquire at the hostel yourself, and welcome to the errand by my lights. Righteous types give me the creeps.'
Lysaer was inclined to avoid Mearn's tactless company on a diplomatic visit in any case. The man's nerve-jumpy habits could haze even Daelion Fatemaster to impatience. As the duke's youngest brother fretted in his haste to be away, the prince gave him gracious dismissal. 'I'll have a man row across to your galley in the morning to say what I've found.'
As the grooms were rousted to saddle mounts for himself and his escort to visit Ath's initiates for inquiry, Lysaer dismissed whatever bent of s'Brydion nature moved Mearn to prankish laughter.
One thing that I appreciate about Vastmark (the book) is that we're getting a very close look at Lysaer's flaws as a leader. Because he's brilliant and terribly competent, and expert at winning people over, and this book doesn't negate that.
But he's judgmental. He jumps to conclusions. And he does not consider other people's perspectives, or more importantly, that they know something he doesn't.
These are flaws Lysaer had before the curse, but then, he generally had the self-awareness to learn better. But here, Lysaer has already dismissed Mearn as being jumpy and irritating, and definitely NOT good company on a diplomatic visit. Fair enough. But he's forgotten something very important in the process.
MEARN is a local. Not to Shand, and not to this particular area, of course. But he's a native of the world of Athera. Which means there's a Hell of a lot that he knows that Lysaer doesn't. Like what's the deal with the Brotherhood of Ath.
(And of course, we get the requisite fraternal parallel here. Arithon ALSO is traveling with an uncouth and irritating person with more local knowledge than he has. But Arithon relies on it, rather than dismisses it.)
--
Sometimes I really do enjoy Ms. Wurts's lack of subtlety, as this is the paragraph for Lysaer's arrival:
Great torches burned in bronze brackets at the entry of Ath's hostel, sure sign, as Mearn s'Brydion might have cautioned, that a royal visitor was expected. Not born to familiarity with Athera's most time-honoured customs, Lysaer raised his hand and signalled his jingling guard to rein up. Shadows thrown off by twisted tree limbs inked crawling lines on the sigil-cut stones of the gateposts. The horses seemed undaunted by the carvings, but their mazed shapes set the attendant groom on edge. The lad hovered close to the prince's large gelding, hands clenched white on his bundle of lead reins.
You are a clueless, clueless man.
Lysaer dismounts uneasily, but is too much the ruler to falter". Things admittedly seem pretty creepy:
A full moon thatched behind clots of black leaves had made the ride down the lane an eerie traverse in patched light. The building past the gateway had no windows: bounded by the oppressive, rank growth of the Scimlade's oak hammocks and scrub forest, its shape and size were indistinct. The wind-ruffled scratch of dry weeds and the scrape of overgrown tree limbs against mossy walls lent an unsettled air of neglect. This site held no resemblance to the sacred ground Lysaer recalled from his childhood, bordered in trimmed hedges and crossed by brick walks and rows of flowering herb beds. Since the practice of the mysteries in Athera had suffered decline after the disappearance of the Paravians, Lysaer was scarcely surprised. The adepts here would inevitably lack funds to lavish on gardeners and grounds-keepers.
And there's a note that I was wondering about. We've heard Lysaer and Arithon swear by Ath. It sounds like the worship did indeed continue in Dascen Elur. But things have evolved in a different direction, perhaps?
So let's see Lysaer vs. Expectation:
On brisk presumption his visit would be short, he bid his escort to wait, then advanced to the sigil-marked portal. The information he desired at worst case might be bought for a charitable donation to relieve the hostel from poverty.
'We have no use for coin,' said a velvet alto voice near enough to make Lysaer start. A figure in a full-sleeved, hooded white robe stepped from the night shadows to greet him. 'This place holds no threat unless beliefs in your heart make you think so.'
Nettled to a queer flutter of nerves, and startled to be approached from the side, Lysaer replied in jewel-edged diplomacy. 'Blessing on you, brother. When I wish the particulars of my faith to become your affair, I shall say so.'
A smile curved the lips beneath the snowy hood. 'Sister, in this case, may the light of the creator shine through you.' Hands with elegant, tapered fingers turned back the deep hood. The warm leap of torchlight dusted high, bronze cheeks, a regal nose, and eyes too direct for the comfort of a prince accustomed to royal rank and deference.
'Your will is ever your own.' Gently patient in correction, the adept gestured to welcome Lysaer and his escort into the sanctum of her hostel. 'Beyond these gates, the opinions you hold are not private. Ath's greater mercy will rule upon your petition and touch upon your actions.'
So Lysaer is already a bit out of sorts. He notes that he's not here to petition, but he's inquiring about an injured man and a woman who may be with him. The adept confirms: Tharrick and Jinesse and says he may see them inside.
May. Interesting word choice there.
Anyway, Lysaer follows inside. He charges his escort to wait, and well:
The concept never dawned that his authority would be upset, that when he entered the hostel's cavernous stone edifice, his officers would dismount and disarm, then trail him into the anteroom. His order had been explicit; he had asked no one's company. And yet every member of his retinue came on. Undistressed at his heels, even the boy groom appointed to hold his horse stared in wide-eyed fascination at the seals and sigils chiselled in flowing bands around the walls.
The adept herself had invited them. If Lysaer wished to be annoyed by such presumption, his hostess smiled at him as a nurse might indulge an errant child. 'You have ventured inside of our precinct. Here Ath's law abides.' Her speech raised limitless echoes against high, groined ceilings, and her barefoot step fell soundless over floors of tessellated marble. 'Within our hostel, no man holds ruling privilege over any other beyond himself. Rest assured, the audience you ask will be private.'
This place is awesome. And Lysaer has no idea how to act in a place where rank, privilege, and pretty words have no sway.
Lysaer asks about their horses: if they'll abide by peace and not stray. He's reassured that an initiate will go and look after them. Whatever that means.
Lysaer does go alone to the inner sanctuary. And well, it looks like Ath's Brotherhood is actually pretty fucking swanky:
The grand space beyond held anything but the rundown poverty he expected.
Lysaer entered a pillared loggia. An open-air courtyard stretched beyond with a fountain playing at its centre. Outside these grey walls with their coiling, queer incised sigils, the hour was night, lit by the risen moon and ruddy torches. Here, from no source the eye could discern, lay an ice-pale twilight, all silver and lavender and the deep leafy mystery of an enormous stand of trees. These were not scrubby, storm-tattered hardwoods, nor the palms of the Scimlade peninsula, but patriarch trees with towering, high crowns and trunks as broad as the reach of five men.
They were a living enigma, impossibly tall and wide; they should have towered through the roof of the building that housed them.
The air beneath their branches smelled of life, a tapestry of rich growing greenery bound to tension which reminded of the unseen power of a stormfront beyond the horizon.
Niiice.
Lysaer is directed toward a fountain, and we get a hint of how Ath's worship may have evolved differently in each world:
He blinked hard and shivered. The clothing on his body seemed to scratch and constrict, for no sane reason an intrusion on his flesh. The sensations struck through his being had no parallel inside his experience. Not when he had expected figurines in niches and verdigris brass lamps, and the painted gilt icons of Daelion Fatemaster and Dharkaron's Chariot. The cathedrals of Ath's Grace he remembered from his homeland held grand, groined ceilings shafted in stirred dust. Only echoes had filled them, as solemn robed priests made their way through devotions and prayer.
Here, beyond the pillars, spread a space with no walls, no roof, no lamps with lit candles burned for blessing. Before his amazed regard lay the creator's primal forest, its breathing summer foliage alive with animals and birds. Peace cloaked the loam-rich air, thick as drugged sleep, but sealed into clarity like crystal. Snapped to a razor's edge of awareness, Lysaer gave way to awe. No longer could he pay heed to the tinny voice of logic which insisted this place could not exist; or that he should show surprise at the dozing leopard he strode past as he resumed his way forward.
Past and future fell away from him. The crisp swish of grasses beneath his step held more meaning than remembered experience. A grazing hare hopped aside for his footfalls, unfrightened. Beyond lay the fountain, no carved edifice, but a natural spring that welled from a stepped scarp of rock. The glassine play of water sluiced away his last fragile hold on disbelief.
I wish I were better at analyzing symbols, because I bet we could do a lot with fountains and their use in this series.
Lysaer asks where the priests are:
The woman beside him laughed, mellifluous as the water's voice, falling. 'We have no priests, no priestesses. That would imply a hierarchy where Ath's law bids none to exist. You come as a man, and as earth's balance dictates, the initiate who speaks will be female.'
Lysaer isn't here for counsel, of course. He's here to see Tharrick and Jinesse. He was told he might see them, after all. The response: "so you might" is not helpful.
Lysaer finds himself with an "unprincely need to explain himself":
'The man, Tharrick, knows more than he's saying of my enemy's intentions, and the woman's part is crucial. She has no choice but to follow her children. When she does, she'll guide the way for my war host.' Against the plinked cry of springwater, over the feathered rustles as the birds ruffled and stared, the statement rang loud as a shout.
Ever proud of his grip on discretion, Lysaer shrank in dismay, in embarrassment; then, as the grasping manipulation in his words struck home, in disgraced and annihilating shame. He stared at the face of Ath's initiate, appalled.
...
Isn't that an interesting reaction? Does the Mistwraith's curse not reach here?
He's told that Tharrick and Jinesse are guests. They have their own will, by Ath's law, and desire not to be used so.
Well, there you have it. May see them/might see them is not a guarantee.
Lysaer tries to press, this time speaking "from the half that was prince." He insists that Tharrick and Jinesse are mislead. He MUST hunt down the sorcerer who corrupted them.
To take his life, the Adept answers back. And then she tells him a truth:
At his side, the woman turned back her white hood. Her loosened hair gleamed in the pale, lucent twilight like ripples of dark-dyed silk. Her eyes were moonstone. Her lips framed the voice of Dharkaron Avenger, or the wheels of his Chariot as they turned on a thundering charge to claim the world's due redress.
'Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn is no enemy of yours.'
Lysaer felt a blistering cry rip from the depths of his throat. He felt strong, whole, and gloriously clear-minded. 'Arithon s'Ffalenn would as soon see me dead, just as I would kill him. If you doubt his intent, he has toyed with you.'
'Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn is no enemy of yours,' the lady repeated. She stood tall before him. Her porcelain finger scribed a seal in white fire upon the air.
And it actually seems to be having an effect!
