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i_read_whatSo I've made it to the penultimate chapter. That makes this sound like a short book. For the record, and hopefully you can tell by the length of these recaps, it very much is NOT. It is pretty fun though.
Last time: Arithon got high and committed a war crime in the hope that Lysaer would then call his army back and save more lives. But that plan's dead on arrival, as Diegan makes sure Lysaer never hears about the event at all. Fucking Diegan. On the plus side, Dakar seems to be finally getting a clue?
Hey, I wonder if the Fellowship ever even bothered to TELL Dakar about the Black Rose Prophecy. They mention it to US often enough, but you know, it might have helped if Dakar knew there was a reason that they want to keep Arithon alive.
But well, let's be honest, when have the Fellowship ever bothered to HELP either Dakar OR Arithon?
So anyway, we start off in Vastmark. Dakar is brooding (apparently his hair and beard are screwed into rings, by the way). Caolle is also brooding. Apparently since the Havens, he had "lost flesh. . The skin pressed like cured leather over the craggy jut of his face bones, and his hands, never wont to pause between tasks, turned the blade in forced deliberation."
Basically, they've learned that the "commit warcrimes to scare off Lysaer" tactic has failed. And honestly, I wonder if there's a subtle point to be made about tienelle scryings in this series. The Fellowship did a tienelle scrying and determined that all hell would break loose if Lysaer was crowned, and the only hope was if Arithon was. And well, we saw how THAT turned out.
Not that I necessarily think it would have been better if Lysaer HAD been crowned. At least if he'd gotten cursed. But it's because they were willing to sacrifice him that he had been cursed, and all this genocide and war happened.
Arithon does a tienelle scrying twice, both times, basically learning that his ONE chance to save everyone is to do fairly awful things. He does. And both times, his efforts end up failing because of the actions and choices of other people that tienelle couldn't predict.
Maybe that's the underlying message. In the end, you can't rely on an outside source to make your decision or justify terrible things. Make your choices and own them.
Maybe not. It'll be interesting to see if it comes up again.
So anyway, Caolle doesn't want to be the one who tells Arithon. But Dakar says that Arithon already knows. He told Dakar "last night" that he'd felt the stirring of the curse, meaning that Lysaer is pressing forward. What were you two doing last night? They have basically until noon before the curse becomes unmanageable. Yay.
And miracle of miracles, Arithon is being reasonable for once and actually trying to rest. Dakar is miserable about this, probably because, like us, he realizes that if Arithon is actually being reasonable, things are bad.
We get some beautiful description of the valley:
The mists that presaged autumn in Vastmark could hug the land like raw silk, impenetrable, then part without warning to some unseen caprice of changed air. The vale at Dier Kenton emerged out of stainless, cloaking white like an uneven bowl draped in furrows of burlap left out and beaten by weather, then salted with dirty flecks of shale. Mountains arose around the rim. The mild range of hills which invited easy access from the west built ever higher as the pitch of the valley steepened. The east wall swept up, a sheer face of grim scarps that speared blue-green shadow across the knoll where Caolle stood.
There's a decoy set up: steel helms on stakes with standards set up according to clan custom. (Shand first, purple and gold, then Vastmark, a black on grey wyvern, then finally Rathain's leopard, green, sable and silver. I feel cheated by the fact that we've yet to actually SEE a leopard in this series. Are they extinct?)
They can see the front body of the warhost in the distance: "an unnatural, living carpet a league and a half in width." All that, to kill one dude. Caolle thinks it's uncanny. He's not wrong. And you'd think maybe more of Lysaer's followers might realize that. Even if Arithon's the worst person in the world, is he really worth THIS?
I don't intend to recap every maneuver here. I'm not really interested in military tactics. Basically, there's a reason Arithon chose this terrain and made an army of people experienced with it, and with stealth warfare.
Caolle seems a changed man since the Havens:
Caolle shut his eyes, aching inside for what must come. For the stakes were no longer malleable. Each side would kill in defence of its prince; the living would mourn and the slain would stay dead. As Arithon had most cruelly foreseen, the recent blood spilled at the Havens in the weight of this moment seemed a pittance. A man could stand atop the knoll at Dier Kenton where the trap would be sprung and wonder if five hundred planned casualties had been enough; whether more than one raid and a thousand more corpses could have stemmed the flood of tens of thousands. Then if not a thousand, how many more, until the goading question of if and if again caused the mind to shudder off its wretched track and embrace the plunge into despair.