Riven by that rushing tide of power, Lysaer flung back, tripped on the rimrock, and found himself inexplicably turned around. Both hands splashed to the wrists in icy water. He gasped from the wet and the shock. Dizzied by the sensation of split personality, laced by pain that skinned through to his bones, he was embattled by irreconcilable truths: of children trained to slit the throats of wounded men, and Arithon s'Ffalenn wholly innocent of the command that had sent them forth to cause bloodshed. Then the second, bleakly damning, of himself with his s'Ilessid gift of justice bent awry by the usage and possession of Desh-thiere's wraith.
Lysaer screamed aloud in split voices. 'Ath and Dharkaron's pity on me! The deaths at Tal Quorin were none of my choosing.' But surcease was denied him. In the searing, deep mirror of the initiate's regard, amid the terrible mystery of the glade, he observed his past deeds recast in a mould that condemned him. In turn, he beheld Arithon forced to the unwilling role of killer.
The oddly skewed vision refused to relent: Lysaer saw himself, and wept for the deaths of clan wives and children brought through his given gift of light; and he saw himself in the stern role of prince, deluded by duty to enact an execution for an ignorant, blind claim of just cause.
We have another parallel here. Not fraternal this time. But Lysaer, like Dakar, is face to face with a very painful truth. Lysaer, like Dakar, is now facing a test.
The Adept urges him to step back into the pool. The spring will cleanse him. Ath's mercy will allow you forgiveness.
The half of him that wept heard a haven in her words, and begged beyond pride for such release. The half of him that was prince saw no cleansing and no pool, but a whirling grey tide of Desh-thiere's wraiths, jaws agape and fanged mouths slashing in hunger to rip his bare flesh.
And isn't this interesting. The "half that is prince". That came up before, when he insisted that Tharrick and Jinesse was misled. Is that how the curse works? It wrapped itself into the idea of being a prince?
No wonder Lysaer hasn't been trying to fight it.
He cried out again, seared by the agonies of temptation. Desire made him ache to let everything go, to set aside strife and embrace his bastard half-brother in reconciliation.
Yet suspicion resounded in faint, far-off clamour, that the notes played by the fountain and the initiate's bright powers might lure in false promise to condemn him.
The words of his father lashed through his turmoil and damned him for selfish wishes. 'You were born royal, boy. A prince never acts for himself. No matter how hard, no matter how painful, regardless of how lonely the decision may be, you must rule in behalf of your people.'
And the painful irony here. Reconciling with Arithon is presented as the temptation. Continuing with his crusade is the noble sacrifice.
'Lady, there can be no quarter given in this war,' Lysaer gasped. To yield to belief that Arithon was blameless was to repudiate honour: to abandon justice for the unsuspecting cities bound under s'Ilessid protection and to endorse the full-scale ruin of hapless innocence.
'I will not suffer a peace to be built upon lies.' Whole once again, snapped back to self-command with the burning focus of a glass lens poised to seed fire, Prince Lysaer regained his feet and drew himself up to full height. He raised his wet palms and blotted skinned knuckles upon the dry silk of his sleeves.
His acts at Tal Quorin had not been misled choice. He was no man to take the lives of clan families without the most dire cause.
Denial ain't just a river, is it?
So Lysaer has to "escape". And by that, he courteously states that he'll be taking his leave. He turns away from the pool and leaves. His men ask questions, which he ignores. He doesn't know if his experiences were a vision brought on by weakness or an "assault of illusion, controlled by manipulative power."
Oh, Lysaer.
He's definitely wrapped up in the unpleasant implications that the Adepts of Ath sympathize with his brother.
(We get a glimpse then of the initiate at the pool, sad and silent.)
But well, there's still some amusement factor here:
From beyond the loggia doorway, muffled very little by grey rock walls carved in sigils, the voice of the Prince of the West re-echoed back in mettlesome temper. 'Sithaer's Furies! We'll be the best part of the night recapturing those horses from the swamp!'
Then his officer's reply, hurt and sullen, declaiming, 'Your Grace, what did you expect to come mounted to a hostel of Ath's Brotherhood!'
'They always do this?' Lysaer blistered back. 'Take a man's stallion and turn it loose without leave?'
The altercation dwindled as the company passed on foot through the gate arch into the lane. 'Any beast in harness, your royal Grace. It's old custom. But surely you knew that. .. ?'
He didn't, no. Lysaer, for all his graces and charm, is still a newcomer to Athera. Next time, maybe, you should wonder what your irritating allies know.
Meanwhile, the adepts are very concerned. They mourn what they saw: "the combined effects of a strong prince's will, and the insidious, warped legacy the Mistwraith had made of the royal s'Ilessid birthright of true justice. The entangled ugly coil had stamped untold desecration upon a haven spun from dreams and prime power."
There are actually worse implications:
For the grove was not static, but a fluid play of forces susceptible to the influence of the mind and heart of any supplicant who entered. Out of need to restore a broken balance, to set right a kinked snarl in natural order, the sacred peace within had offered up its deepest well of mystery. The impact of Desh-thiere's curse against its current had torn like a hole into darkness, as a lamp expended before extremity. Since the loss of the old races, the order's fine knowledge was flickering, dying, reduced to mean sparks like candlewicks propped before a gale.
No adept alive could measure tonight's cost, nor number how many generations of strung sigils and gentle cycles of ritual had been tapped and burned away. Prince Lysaer had not been recalled to sane mind, but had only renewed the dedication which held him entrenched into blinded obsession.
The sanctuary would take many centuries to return to the glory of its former presence, if it could be restored at all. Those spirits called to wear the white of Ath's Brotherhood in recent years had been too few to replace ones who died.
Lysaer, without ever realizing, just destroyed something very beautiful, when he chose denial over a painful truth.
The adepts are afraid of what Lysaer, and the Mistwraith's geas, could become. ("a force in the land to unravel even basic, sacred order.") And without the Paravians, the people are losing their connection to Ath and the divine. Crap.
On the plus side, the Ath adepts have realized that they must interfere with the world, a little bit, and get Tharrick, Jinesse, and the surviving sailhands the fuck out of there and into the care of Erlien, caithdein of Shand.
--
The third subchapter is Daybreak.
We're back with Dakar and Arithon. They're awkward in the way that really resembles the morning after a very bad idea:
The hike downslope to seek the shepherd children's family became a mutual contest of taut nerves. For the first time in Dakar's irresponsible life, the discomforts involved with bearing burdens like a pack-horse over inhospitable terrain came second to other concerns. He and Arithon cat footed about each other's presence, the Mad Prophet in a brittle-edged, morbid fascination, and the Shadow Master, in the wolfish sort of reticence of a man who knew he walked weaponless.
Arithon really should stop having magical symbolic sex with people.
Anyway, Arithon's carrying Ghedair, who is wrapped in every stitch of warm clothing they got (I bet Arithon regrets not listening to Dakar now), while Dakar's got poor Jilieth's body.
Hey, this is the second time that Arithon gets to make friends with people by bringing them a little girl's corpse. That...kind of sucks, dude.
There is a point where Dakar almost slips on sheep dung, and they share some bickering:
From four paces off, Arithon peered at him, his guardedness loosened to amusement. 'By that, I gather we're somewhere near the flocks?'
Dakar ground out a last epithet and added, 'Stuff reeks like the vapours of Sithaer.'
'Careful.' Arithon's teeth flashed back a fast grin. 'Ivel the blind splicer won't know you any more. Or else he'll stop mistaking your presence for a beer vat left to dry in the sun.'
'The blind old coot did that?' Dakar shifted to juggle his load, then eased the lesser bite of the bowstring and the strap that hung Arithon's lyranthe. 'Dharkaron himself ! If that filthy-tongued whoreson had eyesight to see his own face, he'd strike himself dumb, then spend all his days with his ugly mug stuffed in a sack.'
'Dakar! Where's your sense of fun?' Arithon threaded the gap through the gulch and reappeared, a burdened silhouette against the moon-washed floor of the valley. 'Ivel's foul gossip just happens to be the life of the shipyard. Nobody's spared. He sets great store by his honesty.'
'Ivel's grasp of truth would steam the scales off a snake!' Dakar tripped on a jutted chunk of rock, bashed his elbow against an outcrop, and emerged to more fluent curses onto open ground.
I still ship it.
Anyway, they stop bickering when they notice light in the distance. Someone is searching.
This person gets a description:
The torch bearer proved to be a young woman, armed with a short recurve bow and a quiver of steel-headed arrows. Lanky and agile as her nomad forebears, she crested the rise to meet them. Her caped, dun shepherd's cloak was flung back to free her long legs, her hood blown off in the wind. The rest of her was well covered in laced boots with tasselled cuffs and a skirt loomed in patterns of saffron and cream, strapped tight at the waist with yard lengths of thong kept handy to tie sheep in emergencies. She had a sharp-chinned face rubbed to colour by the cold. Her honey-pale braids jounced and jangled, hung with clusters of bronze bells strung on yarn through each end.
Her name is Dalwyn. She's the children's aunt. She's overjoyed to see Ghedair and devastated to see Jilieth.
Dakar is distracted from her though in a moment if insight: Arithon's either tired or "half-unstrung", because his training should have let him break the news more gracefully. Arithon does snap out of it enough to tell her that the end was light and painless.
Dalwyn shares a bit of the family pain. Her sister, the kids' mother, died in a landslide. The kids' father was disabled in the same slide. Only Dalwyn, Ghedair, and a "bounded herdsman" are there to tend the flocks.
So they have to go tell a man that his daughter is dead. Yay.
There's some nice description though:
They had not far to go. The corrie opened into a narrow, sheltered valley, monochromatic under moonlight, and aflood like moiled waters with the tight-packed, jostling backs of sheep. The air between gusts hung rank with the flock's musky odour, nipped by a darker tang of peat smoke. The angular contours of a shepherd's tent nestled amid the rim-lit scarps. A lamp burned inside, glowing dull red through the geometrical markings dyed into its oiled felt. The lore of the Vastmark tribes was extensive, as if elaborate customs and superstitions could replace their dearth of possessions. The banded patterns in each dwelling's weaving represented an inheritance, passed down through generations, to ward off a specific aspect of misfortune.
The movement on the slope raised a deep-throated bay from the guard dogs. Great beasts, broad-chested and sable with heavy white ruffs at the neck, they were bred to stand down the wyvern, and trained to defend sheep from winter wolves. At the approach of strange visitors, they burst from the flocks, unravelling order like blunt instruments through a burst seam. A fierce command from the woman halted their headlong charge. Tall as a man's waist, and fanned in a pack's closing circle, the dogs slowed to a stiff-legged walk.
Dogs!
The use of the word "tribes" here interests me. Are the Shepherds then clansfolk? There doesn't seem to be any corresponding townsfolk around.
Anyway, they go into the tent and we get more vivid description:
Discomfited by the sudden brilliance, the visitors stepped over cushioning fleeces ingrained by the rancid tang of mutton fat and leather. Propped against a hassock stuffed with straw, the family patriarch waited amid a nest of woven blankets heavy enough to serve as a hearthrug. A man old and gnarled beyond his years, he had a drooping moustache and features quarried into slanting wrinkles by ongoing years and harsh weather. His eyes were gouged deep into bone-hooded sockets by the pitiless, strong sun which, summer and winter, burnished all that lived on the shadeless slopes of Vastmark.
Arithon presumably tells them what happened, but we follow Dakar instead, as he settles into a corner. There are no furnishings to sit on, and we're given more cultural information about the tribes.
Winter cottages in the deep valleys might have a stone table or a few three-legged stools, but the tents taken upland to the flocks in high pastures held nothing that could not be packed and carried, or drawn on skids by a dog. Timber was scarce and precious. The most conspicuous item in any tribal household was always the bow rack, lovingly crafted with copper and bone inlay, hung with its indispensable rows of weapons: longbows for damp, inclement weather, and the powerful short recurves laminated from thin strips of horn, glue, sinew and wood, preferred for extreme range on dry days. Each unstrung weapon lay paired beside its quiver of barbed broadheads. Slung on thongs alongside were the ram's horns carried to call warning, each one an heirloom passed down from mother to daughter and father to son, with chased silver mouthpieces, and ciphers of blessing and guard etched into their flared rims.
At some point, of course, Arithon plays for them. It's the same "signature composition" he'd played to help Jilieth move on. It seems to provide catharsis for the old man and Dalwyn...as for Dakar:
When Arithon at last set his instrument aside and arose to let himself out, no one stirred to deter him. The music had not lulled Dakar from subterfuge. Bound by knots of cold venom he lacked the subtlety to unwind, he chose to bide his time and revel in his stilled power. The day would arrive when he was not reamed to the marrow over the plight of a dead child. At his leisure, he could unpick his antagonist's wily nature now the barriers between them were fretted thin. The hour would be carefully chosen, when he became the one to strike and rankle the Shadow Master's sacrosanct poise.
The triumph would be sweet, as he mined through defences and exposed the mean motives which had to exist behind Arithon's deep layers of deceit. On that day, the Fellowship Sorcerers could surely be convinced to release Asandir's geas of binding. The miserable spellbinder would see himself freed from a service he viciously detested.
Of course.
--
So later, we're told that Arithon wandered off at one point. To angst, of course, and we get a very rare passage in his point of view. (It's interesting that of all the characters, we spend the least time in his head. Probably because it's too fucking depressing.)
Arithon stood with his back to the tent, his tight-knit shoulders hunched from the wind against the rough slab of a boulder. The miscast healing for Jilieth had torn his heart wide open. He felt as if his bones had been pulled through the skin, then replaced, one by one, in flawed glass. The slightest of taps would see him shatter. The ritual of manners chafed too thin for constraint. His bard's gift of empathy and the compassion of his forebears had flung him too far out of balance. Should he go back inside to seek shelter, he would find no surcease. The lamentation of the tribesfolk for their lost child held sorrow enough to unstring him.
(Exhibit A).
Anyway, he thinks of Halliron, and how he once told him that there'll be times when the music he brings is a boon to everyone but himself. And that as many times as he'd seen Halliron play consolation for a death, he'd never taught Arithon how to distance from the racking grief afterward. And there are no Fellowship Sorcerers to advise him whether his melancholy is just exhaustion or "the unwanted burden of his ancestry".
Honestly, dude, I'd probably go with untreated PTSD and depression. Does Athera have therapists?
Ah, but he's not alone for too long. Dalwyn has come to find him. She's brought his cloak, which is good because he's violently shivering, because he's a moron.
She asks how he was able to portray Jilieth so accurately. Arithon doesn't tell her what really happened: just that he saw her die and there are no secrets when that happens.
She vents about the little girl: how she'd tried to restrain her, but no one could make Jilieth see sense after her mother died. Arithon ends up embracing her as she cried. And well...things start to heat up a little:
Why should a man of your talent be wandering these hills?' Dalwyn raised her chin to the chink of a bell as her braid slipped over his elbow. 'Who are you? Why did you come here?'
'Athera's new Masterbard, and as you see, scarcely experienced with the arts that go with the title. I came for personal interests.' His fingers burrowed under the hair at her nape, an instinctive gesture to ease the cold. Yet Dalwyn, pressed full-length against him, could scarcely suppress the light, startled tension that wound through her frame as she reacted in female awareness.
Underneath her sheep-smelling woollens, she had a clean-limbed, athletic firmness that reminded him sharply of Elaira. Scorched through by unexpected desire, then a pain of loss so intense he could only gasp, he could do nothing to spare Dalwyn from the effort that followed, as he forced back his feeling and denied his response to crush her more tightly against him.
Ahem.
Dalwyn notes that he has no wife. And he pulls back, feeling exposed with all the Elaira baggage. But Dalwyn has her own baggage:
His hesitation warned her as he groped for the strength to let her down. A sob of sheer misery ripped from her. 'Damn you to Sithaer, if you knew I was nandii, why ever did you touch me to begin with?'
The term was not familiar, Arithon's brows drew down in perplexity as his masterbard's lore fell short. The closest equivalent in old-style Paravian translated to mean 'without'. He dared not ask her to interpret; before Dalwyn's baffling onslaught of pain, a wrongly put question could wound. He negated her rage in the only way possible: tightened his grip in helpless, trapped sympathy and soothed the belled end of her braid.
The bronze gave off metallic shimmers of sound as she yanked the hair from his fingers, then hurled her fury into his teeth in a burst of embittered loneliness. 'That means barren.' Dalwyn shook the braid to a stinging clash of bells. 'That's what these are: a warning. Our tribes hold that to touch a woman who cannot bear is to curse a man's sons to sour luck. But I thought you valley folk believed differently.'
Oh, poor lady.
Arithon is quick to reassure her that it's true. Her ability to bear children means nothing to him. But he's in love with someone else. That's a relief to Dalwyn, and she asks why his lady isn't with him. Arithon explains the whole Koriani enchantress thing. The shepherds clearly aren't THAT isolated, because Dalwyn understands what that means.
He asks how she knows she's barren, and we learn more about tribal culture:
'Ah well. Does it matter? Tribal law on the subject is most strict.' Stiffened to wry strength by his private admission, she spoke in bald terms of her plight. 'After marriage, if a woman fails to conceive within two years and a day, she may choose five partners to share her bed. Each lies with her for the span of four seasons. If she bears to none inside that given time, she wears the bells for the rest of her life.' Her bravado wavered as she finished, 'Jilieth was the daughter I can never have. There are no words to repay what you and Dakar tried to do for her.'
So...well...
Arithon let her come as she took a step forward, her hair fanned in waves across her shoulders and hood, -spun silk against the coarse cloth. He regarded her face, fine-chiselled from hunger, and tipped up in entreaty, tinselled in tear tracks by moonlight. A queer thrill shocked through him, born out of clear truth and empathy. He saw that this once, he might indulge his raw need, and answer hers with the gift of his presence.
She was barren and had lost an irreplaceable child; and her woman's hurt ached for the ease of giving comfort forbidden within the circle of her people.
What else could he do but gather her in and nestle a sigh against the soft weave of her crown.
Oh brother. Leave it to Arithon to find a way to get laid as an act of martyring self sacrifice.
Dumbass.
I'm assuming Medlir must have roamed around a little, because it was pretty clear in Mistwraith that Arithon hadn't had sex before. (Since his one girlfriend got freaked out at his shadow magic.) Arithon doesn't mention virginity here. So presumably he's figured out how it works.
And well, Dalwyn seems to have her own offer of comfort to make:
Her hands crept up and clasped behind his neck. As she began to worry out his harsh knots of tension, she murmured against the hollow of his throat. 'For what you have done for Ghedair, and for the sake of Jilieth's memory, I beg that you share what you know of your beloved. Can you bring yourself ease, I don't mind if you whisper every detail you remember of her face. On the contrary, the night is most cold and sad. I believe we should be doing ourselves a kindness.'
Fair enough. Go forth and bang, like Ath intended.
--
Our sneak peek page is Crossroads:
1. Lysaer releases Mearn to go search the coastlines like he wanted, while he moves his camp from Merior to Southshire to winter.
2. In Avenor, Princess Talith packs her trunks and bullies the captain-at-arms to give her an escort so she can rejoin her royal husband.
3. Erlien, in a water-worn cave of sandstone that is his winter headquarters (I just think that's a neat detail), agrees to send Tharrick and Jinesse to Arithon with his scouts. His disapproves of their mistrust of Arithon, but notes that if the adepts saw fit to act for them, he can't shirk his own part.
It's funny how much of a mirror this chapter is to the chapter where Arithon and Elaira heal the boy in Merior. Though obviously, the result is much sadder. And Dakar is considerably stupider than Elaira. Oh well, no accounting for taste. I still 'ship it.
At the start of this chapter, we rejoin Arithon and Dakar. We're told that Arithon makes a brief pitstop in Innish to "renew select friendships" and set up some folks to deal with the Khetienn (the completed brigantine), before setting sail once more, this time to a place called the Cascain Islands.
We get some helpful description:
Like everywhere else on the Vastmark coast, the shoreline was all hostile rock. Galleys made no ports of call there. Captains who plied the trade routes gave the chained islets with their reef-ridden narrows and foam-necklaced channels a nervous, respectful wide berth. Forbidding slate cliffs stabbed up through the froth of winter breakers, black, jagged-edged and desolate. Their knife-bladed faces, clean polished by storms, slapped back every sound in meshed echoes.
Neat. So Arithon's pretty out of sorts. Losing the shipyard at Merior is a big fucking deal, and he's scrambling for a countermove. Dakar seems to be enjoying the sight.
Never more patient, Dakar passed his days in coldblooded discontent. Arithon caught out in ignominious retreat was novel enough to be fascinating. The options left to choice were all mean ones. Lysaer's warhost, so brilliantly reduced, now moved southward, pared down to its most dedicated divisions. Once the weather eased and more companies arrived to bolster the strike force at Merior, the Shadow Master dared not be caught cornered. No quarter would be shown by the specialized troops trained at Avenor for this war, Duke Bransian's seasoned mercenaries and the hotly partisan garrison divisions lent by Etarra and Jaelot would vie to be first to claim his head.
'Your tactics have only burned away the dross,' Dakar pressured as Arithon tinned the sloop's second anchor line on a cleat and flipped in a sailor's half hitch. 'You now face the eastlands' most gifted commanders. They won't make misjudgments for the season and the supply lines. They'll know to the second how long they can expect prime performance from an army in foreign territory.'