He's thinking of his own ghosts. The caravan drovers and couriers that he's left with slit throats. The corpses left on the ledges. And now these people.
A stranger to himself, to feel harried by a young man's uncertainties, Caolle found the prospect of drawing steel abhorrent. Nor did any cause under sky seem reason enough to claim another life. In the wrong place, years too late, he realized his pride and his skills as a killer led nowhere.
But hey, at least angst brings company:
'I have no one else I trust to see this through,' husked a quiet voice near his elbow.
Caolle started, spun, and met a face as haunted as his own. His liege lord had arrived without sound at his side, the change in him since the Havens the very epitome of heartbreak.
Too thin, too pale, too worn, Arithon met the mirrored anguish in his war captain's glance. Again he answered the unspoken shock for the changes to his appearance. 'It's as much Desh-thiere's curse and the draw upon my will as Lysaer approaches our position as any single burden from the past.'
Caolle calls Lysaer a murderer and admits that the tactic at the Havens was a "mere pittance". But, rather surprisingly, Arithon still has some amount of faith in his brother:
'No.' Arithon studied the overwhelming, massive deployment, unable to mask his expression. Or perhaps the strength in him was too self-absorbed to spare any token thought for privacy. While the wind flicked his loose sable hair, the compassion that in this moment lacerated him from within showed in scraped pain through his words. 'Lysaer's not yet blinded to mercy. I have to believe that. Our twenty-five survivors never got through, nor had their chance to deliver fair warning.'
Maybe the tienelle vision did some good after all. It may have been useless in terms of the greater stakes, but this is the first time in a long time that Arithon's been able to think about his brother as a person. Or at least talk about him as one. And I'm reminded of how close they became in Mistwraith. And his early desperation to find common ground with Lysaer even before that.
This must hurt.
Anyway, we're told that Arithon learned his lesson at Merior. He's not going to abandon his allies to suffer Lysaer's "curse-twisted influence".
Caolle regarded his prince with an uneasy mix of pity and wary apprehension. 'You have a will Dharkaron himself should fear to cross,' he said, then spun on vexed reflex to meet a scrambling disturbance at his back.
It's interesting that Wurts chose to use Caolle for this rather than Jieret. Jieret and Arithon had their resolution of sorts, in Merior. Things were always tenser with Caolle. I think I'm happier this way though. I don't think Arithon OR Caolle would have wanted Jieret mixed up in this. Even after everything he's been through, Jieret represents something a little cleaner and more hopeful than this mess.
They rejoin Dakar, who is low key freaking out about something:
Dakar crested the rise, wheezing like a holed bellows. Beneath his tousled hair and the wiry bristle of his beard, his complexion showed the blued pallor of half-congealed candle wax. 'Nothing alive should be standing here,' he gasped. An expressive roll of his eyes encompassed the surrounding peaks, this moment clogged under clouds. As if chased by a thought, his brows furrowed underneath his woolly bangs. 'Fiends plague, Arithon. So that's what you were doing mooning about, walking this place over and over again at night throughout the spring.' He turned an impossible shade paler.
Where's that Pikachu meme again? Surely you realize that Arithon multi-tasks his angst and his machinations.
It's a little cryptic here, but Arithon admits that he was "listening to the pitch of the stone." Dakar is doing something magical here and he's a little bit cranky/hysterical about it, insisting that no one sneeze, and that he just wants to finish this spell pattern and hunker down on high ground.
I THINK they're planning a rock slide.
This bit amuses me though:
Caolle edged aside as though faced by coiled snakes. Magecraft and mystery lay a rung below cheap trickery in his opinion, but he knew better than to waste breath arguing points of honour with a madman.
'Dakar adheres to Fellowship teaching,' Arithon reassured. 'Any spell he works upon life or substance must be founded upon free permission.'