He can't be too happy though, because he's still stuck following Arithon around. And unless he wants to be "crushed like furniture in the thrust of Lysaer's campaign" he has to be able to know what Arithon intends to do and use it.
It's an interesting and very subtle character beat here, but it seems like, on some level, Dakar is starting to be aware that Lysaer isn't his friend anymore, and won't remotely care if Dakar gets killed so long as Lysaer can get to Arithon.
Unfortunately, for Dakar, of course, Arithon's not telling his plans. All Dakar knows is that they're off to the mountains of Vastmark. (He does nag Arithon a bit about bringing warmer clothing. Heh.) Anyway, it SOUNDS like Arithon intends to use Vastmark as his new shipyard, though how THAT's going to work without money (Maenalle's gift is long spent) is an interesting question.
In distrust and suspicion that Arithon's excursion must be plotted as a feint to mask a more devious machination, the Mad Prophet snatched up his least-battered woollens, crammed them in a wad in his cloak, and in a clumsy boarding that rocked water over a gunwale, parked his bulk in the stern of the tender.
I do enjoy Dakar's constant suspicion of Arithon, and then his complete, disbelieving offense whenever Arithon does reveal himself to be scheming.
So they venture out. It sounds pretty fucking miserable. Cold and wet. They end up cooking a thin hare and bunking down on rock. Dakar is definitely not enjoying it. He tries to taunt Arithon into a rest by pointing out that if Arithon slips and falls, his legendary lyranthe (from Halliron, noting his Masterbard status) will be destroyed. But Arithon is distracted by something else:
The landscape was not empty. Sinister and black above the rim of a dry river gorge, creatures on thin-stretched, membranous wings dipped and soared on the wind currents. The high mountain silence rang to a shrill, stinging threnody of whistles.
Dakar identifies them as wyverns, smaller and less dangerous cousins than the Khadrim they'd met in Mistwraith. (When the sword first proved itself to be Too Awesome To Bear.) They seem to be hunting something though, and Arithon wants to see what it is.
'It's likely just the carcass of a mountain cat,' Dakar carped. 'Mother of all bastards, will you slow down? You're going to see me trip and break my neck!'
Arithon called over his shoulder, cheerful. 'Do that and you'll just have to roll your fat self off this mountainside. No trees grow within a hundred and fifty leagues to cut any poles to make a litter.'
I ship it.
So it's a tricky climb, and at one point Arithon leaves his lyranthe and Dakar higher up to get a closer look:
In the deep shade of a fissure, on a ledge lower down, a shepherd in a stained saffron jerkin crouched braced at bay against the cliff face. One arm was muffled in a dusty dun cloak. The streaked fingers of his other hand were glued to the haft of a bloodied dagger. Heaped to one side like a sun-shrivelled hide, the corpse of a wyvern lay draped on the scarp. The gouged socket of the eye that took the death wound tipped skyward, stranded in gore like a girl's discarded ribbons between the needle teeth that rimmed the parted, horny scales of its jaw.
Huh, there's a dude. Well done, dude.
Arithon helps out with his bow and arrow, shooting another wyvern that had been hovering just outside of the new guy's weapon's reach. He and Dakar still manage to bicker:
Arithon nocked and drew a second arrow. 'I thought you said they never fought in packs!'
'They don't.' Morbidly riveted, Dakar watched the weapon tip track its descending target, the twang of release left too late to forgive a missed shot. Arithon's shaft sang out point-blank and smacked home. The wyvern wrenched out of its plunge. It cartwheeled, the arrow buried to the fletching beneath its wing socket.
His envy compounded with unabashed regret for such nerveless, exacting marksmanship, Dakar qualified. 'That was the mate of the one you killed first. The creatures fly paired. They defend their own to the death.'
'I believe you.' The edged look of temper Arithon threw back bruised for its knowing, poisoned irony. 'But if you happen to be wrong, you'd better do the same.' He thrust his bow and his unhooked quiver into the Mad Prophet's startled grasp.
And then:
Unable to mask his raised hackles, Dakar glared as Arithon hurled himself over the lip of the ledge. 'You think I'd bother? I don't care how often you're reminded. It's no secret I'll rejoice to see you dead.'
Arithon's reply slapped back in hollow echoes off the sheer walls of the ravine. 'I'm not quite the fool I appear. With eighty leagues of mountains between here and Forthmark, if you don't fancy climbing, you're stuck. Unless you find the sea legs to single-hand my sloop.'
Seriously guys? Have you considered hate sex? I feel like it'd be good for you. So anyway, Dakar does scramble down to join Arithon. And he sees what Arithon presumably already knew (the scene had been from Dakar's viewpoint):
His words died unspoken. A shudder of horror swept through him as he saw: the shepherd with the knife proved no man at all, but a boy not a year more than twelve.
The child stared at his rescuers in uncomprehending shock, eyes dark and round in a face of vivid angles, drained to wax pallor beneath its scuffed dirt. Straw tails of hair stuck in matted hanks to a bloodied shoulder. The stained, cloak-wrapped wrist used to fend off teeth and talons was rust with the same stiffened stains. His shirt was more red than saffron. The one bare foot visible beneath the ripped cuff of his trouser lay swollen beyond recognition.
Oh. Poor kid.
It gets worse though, because when they get to the kid, and Arithon gets him cradled against his chest and is checking his ankle, the kid starts begging them to "look to Jilie."
'Merciful Ath!' Dakar dropped to his knees, his antipathy eclipsed. Closer inspection showed a face and a small hand inside the mass of shredded clothing. Behind the boy lay a second child, a girl no more than six.
Oh, poor kids.
The little girl is still alive, and when Dakar lifts her "pitiful, torn body into the open" she wakes up and asks for her papa.
The Mad Prophet clenched his jaw in helpless grief. 'If I could command even half of what Asandir taught me, I could help.'
'Never mind that.' Arithon loosed the boy with a murmur of encouragement, turned aside, and cupped the girl's tear-streaked face.
'Papa,' she repeated as his shadow crossed over her.
'Your father is with you, believe it,' he assured in the schooled, steady timbre earned in study for his masterbard's title.
'Ghedair said he would come.' The girl gasped. Blood welled and trickled from the corner of her mouth. Her chest heaved against drowning congestion as she forced in another pained breath. 'It hurts. Tell my papa, it hurts.'
This is not good at all.
Arithon soothed back crusted hair to bare the mauled ruin a wyvern had left when its front talons had raked and grasped her face. The rear claw had sunk through her shoulder and chest; deep gashes had torn when it flew. Ends of separated bone and ripped cartilage showed blue through the shreds of her blouse.
Very very not good.
The little girl tells them that it's not Ghedair's fault. Presumably her brother. He'd been watching, but she'd run off and the wyverns came. Arithon reassures her and her "one eye slid closed." Jeeze.
Masterbard trick, to help her sleep.
The boy's somewhat better off. Punctures and gashes to his arm. Broken ankle that needs to be splinted. They need to triage and move the kids now. Arithon knows his poultices and herbal healing from Elaira, but he needs water and shelter to build a fire to do it. Fortunately, Dakar thinks there should be springs at the base of the cliffs.
'Then we'll find a path down.' A leap and an athletic slither saw Arithon up to the ridgetop. He returned with his quiver and spare shirt. Before need that disallowed the indulgence of his hatreds, Dakar lent his hands to the grim work of splinting and binding.
The big difference between Dakar and Lysaer when it comes to somewhat irrational hatred of Arithon - Dakar is able to prioritize. He'll betray Arithon, sure. But he won't endanger innocent kids to do it. I respect that.
So they get the boy splinted. Dakar's pretty sure the girl's wounds are mortal, but Arithon thinks they might be able to save her. Dakar points out that she has five bones in her ribcage separated form cartilage and one of her lungs is filling up with blood. But Arithon asks him to keep her alive until they get to a spring. He asks Dakar to trust him.
And actually...this does have an effect:
Dakar clamped his teeth. The Prince of Rathain had never asked his help; never before now bent his stiff royal pride to admit that other company was better than a burden to be managed in blistering tolerance. If Asandir's geas hounded Dakar to sheer misery, for Arithon, the bonding was a nuisance.
Tempted into a sympathy that felt like self-betrayal, Dakar ground out the first rude word to cross his mind. Then, stubborn in prosaic disbelief, he passed the doomed girl into Arithon's waiting grip and dragged his plump carcass back up the rim wall to the slope.
...Arithon's never made a decision that hasn't come back to fuck him over in so many ways. Maybe he's been handling Dakar all wrong after all.
So two hours later, they're at a sandy bank beside a rock pool. Poor Ghedair's getting his wounds treated. Jilieth is getting worse though. Dakar's pretty sure all they can do is keep her warm and sheltered until she dies.
So what is the plan to save her?
Magic. He wants to combine Dakar's "longevity training" (from what it sounds like, it's basically hyper-advanced healing knowledge) with his own bardic ear for "true sound". Basically, Dakar builds the spells to initiate the healing, and Arithon uses music to link them to the "signature vibration" that defines the girl's "true name".
He explains what we already know, that he and Elaira had done it once before.
Dakar HATES the idea. It means a mindlink and he could end up exposed to every part of Arithon's mind. Including the parts twisted by the Mistwraith's curse. It's admittedly a scary prospect.
Rathain's prince at least had the decency not to stare while the Mad Prophet pondered the unkindly reach of later consequence. The faltering life held sheltered in his arms became tormented testimony to the list of his personal shortfalls. Dakar stood as a man on the edge of an abyss. One word in consent, one misstep in weakness, and his self-awareness might become forever skewed.
Worse, success could not be guaranteed. He could agree, and shoulder his whimpering fear, and still fail. The girl was far gone already. She could end a cold corpse beneath a shepherd's stone cairn, surrounded by her circle of weeping kinsfolk.
Dakar closed his eyes against a thorny barrage of selfish thought. He could equally well master the sacrifice and see Jilieth walk whole in the sunlight.
Oh Dakar.
Because at heart, Dakar IS a good person. He points out, with some bitterness, that there's no real risk to Arithon. Just exposure to debauchery and vice. But there's a kid in Dakar's arms who is struggling to breathe, and well...
There remained only malice toward the man who laid that irreversible crossroads before him. 'Damn you,' Dakar answered to Arithon s'Ffalenn in a tone very like the one Tharrick had used before swearing his oath in Jinesse's cottage. 'I cannot refuse, as you're fully aware. Ath's pity on us both when we come to regret this hour afterward.'
'There's always the chance that we won't,' Arithon said; but his pained snap of sarcasm showed his dearth of faith.