Yeah. Right. Caolle is as skeptical as I am. And this is interesting:
'You say!' The war captain snorted his disbelief, dark eyes squinted down the valley out of habit to mark tactics as the warhost began its last stage of deployment. 'So, they're smart enough after all not to charge their light horse over stone. You'll face pikemen in squares with archers at the centre. Slow but sure. The gullies will hamper their advance, but not much.' The war captain paused to slice a glower up the rise, where Dakar paced off a slow circle around the banners and helmets, his head tucked in frowning concentration. 'And I don't believe yon soldiers all chucked you a grin and bent their stupid necks to be witched.'
The Mad Prophet paused between steps, his offence expressed in a crafty glint of teeth that might have been a smile behind his beard. 'Not in so many words. But Lysaer's soldiers, to a man, allowed themselves to be deluded. The mesh I weave here will only cause them to see exactly what they believe they should find.'
The Fellowship has a very interesting definition of consent. But what's more important, and just sinking in for me now, is that for the first time, Dakar has picked a side.
He's not just aimlessly following and occasionally plotting barely competent mischief against the man he hates but doesn't understand. This is a Dakar who's had a clear eyed look at both Arithon and Lysaer, who is now able to say with certainty, who's deluded and who's not. And he's an active and formidable participant.
He sees more than that too, of course:
'Which means, prince, you'd better have distance between and a blindfold on when it happens,' Dakar retorted.
Arithon did not respond, but held his regard on the warhost below in cat-eyed concentration. The Mad Prophet glanced at him, sharp, then spun to the war captain in a high-strung concern that was strikingly out of character. 'Caolle, for the love you bear Rathain, get your liege lord out of here, now!'
The curse is stirring.
--
So we jump ahead a few hours. The wind's died and the banners of the warhost are draping limp. The horses are having trouble. And we get a look at Diegan, who is a changed man from when we first met him:
Grateful for the one coarse mount in his string too tough to pull up lame, Lord Diegan leaned over its unstylish, thick crest to tighten the strap on his helm. He lowered a sweaty wrist tinged in rust and swore. Armour polished inside of three days already showed attrition from the damp. No longer the dandy to fuss over appearances, the soldier he had become reviled the neglect to his gear.
Murder takes it out of you, I guess. It's interesting that I have a different emotional response to Arithon ambushing the invaders to Diegan having them assassinated. Some of it may just be bias. I like Arithon and hate Diegan. But also, they were invading when they died to Arithon's arrows. Whereas they were trusting Diegan's hospitality.
And of course, Lysaer gets some prose:
At his side, a figure bright as a gilt-trimmed icon in a steel cuirass edged with gold chasing, Lysaer s'Ilessid turned blue eyes spiked to a baleful charge of humour. 'Why mind the rust? Your gear's sure to need scouring tonight just to clean off the bloodstains.'
Anyway, Diegan's nervous. He's also a much better soldier than he'd been once. He's thinking back on how unseasoned garrison men boasted about chasing archers away. He thinks there's a good chance they're being led somewhere today.
It's funny how Diegan has now become like Pesquil. Meanwhile, Lysaer "in frigid certainty" tells us that the time is close. He can sense Arithon's presence.
And the decoy seems to work:
His eyes, cold sapphire, stayed fixed on the crest of the knoll as he accepted the brass casing and snapped its segments open. Trained upon the summit, the eyepiece yielded a grainy view of silver-pebbled helms, a ranked thicket of pole weapons, then the standards of Shand and Vastmark, accompanied in presumptuous arrogance by the leopard device of Rathain.
Lysaer felt a sharp sweep of heat cross his skin. His eyesight seemed to blur momentarily out of focus. A half-sensed brush of cold that might have been magecraft prickled the hair at his nape. For an instant, he almost saw a black-haired figure lift a mocking, triangular chin to taunt him over the blade of a black sword.
"Presumptive arrogance" is an interesting response. Regardless of anything else, Arithon is the recognized heir of his country. And the device was used in Karthan as well. Anyway:
The animal snarl that arose in his throat was nearly too savage to repress. Fired to white fury, Lysaer clenched his fingers on brass and fought a blistering, sharp battle to retain his grip on self-command. Wise in restraint since the disaster provoked at Minderl Bay, he jerked down the glass and snapped it shut. 'He's there. There's a fighting force behind him.'