The fact such doubt was justified hurled Dakar over the edge. His consent was flung down like a duellist's challenge, as much to spite the scorn of an antagonist as to save a failing child from certain death.
'Make me the butt of your hatred all you like,' Arithon baited in maddening, nerveless composure. He fetched his lyranthe and in fierce, hard jerks began to unlace its fleece wrappings. 'But unless you wish to tempt disaster, let your feud with me bide until later.'
Dakar's got it rough though. Because while he's got the training and isn't incompetent, he never particularly cared for the "grand conjury" part of magery. He prefers debauchery as his escape, rather than clear, still quiet. (To be fair, that tended to poke his gift of prophecy, so it's hard to blame him.) The result is that he doesn't have the knowledge to initiate the poor girl's healing himself.
In contrast, Arithon's ability is damaged, but he has the intuitive experience to know how to approach the situation. They're stuck working together.
I love it. I really do.
So here we go. Another catch is that Arithon is essentially magic blind. Dakar is going to have to be his eyes as well as the source of energy. And they have a moment:
Dakar swallowed back awe, unable to match such resignation. 'Why ever should you do this? You know how I hate you. Anything I capture in the backlash from your mind will later be turned hard against you.'
Arithon glanced up, his eyes deep and terrible with distance. 'You don't gloat for justice? I thought for certain you'd say I've a reckoning due for the young ones who died by Tal Quorin.'
Since no more vicious a subject existed to rip back in rejoinder, Dakar was caught short. Before he was ready, the last remaining bass string was fussed and brought to true pitch. Arithon feathered through an acid progression of major chords, then launched into dancing, sprightly melody.
Oh, yes, I can see that, like the Elaira healing chapter, this will be a recap with a LOT of excerpts.
Then the music's fierce honesty slapped him speechless.
For what Arithon described in the stunning command of his art was the signature pattern of a whole and healthy little girl. His melody captured Jilieth in her fabric of fresh innocence, extracted from one minute's fleeting, splintered view through the window of her sole remaining eye.
The bard's perception was an untamed awareness, unrestrained as the lofty flight of falcons; it did not judge, but accepted. It made no demand, but set free.
Dakar felt the small, contorted body in his grasp settle and ease across his knees. A tiny, stray smile bowed up the corners of colourless lips. Even through the fogs of unconsciousness, Jilieth met the song that was her living self and responded to the promise that lilted in light harmonics through each measure. In tripping runs, in fiery-sweet tangles of ascending and descending arpeggios, even Dakar could sense a glimpse of the woman she might become in the unfolded promise of later life.
The effect was to wrap the spirit spellbound.
And then the real work begins. They go into trance, Arithon lets down his barriers and...
The first contact all but disarmed him. Deflected and sent reeling by a vulnerability of shattering proportion, Dakar found his animosity disarmed, then submerged in a rush of expanding discovery: the forced gift of compassion lent to this s'Ffalenn prince a limitless capacity to forgive. Arithon owned no defence against hatred. He could do nothing before railing slights and prejudice except bare his heart in understanding. For a scion of his line, there existed no half measures; against misinterpretation and betrayal, even cold steel in the back, he had only temper to shield him. The pained patience that rooted his sarcasm became a lacerating revelation to upset Dakar's entrenched hostility.
Even through the sweet pull of the music spun for Jilieth, Arithon was not unaware of the Mad Prophet's distress. Solidly delicate as a wall of blown glass, constraints were offered to bolster him.
Against a lifelong assault to wide-open feelings, and the demands his own sympathy set against him, Arithon had learned to covet privacy. In the clear-cut solitude of a master's restraint, he carved himself space for peace of mind.
We get a lot of purple prose about the beauty of Arithon's mind, of course. Which I always enjoy.
Oh, and get a load of this bullshit though:
The foundation of his learning followed Fellowship precepts: all change must begin with consent. Jilieth herself must agree to her healing. In a girl too young to grasp adult implications, permission must be garnered in stages.
Fucking Fellowship consent bullshit. Sure, HERE, it matters. The little girl has to consent before they save her life. Because Dakar and Arithon genuinely believe that bullshit. Whereas we've seen how the Fellowship defines consent. Too bad they don't know how to magically alter the little girl's memories and force her to consent.
But bitterness aside, it is pretty interesting to see how they get consent from someone too young to understand. And they do it in stages. First, they get her consent to relieve pain. And with Arithon's power of purple prose, that's doable:
Arithon's deft progression of chords refrained the same vibration, then wove in an aching and beautiful counterpoint through the measures that framed the child's Name.
Tears streaked in earnest down Dakar's plump cheeks. For the span of an instant, nothing alive could withstand the tenderness expressed by the flight-dance of fingers across the length of a fretboard and fourteen silver-wrapped strings. Arithon's talent held true as struck gold, commensurately brought beyond promise to potential by the gift of Halliron's teaching. Jilieth could do naught but respond. Beneath Dakar's hands, her next breath came easier. He dared another sigil for dampening pain, and the lyranthe's song soared through and answered him.
But now the harder part:
Tied by the strictures of his training to the Law of the Major Balance, the child he sought to help possessed sole volition to close the first step. To open within her the conduit to enable grand conjury, to empower her to thwart death, Jilieth would have to embrace change. Her wilful young nature and the pull of heedless passion that urged her to go her headstrong way must yield to wisdom beyond her years and development. She must of herself be encouraged to accept the loving boundaries that skilled parents would instil upon offspring too young to protect themselves.
To recover and rise whole, a six-year-old girl must unmake the decision to flout her brother's care and run off to play alone among the rocks.
Jilieth heard the question that was asked of her. Enfolded in every protection a masterbard's music could draw to set her outside pain and suffering, her spirit shimmered in playful rebellion. She would dance, and court danger, even as her lost mother, who had cruelly abandoned her in childhood; who had ventured out on unsafe footing to save a stranded lamb, and perished in the grinding thunder of a rockslide.
Getting a six year old girl to regret her decision and think about consequences is pretty fucking impossible.
The Mad Prophet despaired for his clumsiness. He scrambled to recover a patience he had never seen fit to cultivate. Jilieth needed the firm-handed guidance of a teacher. The censure and correction dealt out in restraint, that over and over, Dakar had refused from his Fellowship master.
Look dude, you have your vices admittedly. But seriously? Asandir's a fucking dick. Any one with sense would refuse that asshole.
But:
For the first time in life, that failing cut through his thick-skinned obstinacy. He knew how to pleasure the most jaded of his whores, could wheedle his way to indulge in the worst forms of vice.
But in tragic revelation, he saw he owned no clue how to curb the same destructive urge in a child.
Arithon tries to help, but he's got his own issues. And when the lyranthe fails, he tries to break through his mental block to his old mage powers. And bounces off of it:
The shock tore him open, harrowed up his insufferable memories. Strangled afresh by the choices he had seen no moral avenue to escape, he had no control left to shield Dakar from the impact of shared sight.
All over again the children died on the field at Tal Quoiin. Who else but he knew they had been spared a worse fate on the executioner's scaffold in Etarral Their deaths had been sealed, along with the clan survivors he had sacrificed his integrity to spare from the misguided coil unleashed by Desh-thiere's curse when Lysaer had raised Etarra's army.
He lived with the guilt and annihilating fear for the sway the Mistwraith's geas held over him.
He also flashes back to Mindirl Bay, and we get to see what exactly happened that led to his recent oath to survive:
Cornered once again on the desolate sands at Athir, the humiliation bought at Minderl Bay a recent wound in his heart, Arithon had cried out in a despair that unmanned him. 'You wish my blood oath? To hold me to life? Ath Creator show me mercy! You can't know what you're asking!'
Then the Fellowship Sorcerer's unequivocal answer, 'I do know.' Through the Warden of Althain, Asandir was cognizant that one staunch liegeman's hold on an unmerciful duty had spared an untenable reckoning. 'It is all the more urgent that I ask. You've experienced the peril this Mistwraith represents. Whatever atrocities its curse may bring to pass, to spare humanity, your birth-born talents must be preserved for the future. Who dies and who lives cannot be made to matter before necessity as broad-scale as that.'
And so the knife to seal blood oath had bitten irrevocably, forging an unbreakable tie to a Sorcerer and a charge of responsibility to negate change of will. The sting of the steel shocked back the sundered currents of control.
Yeah, the Fellowship are SO ALL ABOUT CONSENT, AREN'T THEY!!
But there you go. Dakar can't reach her. Arithon can't reach her. And as Arithon starts to play again, to ease her final passage, Dakar gets a glimpse, through mage-sight, of a carefree young girl, skipping through a golden flood of sunshine.
Fuck.
So now it's done. It's night now. And quiet. And Arithon offers Dakar some reassurance:
You were all you could be for the one given moment,' the Prince of Rathain said at length. Never more Torbrand's descendant, he stared into the shadowy depths of the pool, too exhausted to care if his heart showed. 'There's no doubt in my mind. You gave all you had. The girl saw her chance and made her turning.'
But Dakar's feeling the compounded waste of every year he had squandered. Poor guy. He asks what there is left to do?
Arithon knows, of course. They'll take the children back to their people. He asks where they should look for them. Dakar realizes that there should be a camp nearby, delayed for some reason from moving their flocks down-country for winter.
Meanwhile, Dakar's processing things:
At some point Dakar recovered willpower to move. He packed up the satchel and wrestled to shed an unwelcome legacy of skewed viewpoint. The imprint of Arithon's consciousness clung to his thoughts like fine cobwebs. Dakar shrank from the coiled question in obstinate fear for another prince: the fair-haired s'Ilessid half-brother he cherished as his closest friend.
Discomfort gnawed him. He dared not re-examine the hour of Desh-thiere's revenge lest he encounter an unthinkable truth, that the past might no longer support his beliefs. The creeping thought answered, that nine years ago during the crisis at Etarra, it may have suited Prince Lysaer not to fight back against the wraith that had twisted foothold through s'Ilessid justice to seed its undying curse of enmity.
Later evidence lent credence. No Fellowship Sorcerer ever stepped back from human need without cause. There would be compelling reason why only one prince had been asked to swear blood oath at Athir.
Poor Dakar. Imagine if someone had ever bothered to TELL him anything.
But there's also an idea that we haven't really seen before. One that may be worth examining. Lysaer was undoubtedly a good man before being struck by the curse. Flawed, of course, but fundamentally good. But...was there a moment when he chose not to fight back?
Maybe only Lysaer, deep down, knows for sure.
Dakar, on the other hand, has decided to retreat into denial:
In a cowardly need to plough past ugly doubts, Dakar resumed conversation. 'If we strike downslope, we ought to find the sheep.' He watched Arithon shoulder his share of their belongings, then hoist the unconscious boy across his back. The bard seemed as he always had, spare and assured in his competency.
On the strength of stolen insight, Dakar realized he could pierce that crafty mask of self-reliance. He was Lysaer's man, always, as Arithon well knew. What came to pass through tonight's unnerving partnership would not be simple, nor freely given. No law insisted that their bid to spare a child had occurred without the underlying subterfuge that trademarked the Shadow Master's style.
Oh Dakar.
He has the thought that his splintered faith in Lysaer's decency could be restored but one way: by testing and prying until he forced out the proof that Arithon had exposed his royal gift of compassion for gain. The possibility existed. In cold calculation as Shadow Master, ruled by Desh-thiere's curse, he might have acted behind cover of Jilieth's need to disarm Dakar's enmity and twist a just hatred in diabolical change to complicity.
Denial ain't just a river, huh?
--
The next subchapter is Ath's Adepts
And here, we rejoin Lysaer and the s'Brydions. Mearn, one of the brothers...I think the smallest one? is frustrated. There's nothing to find. The villagers have nothing to say. And there's only one place they haven't searched for info: the Brotherhood of Ath's Adepts.
Mearn wants to go sailing after him. He's heard that Arithon's had dealings with a brig called the Black Drake. But Lysaer thinks Arithon will be too wily to be caught easily. He's not enthused with this information:
'All right then.' Suspiciously triumphant, as though he had won some obscure point of argument, he grinned at the prince in a sparkling, new depth of malice. 'You can inquire at the hostel yourself, and welcome to the errand by my lights. Righteous types give me the creeps.'
Lysaer was inclined to avoid Mearn's tactless company on a diplomatic visit in any case. The man's nerve-jumpy habits could haze even Daelion Fatemaster to impatience. As the duke's youngest brother fretted in his haste to be away, the prince gave him gracious dismissal. 'I'll have a man row across to your galley in the morning to say what I've found.'
As the grooms were rousted to saddle mounts for himself and his escort to visit Ath's initiates for inquiry, Lysaer dismissed whatever bent of s'Brydion nature moved Mearn to prankish laughter.
One thing that I appreciate about Vastmark (the book) is that we're getting a very close look at Lysaer's flaws as a leader. Because he's brilliant and terribly competent, and expert at winning people over, and this book doesn't negate that.
But he's judgmental. He jumps to conclusions. And he does not consider other people's perspectives, or more importantly, that they know something he doesn't.
These are flaws Lysaer had before the curse, but then, he generally had the self-awareness to learn better. But here, Lysaer has already dismissed Mearn as being jumpy and irritating, and definitely NOT good company on a diplomatic visit. Fair enough. But he's forgotten something very important in the process.
MEARN is a local. Not to Shand, and not to this particular area, of course. But he's a native of the world of Athera. Which means there's a Hell of a lot that he knows that Lysaer doesn't. Like what's the deal with the Brotherhood of Ath.
(And of course, we get the requisite fraternal parallel here. Arithon ALSO is traveling with an uncouth and irritating person with more local knowledge than he has. But Arithon relies on it, rather than dismisses it.)
--
Sometimes I really do enjoy Ms. Wurts's lack of subtlety, as this is the paragraph for Lysaer's arrival:
Great torches burned in bronze brackets at the entry of Ath's hostel, sure sign, as Mearn s'Brydion might have cautioned, that a royal visitor was expected. Not born to familiarity with Athera's most time-honoured customs, Lysaer raised his hand and signalled his jingling guard to rein up. Shadows thrown off by twisted tree limbs inked crawling lines on the sigil-cut stones of the gateposts. The horses seemed undaunted by the carvings, but their mazed shapes set the attendant groom on edge. The lad hovered close to the prince's large gelding, hands clenched white on his bundle of lead reins.
You are a clueless, clueless man.
Lysaer dismounts uneasily, but is too much the ruler to falter". Things admittedly seem pretty creepy:
A full moon thatched behind clots of black leaves had made the ride down the lane an eerie traverse in patched light. The building past the gateway had no windows: bounded by the oppressive, rank growth of the Scimlade's oak hammocks and scrub forest, its shape and size were indistinct. The wind-ruffled scratch of dry weeds and the scrape of overgrown tree limbs against mossy walls lent an unsettled air of neglect. This site held no resemblance to the sacred ground Lysaer recalled from his childhood, bordered in trimmed hedges and crossed by brick walks and rows of flowering herb beds. Since the practice of the mysteries in Athera had suffered decline after the disappearance of the Paravians, Lysaer was scarcely surprised. The adepts here would inevitably lack funds to lavish on gardeners and grounds-keepers.
And there's a note that I was wondering about. We've heard Lysaer and Arithon swear by Ath. It sounds like the worship did indeed continue in Dascen Elur. But things have evolved in a different direction, perhaps?
So let's see Lysaer vs. Expectation:
On brisk presumption his visit would be short, he bid his escort to wait, then advanced to the sigil-marked portal. The information he desired at worst case might be bought for a charitable donation to relieve the hostel from poverty.
'We have no use for coin,' said a velvet alto voice near enough to make Lysaer start. A figure in a full-sleeved, hooded white robe stepped from the night shadows to greet him. 'This place holds no threat unless beliefs in your heart make you think so.'
Nettled to a queer flutter of nerves, and startled to be approached from the side, Lysaer replied in jewel-edged diplomacy. 'Blessing on you, brother. When I wish the particulars of my faith to become your affair, I shall say so.'
A smile curved the lips beneath the snowy hood. 'Sister, in this case, may the light of the creator shine through you.' Hands with elegant, tapered fingers turned back the deep hood. The warm leap of torchlight dusted high, bronze cheeks, a regal nose, and eyes too direct for the comfort of a prince accustomed to royal rank and deference.
'Your will is ever your own.' Gently patient in correction, the adept gestured to welcome Lysaer and his escort into the sanctum of her hostel. 'Beyond these gates, the opinions you hold are not private. Ath's greater mercy will rule upon your petition and touch upon your actions.'
So Lysaer is already a bit out of sorts. He notes that he's not here to petition, but he's inquiring about an injured man and a woman who may be with him. The adept confirms: Tharrick and Jinesse and says he may see them inside.
May. Interesting word choice there.
Anyway, Lysaer follows inside. He charges his escort to wait, and well:
The concept never dawned that his authority would be upset, that when he entered the hostel's cavernous stone edifice, his officers would dismount and disarm, then trail him into the anteroom. His order had been explicit; he had asked no one's company. And yet every member of his retinue came on. Undistressed at his heels, even the boy groom appointed to hold his horse stared in wide-eyed fascination at the seals and sigils chiselled in flowing bands around the walls.
The adept herself had invited them. If Lysaer wished to be annoyed by such presumption, his hostess smiled at him as a nurse might indulge an errant child. 'You have ventured inside of our precinct. Here Ath's law abides.' Her speech raised limitless echoes against high, groined ceilings, and her barefoot step fell soundless over floors of tessellated marble. 'Within our hostel, no man holds ruling privilege over any other beyond himself. Rest assured, the audience you ask will be private.'
This place is awesome. And Lysaer has no idea how to act in a place where rank, privilege, and pretty words have no sway.
Lysaer asks about their horses: if they'll abide by peace and not stray. He's reassured that an initiate will go and look after them. Whatever that means.
Lysaer does go alone to the inner sanctuary. And well, it looks like Ath's Brotherhood is actually pretty fucking swanky:
The grand space beyond held anything but the rundown poverty he expected.
Lysaer entered a pillared loggia. An open-air courtyard stretched beyond with a fountain playing at its centre. Outside these grey walls with their coiling, queer incised sigils, the hour was night, lit by the risen moon and ruddy torches. Here, from no source the eye could discern, lay an ice-pale twilight, all silver and lavender and the deep leafy mystery of an enormous stand of trees. These were not scrubby, storm-tattered hardwoods, nor the palms of the Scimlade peninsula, but patriarch trees with towering, high crowns and trunks as broad as the reach of five men.
They were a living enigma, impossibly tall and wide; they should have towered through the roof of the building that housed them.
The air beneath their branches smelled of life, a tapestry of rich growing greenery bound to tension which reminded of the unseen power of a stormfront beyond the horizon.
Niiice.
Lysaer is directed toward a fountain, and we get a hint of how Ath's worship may have evolved differently in each world:
He blinked hard and shivered. The clothing on his body seemed to scratch and constrict, for no sane reason an intrusion on his flesh. The sensations struck through his being had no parallel inside his experience. Not when he had expected figurines in niches and verdigris brass lamps, and the painted gilt icons of Daelion Fatemaster and Dharkaron's Chariot. The cathedrals of Ath's Grace he remembered from his homeland held grand, groined ceilings shafted in stirred dust. Only echoes had filled them, as solemn robed priests made their way through devotions and prayer.
Here, beyond the pillars, spread a space with no walls, no roof, no lamps with lit candles burned for blessing. Before his amazed regard lay the creator's primal forest, its breathing summer foliage alive with animals and birds. Peace cloaked the loam-rich air, thick as drugged sleep, but sealed into clarity like crystal. Snapped to a razor's edge of awareness, Lysaer gave way to awe. No longer could he pay heed to the tinny voice of logic which insisted this place could not exist; or that he should show surprise at the dozing leopard he strode past as he resumed his way forward.
Past and future fell away from him. The crisp swish of grasses beneath his step held more meaning than remembered experience. A grazing hare hopped aside for his footfalls, unfrightened. Beyond lay the fountain, no carved edifice, but a natural spring that welled from a stepped scarp of rock. The glassine play of water sluiced away his last fragile hold on disbelief.
I wish I were better at analyzing symbols, because I bet we could do a lot with fountains and their use in this series.
Lysaer asks where the priests are:
The woman beside him laughed, mellifluous as the water's voice, falling. 'We have no priests, no priestesses. That would imply a hierarchy where Ath's law bids none to exist. You come as a man, and as earth's balance dictates, the initiate who speaks will be female.'
Lysaer isn't here for counsel, of course. He's here to see Tharrick and Jinesse. He was told he might see them, after all. The response: "so you might" is not helpful.
Lysaer finds himself with an "unprincely need to explain himself":
'The man, Tharrick, knows more than he's saying of my enemy's intentions, and the woman's part is crucial. She has no choice but to follow her children. When she does, she'll guide the way for my war host.' Against the plinked cry of springwater, over the feathered rustles as the birds ruffled and stared, the statement rang loud as a shout.
Ever proud of his grip on discretion, Lysaer shrank in dismay, in embarrassment; then, as the grasping manipulation in his words struck home, in disgraced and annihilating shame. He stared at the face of Ath's initiate, appalled.