I find it interesting whenever Lysaer fights the curse, because I think it does tie in with his fatal flaw. Admittedly, unlike Arithon, he doesn't really know (or at least believe) what he's dealing with. But he CAN recognize when he's losing control. He CAN fight this. He just...doesn't. A lot of the time. Even when atrocities happen.
And this is interesting too, in light of Lysaer's arc over the next few books:
Which statement required no name to qualify; his steely majesty hammered over in tight anticipation, the Prince of the West met his Lord Commander face on. 'In my name, for the deliverance of all people, lead the advance. Let right prevail over darkness.'
Have you noticed throughout this book, a fairly subtle thread about Lysaer not wanting to display weakness or human reaction? And the tone of some of his more grandiose statements? In the opening prologue of Mistwraith, the "Lord of Light" was a religious figure. And over the next arc of the series, we're going to see how that happens.
I think Diegan's response is interesting though:
Diegan's salute held matching eagerness. 'Mine the honour, highness. In your name and for the memory of Etarra's city garrison sacrificed on the banks of Tal Quorin.' And, he added inwardly, for the dishonour of my lady sister.
"In my name", Lysaer says, for deliverance. He's taking steps toward claiming religious devotion. But for good or ill, Diegan's devotion was always to a man. A prince. That's what he means when he says "in your name" linked with the garrison and with his sister. (Ignoring of course that the sacrifice of the garrison was, arguably, made by Lysaer himself as the invading force. Or that Lysaer is the one who declares Talith dishonored.)
So finally, the action starts. The army goes in first, while " At their backs, a figure of inspiring magnificence on his gold-maned war-horse, Lysaer raised his fist. He threw back his head and shouted in glad satisfaction as his gift swelled and answered. Then he opened mailed fingers. Raw light slapped forth, a blinding hot fireball hurled skyward to carve a scalding arc across the heavens."
This isn't just drama of course, this light, visible for leagues, will alert Jaelot and Alestron's forces. The steel ring is closing. And Lysaer's ready. He's been training his powers for years, and now has the finesse to create a countershield for both archery and shadows. If need be, we're told, he'll fire the mountain itself.
Can he do that? Really? Seriously Arithon and Lysaer's grandfather, what the FUCK were you thinking?! "Let's make god-like power a fucking dowry!"
--
We switch scene to something shippy:
Tucked into a rocky declivity in the rimrocks above Dier Kenton Vale, the Mad Prophet stood at Arithon's back, his plump hands pressed white against the royal shoulders that had not stopped trembling since Lysaer's signal bolt had roared aloft.
'Steady,' he murmured. 'Hold steady.' Then, as the distant glitter of the s'Ilessid bodyguard settled on station behind the rear ranks amid the low hills to the west, 'For the love of Ath, don't look now.'
Arithon gave a choked-off smile. Balled in a crouch with his hands locked around his knees, his eyes swathed under a black binding tied off with spell-turned knots, he was most effectively blinded to the movements of his enemy. Dakar and his war captain must serve as his eyes. Since the botched tienelle scrying aboard the Khetienn, the spellbinder had earned the clear right to ask permissions of him even a Fellowship Sorcerer might hesitate to impose.
God. Look at them. Look at how far they've come. Arithon hopes that his "unreserved consent" will give Dakar the leverage to help if the curse's madness gets too great. Wow. And of course, if that doesn't work, there's the final threat: Alithiel, the black sword, unsheathed and waiting.
The chance shrank his heart, made his nerves flinch in dread, that the terrible, edged beauty of the Paravian starspell might be turned against him again. He dared not frame the possibility that one day even this measure might fail him. The sweat which ran down the slant of his jaw arose as much from that fear as from grief for the trap set in the path of Lysaer's warhost.
Okay, for ONCE. FOR ONCE. I'll allow you some "my sword is too cool" angst, Arithon. Because it would be pretty scary for the sword to be used against you.