...
Isn't that an interesting reaction? Does the Mistwraith's curse not reach here?
He's told that Tharrick and Jinesse are guests. They have their own will, by Ath's law, and desire not to be used so.
Well, there you have it. May see them/might see them is not a guarantee.
Lysaer tries to press, this time speaking "from the half that was prince." He insists that Tharrick and Jinesse are mislead. He MUST hunt down the sorcerer who corrupted them.
To take his life, the Adept answers back. And then she tells him a truth:
At his side, the woman turned back her white hood. Her loosened hair gleamed in the pale, lucent twilight like ripples of dark-dyed silk. Her eyes were moonstone. Her lips framed the voice of Dharkaron Avenger, or the wheels of his Chariot as they turned on a thundering charge to claim the world's due redress.
'Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn is no enemy of yours.'
Lysaer felt a blistering cry rip from the depths of his throat. He felt strong, whole, and gloriously clear-minded. 'Arithon s'Ffalenn would as soon see me dead, just as I would kill him. If you doubt his intent, he has toyed with you.'
'Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn is no enemy of yours,' the lady repeated. She stood tall before him. Her porcelain finger scribed a seal in white fire upon the air.
And it actually seems to be having an effect!
Riven by that rushing tide of power, Lysaer flung back, tripped on the rimrock, and found himself inexplicably turned around. Both hands splashed to the wrists in icy water. He gasped from the wet and the shock. Dizzied by the sensation of split personality, laced by pain that skinned through to his bones, he was embattled by irreconcilable truths: of children trained to slit the throats of wounded men, and Arithon s'Ffalenn wholly innocent of the command that had sent them forth to cause bloodshed. Then the second, bleakly damning, of himself with his s'Ilessid gift of justice bent awry by the usage and possession of Desh-thiere's wraith.
Lysaer screamed aloud in split voices. 'Ath and Dharkaron's pity on me! The deaths at Tal Quorin were none of my choosing.' But surcease was denied him. In the searing, deep mirror of the initiate's regard, amid the terrible mystery of the glade, he observed his past deeds recast in a mould that condemned him. In turn, he beheld Arithon forced to the unwilling role of killer.
The oddly skewed vision refused to relent: Lysaer saw himself, and wept for the deaths of clan wives and children brought through his given gift of light; and he saw himself in the stern role of prince, deluded by duty to enact an execution for an ignorant, blind claim of just cause.
We have another parallel here. Not fraternal this time. But Lysaer, like Dakar, is face to face with a very painful truth. Lysaer, like Dakar, is now facing a test.
The Adept urges him to step back into the pool. The spring will cleanse him. Ath's mercy will allow you forgiveness.
The half of him that wept heard a haven in her words, and begged beyond pride for such release. The half of him that was prince saw no cleansing and no pool, but a whirling grey tide of Desh-thiere's wraiths, jaws agape and fanged mouths slashing in hunger to rip his bare flesh.
And isn't this interesting. The "half that is prince". That came up before, when he insisted that Tharrick and Jinesse was misled. Is that how the curse works? It wrapped itself into the idea of being a prince?
No wonder Lysaer hasn't been trying to fight it.
He cried out again, seared by the agonies of temptation. Desire made him ache to let everything go, to set aside strife and embrace his bastard half-brother in reconciliation.
Yet suspicion resounded in faint, far-off clamour, that the notes played by the fountain and the initiate's bright powers might lure in false promise to condemn him.
The words of his father lashed through his turmoil and damned him for selfish wishes. 'You were born royal, boy. A prince never acts for himself. No matter how hard, no matter how painful, regardless of how lonely the decision may be, you must rule in behalf of your people.'
And the painful irony here. Reconciling with Arithon is presented as the temptation. Continuing with his crusade is the noble sacrifice.
'Lady, there can be no quarter given in this war,' Lysaer gasped. To yield to belief that Arithon was blameless was to repudiate honour: to abandon justice for the unsuspecting cities bound under s'Ilessid protection and to endorse the full-scale ruin of hapless innocence.
'I will not suffer a peace to be built upon lies.' Whole once again, snapped back to self-command with the burning focus of a glass lens poised to seed fire, Prince Lysaer regained his feet and drew himself up to full height. He raised his wet palms and blotted skinned knuckles upon the dry silk of his sleeves.
His acts at Tal Quorin had not been misled choice. He was no man to take the lives of clan families without the most dire cause.
Denial ain't just a river, is it?
So Lysaer has to "escape". And by that, he courteously states that he'll be taking his leave. He turns away from the pool and leaves. His men ask questions, which he ignores. He doesn't know if his experiences were a vision brought on by weakness or an "assault of illusion, controlled by manipulative power."
Oh, Lysaer.
He's definitely wrapped up in the unpleasant implications that the Adepts of Ath sympathize with his brother.
(We get a glimpse then of the initiate at the pool, sad and silent.)
But well, there's still some amusement factor here:
From beyond the loggia doorway, muffled very little by grey rock walls carved in sigils, the voice of the Prince of the West re-echoed back in mettlesome temper. 'Sithaer's Furies! We'll be the best part of the night recapturing those horses from the swamp!'
Then his officer's reply, hurt and sullen, declaiming, 'Your Grace, what did you expect to come mounted to a hostel of Ath's Brotherhood!'
'They always do this?' Lysaer blistered back. 'Take a man's stallion and turn it loose without leave?'
The altercation dwindled as the company passed on foot through the gate arch into the lane. 'Any beast in harness, your royal Grace. It's old custom. But surely you knew that. .. ?'
He didn't, no. Lysaer, for all his graces and charm, is still a newcomer to Athera. Next time, maybe, you should wonder what your irritating allies know.
Meanwhile, the adepts are very concerned. They mourn what they saw: "the combined effects of a strong prince's will, and the insidious, warped legacy the Mistwraith had made of the royal s'Ilessid birthright of true justice. The entangled ugly coil had stamped untold desecration upon a haven spun from dreams and prime power."
There are actually worse implications:
For the grove was not static, but a fluid play of forces susceptible to the influence of the mind and heart of any supplicant who entered. Out of need to restore a broken balance, to set right a kinked snarl in natural order, the sacred peace within had offered up its deepest well of mystery. The impact of Desh-thiere's curse against its current had torn like a hole into darkness, as a lamp expended before extremity. Since the loss of the old races, the order's fine knowledge was flickering, dying, reduced to mean sparks like candlewicks propped before a gale.
No adept alive could measure tonight's cost, nor number how many generations of strung sigils and gentle cycles of ritual had been tapped and burned away. Prince Lysaer had not been recalled to sane mind, but had only renewed the dedication which held him entrenched into blinded obsession.
The sanctuary would take many centuries to return to the glory of its former presence, if it could be restored at all. Those spirits called to wear the white of Ath's Brotherhood in recent years had been too few to replace ones who died.
Lysaer, without ever realizing, just destroyed something very beautiful, when he chose denial over a painful truth.
The adepts are afraid of what Lysaer, and the Mistwraith's geas, could become. ("a force in the land to unravel even basic, sacred order.") And without the Paravians, the people are losing their connection to Ath and the divine. Crap.
On the plus side, the Ath adepts have realized that they must interfere with the world, a little bit, and get Tharrick, Jinesse, and the surviving sailhands the fuck out of there and into the care of Erlien, caithdein of Shand.
--
The third subchapter is Daybreak.
We're back with Dakar and Arithon. They're awkward in the way that really resembles the morning after a very bad idea:
The hike downslope to seek the shepherd children's family became a mutual contest of taut nerves. For the first time in Dakar's irresponsible life, the discomforts involved with bearing burdens like a pack-horse over inhospitable terrain came second to other concerns. He and Arithon cat footed about each other's presence, the Mad Prophet in a brittle-edged, morbid fascination, and the Shadow Master, in the wolfish sort of reticence of a man who knew he walked weaponless.
Arithon really should stop having magical symbolic sex with people.
Anyway, Arithon's carrying Ghedair, who is wrapped in every stitch of warm clothing they got (I bet Arithon regrets not listening to Dakar now), while Dakar's got poor Jilieth's body.
Hey, this is the second time that Arithon gets to make friends with people by bringing them a little girl's corpse. That...kind of sucks, dude.
There is a point where Dakar almost slips on sheep dung, and they share some bickering:
From four paces off, Arithon peered at him, his guardedness loosened to amusement. 'By that, I gather we're somewhere near the flocks?'
Dakar ground out a last epithet and added, 'Stuff reeks like the vapours of Sithaer.'
'Careful.' Arithon's teeth flashed back a fast grin. 'Ivel the blind splicer won't know you any more. Or else he'll stop mistaking your presence for a beer vat left to dry in the sun.'
'The blind old coot did that?' Dakar shifted to juggle his load, then eased the lesser bite of the bowstring and the strap that hung Arithon's lyranthe. 'Dharkaron himself ! If that filthy-tongued whoreson had eyesight to see his own face, he'd strike himself dumb, then spend all his days with his ugly mug stuffed in a sack.'
'Dakar! Where's your sense of fun?' Arithon threaded the gap through the gulch and reappeared, a burdened silhouette against the moon-washed floor of the valley. 'Ivel's foul gossip just happens to be the life of the shipyard. Nobody's spared. He sets great store by his honesty.'
'Ivel's grasp of truth would steam the scales off a snake!' Dakar tripped on a jutted chunk of rock, bashed his elbow against an outcrop, and emerged to more fluent curses onto open ground.
I still ship it.
Anyway, they stop bickering when they notice light in the distance. Someone is searching.
This person gets a description:
The torch bearer proved to be a young woman, armed with a short recurve bow and a quiver of steel-headed arrows. Lanky and agile as her nomad forebears, she crested the rise to meet them. Her caped, dun shepherd's cloak was flung back to free her long legs, her hood blown off in the wind. The rest of her was well covered in laced boots with tasselled cuffs and a skirt loomed in patterns of saffron and cream, strapped tight at the waist with yard lengths of thong kept handy to tie sheep in emergencies. She had a sharp-chinned face rubbed to colour by the cold. Her honey-pale braids jounced and jangled, hung with clusters of bronze bells strung on yarn through each end.
Her name is Dalwyn. She's the children's aunt. She's overjoyed to see Ghedair and devastated to see Jilieth.
Dakar is distracted from her though in a moment if insight: Arithon's either tired or "half-unstrung", because his training should have let him break the news more gracefully. Arithon does snap out of it enough to tell her that the end was light and painless.
Dalwyn shares a bit of the family pain. Her sister, the kids' mother, died in a landslide. The kids' father was disabled in the same slide. Only Dalwyn, Ghedair, and a "bounded herdsman" are there to tend the flocks.
So they have to go tell a man that his daughter is dead. Yay.
There's some nice description though:
They had not far to go. The corrie opened into a narrow, sheltered valley, monochromatic under moonlight, and aflood like moiled waters with the tight-packed, jostling backs of sheep. The air between gusts hung rank with the flock's musky odour, nipped by a darker tang of peat smoke. The angular contours of a shepherd's tent nestled amid the rim-lit scarps. A lamp burned inside, glowing dull red through the geometrical markings dyed into its oiled felt. The lore of the Vastmark tribes was extensive, as if elaborate customs and superstitions could replace their dearth of possessions. The banded patterns in each dwelling's weaving represented an inheritance, passed down through generations, to ward off a specific aspect of misfortune.
The movement on the slope raised a deep-throated bay from the guard dogs. Great beasts, broad-chested and sable with heavy white ruffs at the neck, they were bred to stand down the wyvern, and trained to defend sheep from winter wolves. At the approach of strange visitors, they burst from the flocks, unravelling order like blunt instruments through a burst seam. A fierce command from the woman halted their headlong charge. Tall as a man's waist, and fanned in a pack's closing circle, the dogs slowed to a stiff-legged walk.
Dogs!
The use of the word "tribes" here interests me. Are the Shepherds then clansfolk? There doesn't seem to be any corresponding townsfolk around.
Anyway, they go into the tent and we get more vivid description:
Discomfited by the sudden brilliance, the visitors stepped over cushioning fleeces ingrained by the rancid tang of mutton fat and leather. Propped against a hassock stuffed with straw, the family patriarch waited amid a nest of woven blankets heavy enough to serve as a hearthrug. A man old and gnarled beyond his years, he had a drooping moustache and features quarried into slanting wrinkles by ongoing years and harsh weather. His eyes were gouged deep into bone-hooded sockets by the pitiless, strong sun which, summer and winter, burnished all that lived on the shadeless slopes of Vastmark.
Arithon presumably tells them what happened, but we follow Dakar instead, as he settles into a corner. There are no furnishings to sit on, and we're given more cultural information about the tribes.
Winter cottages in the deep valleys might have a stone table or a few three-legged stools, but the tents taken upland to the flocks in high pastures held nothing that could not be packed and carried, or drawn on skids by a dog. Timber was scarce and precious. The most conspicuous item in any tribal household was always the bow rack, lovingly crafted with copper and bone inlay, hung with its indispensable rows of weapons: longbows for damp, inclement weather, and the powerful short recurves laminated from thin strips of horn, glue, sinew and wood, preferred for extreme range on dry days. Each unstrung weapon lay paired beside its quiver of barbed broadheads. Slung on thongs alongside were the ram's horns carried to call warning, each one an heirloom passed down from mother to daughter and father to son, with chased silver mouthpieces, and ciphers of blessing and guard etched into their flared rims.
At some point, of course, Arithon plays for them. It's the same "signature composition" he'd played to help Jilieth move on. It seems to provide catharsis for the old man and Dalwyn...as for Dakar:
When Arithon at last set his instrument aside and arose to let himself out, no one stirred to deter him. The music had not lulled Dakar from subterfuge. Bound by knots of cold venom he lacked the subtlety to unwind, he chose to bide his time and revel in his stilled power. The day would arrive when he was not reamed to the marrow over the plight of a dead child. At his leisure, he could unpick his antagonist's wily nature now the barriers between them were fretted thin. The hour would be carefully chosen, when he became the one to strike and rankle the Shadow Master's sacrosanct poise.
The triumph would be sweet, as he mined through defences and exposed the mean motives which had to exist behind Arithon's deep layers of deceit. On that day, the Fellowship Sorcerers could surely be convinced to release Asandir's geas of binding. The miserable spellbinder would see himself freed from a service he viciously detested.
Of course.
--
So later, we're told that Arithon wandered off at one point. To angst, of course, and we get a very rare passage in his point of view. (It's interesting that of all the characters, we spend the least time in his head. Probably because it's too fucking depressing.)
Arithon stood with his back to the tent, his tight-knit shoulders hunched from the wind against the rough slab of a boulder. The miscast healing for Jilieth had torn his heart wide open. He felt as if his bones had been pulled through the skin, then replaced, one by one, in flawed glass. The slightest of taps would see him shatter. The ritual of manners chafed too thin for constraint. His bard's gift of empathy and the compassion of his forebears had flung him too far out of balance. Should he go back inside to seek shelter, he would find no surcease. The lamentation of the tribesfolk for their lost child held sorrow enough to unstring him.
(Exhibit A).
Anyway, he thinks of Halliron, and how he once told him that there'll be times when the music he brings is a boon to everyone but himself. And that as many times as he'd seen Halliron play consolation for a death, he'd never taught Arithon how to distance from the racking grief afterward. And there are no Fellowship Sorcerers to advise him whether his melancholy is just exhaustion or "the unwanted burden of his ancestry".
Honestly, dude, I'd probably go with untreated PTSD and depression. Does Athera have therapists?
Ah, but he's not alone for too long. Dalwyn has come to find him. She's brought his cloak, which is good because he's violently shivering, because he's a moron.
She asks how he was able to portray Jilieth so accurately. Arithon doesn't tell her what really happened: just that he saw her die and there are no secrets when that happens.
She vents about the little girl: how she'd tried to restrain her, but no one could make Jilieth see sense after her mother died. Arithon ends up embracing her as she cried. And well...things start to heat up a little:
Why should a man of your talent be wandering these hills?' Dalwyn raised her chin to the chink of a bell as her braid slipped over his elbow. 'Who are you? Why did you come here?'
'Athera's new Masterbard, and as you see, scarcely experienced with the arts that go with the title. I came for personal interests.' His fingers burrowed under the hair at her nape, an instinctive gesture to ease the cold. Yet Dalwyn, pressed full-length against him, could scarcely suppress the light, startled tension that wound through her frame as she reacted in female awareness.
Underneath her sheep-smelling woollens, she had a clean-limbed, athletic firmness that reminded him sharply of Elaira. Scorched through by unexpected desire, then a pain of loss so intense he could only gasp, he could do nothing to spare Dalwyn from the effort that followed, as he forced back his feeling and denied his response to crush her more tightly against him.
Ahem.
Dalwyn notes that he has no wife. And he pulls back, feeling exposed with all the Elaira baggage. But Dalwyn has her own baggage:
His hesitation warned her as he groped for the strength to let her down. A sob of sheer misery ripped from her. 'Damn you to Sithaer, if you knew I was nandii, why ever did you touch me to begin with?'
The term was not familiar, Arithon's brows drew down in perplexity as his masterbard's lore fell short. The closest equivalent in old-style Paravian translated to mean 'without'. He dared not ask her to interpret; before Dalwyn's baffling onslaught of pain, a wrongly put question could wound. He negated her rage in the only way possible: tightened his grip in helpless, trapped sympathy and soothed the belled end of her braid.
The bronze gave off metallic shimmers of sound as she yanked the hair from his fingers, then hurled her fury into his teeth in a burst of embittered loneliness. 'That means barren.' Dalwyn shook the braid to a stinging clash of bells. 'That's what these are: a warning. Our tribes hold that to touch a woman who cannot bear is to curse a man's sons to sour luck. But I thought you valley folk believed differently.'
Oh, poor lady.
Arithon is quick to reassure her that it's true. Her ability to bear children means nothing to him. But he's in love with someone else. That's a relief to Dalwyn, and she asks why his lady isn't with him. Arithon explains the whole Koriani enchantress thing. The shepherds clearly aren't THAT isolated, because Dalwyn understands what that means.
He asks how she knows she's barren, and we learn more about tribal culture:
'Ah well. Does it matter? Tribal law on the subject is most strict.' Stiffened to wry strength by his private admission, she spoke in bald terms of her plight. 'After marriage, if a woman fails to conceive within two years and a day, she may choose five partners to share her bed. Each lies with her for the span of four seasons. If she bears to none inside that given time, she wears the bells for the rest of her life.' Her bravado wavered as she finished, 'Jilieth was the daughter I can never have. There are no words to repay what you and Dakar tried to do for her.'
So...well...
Arithon let her come as she took a step forward, her hair fanned in waves across her shoulders and hood, -spun silk against the coarse cloth. He regarded her face, fine-chiselled from hunger, and tipped up in entreaty, tinselled in tear tracks by moonlight. A queer thrill shocked through him, born out of clear truth and empathy. He saw that this once, he might indulge his raw need, and answer hers with the gift of his presence.
She was barren and had lost an irreplaceable child; and her woman's hurt ached for the ease of giving comfort forbidden within the circle of her people.
What else could he do but gather her in and nestle a sigh against the soft weave of her crown.
Oh brother. Leave it to Arithon to find a way to get laid as an act of martyring self sacrifice.
Dumbass.
I'm assuming Medlir must have roamed around a little, because it was pretty clear in Mistwraith that Arithon hadn't had sex before. (Since his one girlfriend got freaked out at his shadow magic.) Arithon doesn't mention virginity here. So presumably he's figured out how it works.
And well, Dalwyn seems to have her own offer of comfort to make:
Her hands crept up and clasped behind his neck. As she began to worry out his harsh knots of tension, she murmured against the hollow of his throat. 'For what you have done for Ghedair, and for the sake of Jilieth's memory, I beg that you share what you know of your beloved. Can you bring yourself ease, I don't mind if you whisper every detail you remember of her face. On the contrary, the night is most cold and sad. I believe we should be doing ourselves a kindness.'
Fair enough. Go forth and bang, like Ath intended.
--
Our sneak peek page is Crossroads:
1. Lysaer releases Mearn to go search the coastlines like he wanted, while he moves his camp from Merior to Southshire to winter.
2. In Avenor, Princess Talith packs her trunks and bullies the captain-at-arms to give her an escort so she can rejoin her royal husband.
3. Erlien, in a water-worn cave of sandstone that is his winter headquarters (I just think that's a neat detail), agrees to send Tharrick and Jinesse to Arithon with his scouts. His disapproves of their mistrust of Arithon, but notes that if the adepts saw fit to act for them, he can't shirk his own part.
It's funny how much of a mirror this chapter is to the chapter where Arithon and Elaira heal the boy in Merior. Though obviously, the result is much sadder. And Dakar is considerably stupider than Elaira. Oh well, no accounting for taste. I still 'ship it.
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Date: 2022-03-10 02:33 am (UTC)THE ROMANTIC MINDMELD HEALING
THE DENIAL
ARITHON GETTING LAID AS AN ACT OF SELFLESSNESS
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Date: 2022-03-10 02:35 am (UTC)