...Ahem:
The spread of thin sun on his shoulders, the smell of wild thyme and wind-caught evergreen held the untrustworthy peace of a drug dream. Needled by circling thoughts, Arithon shifted.
A firm, bearing pressure thrust him down as Dakar said, 'Damn you, prince, not yet.'
...
I will forever be sad that these books came out a little too early to build a true internet fandom, because I would be utterly gleeful to see these lines repurposed into a fanfic sex scene.
So Dakar keeps watch, filling Arithon in. He's amused when Diegan's men discover the ruse. But also...
Yet Lord Diegan had learned deadly caution under Pesquil. Tenacious as a lashed mastiff, he deployed a half-company to quarter the ground to be sure. The knoll swarmed with movement. A foot soldier rendered toy-sized against the span of the vale raised a sword and in a fit of silent fury hacked down the royal leopard standard.
That flash of bare steel and the wind-caught shreds of green silk for some unnamed reason ignited Dakar to slow rage.
When Dakar finally, truly, and in full knowledge, chooses his side. He fucking chooses his side. Now, he tells Arithon, who deploys his shadow.
Shadow ripped out and battened Dier Kenton under implacable darkness.
Cries of terror ripped up from the valley, followed in fated sequence by Lysaer's defending counterplay of light. The burst of illumination sheeted through to create a flickering, sulphurous twilight. No longer the green fool, the Prince of the West would not fire blind strikes at an enemy which offered no target. His response came tempered, sufficient in force to provide his troops with the illumination they required to close and fight.
'More,' Dakar whispered.
Arithon spun his darkness thicker, deeper, smothering his half-brother's effort in what seemed an effortless parry.
They note Lysaer's increased strength with his gift. But this is all part of the plan. And OH...I see what's happening. Lysaer has learned a lot from the events in Mistwraith and Merior, but maybe because of the curse or because of his own nature, he didn't learn the real lesson of Minderl Bay.
He keeps blasting. And I see what Dakar meant by consent now. Because neither Dakar or Arithon are the cause of the rockslide. LYSAER is. Arithon chose the ground (detecting the unstable harmonics), Dakar's spellwork presumably helps direct it (I think, it's not 100% clear), but it's Lysaer's own blast that sets it off.
A tortured rumble rocked bass echoes down the vale. The grumble built, compounded into a grinding, full-throated roar as the shoulders of the mountains front and centre buckled and let go, followed like unravelled crochet work by the slopes on either side. Soil and vegetation sliced away from the scarp. Half-glimpsed through torn thickets of shadow, lit lurid by the unnatural tangle of sheared light kinked like sword cuts through absolute dark, the slow-motion crumple of boulders and torn soil gained frenetic speed in a race to meet the exposed valley. As if ploughed to rolling chaos by the impact of a giant's fist, the mass surged in a wave down the steep rims of the vale.
The vanguard of Lord Diegan's troops glimpsed their doom through the sickly yellow twilight, their panicked screams battered under and lost in the roaring complaint of outraged earth. Horses reared on shaking ground. Pennons dipped, cast out of nerveless fingers. Ranks of pike-men compressed in raw terror, their weapons juddered into recoil like a tailor's pins in crushed cloth.
Then the caroming breaker of rock and soil smashed down from the middle, and on both flanks. The companies in the vanguard were sprayed aside, then harrowed under like shell soldiers abandoned to the muddied teeth of flood tide.
Sorry for the long excerpt but this is pretty satisfying. And hey, Lysaer's boast was right. He COULD light the mountain up. But that doesn't work very well when your own army is underneath.
Strewn at Lysaer's very feet, in disembowelled earth and crushed hope, a mass grave site: ploughed into irretrievable oblivion the pulped bits of tissue, wood and dented steel of what once had been twenty-eight thousand dedicated men.
The howl of the Prince of the West clove the morning, shrill with grief and wild pain. The light of his gift left his fist. A flashfire bolt of distilled energy shrieked across distance and slammed against the summit of the knoll. Impact carved up a flying gout of rocks, an eruption of dead matter that yielded his rage no balm of satisfaction.
Lysaer wept for his impotent strength. The Shadow Master's spelled decoy of banners and empty helmets flamed and melted under impact of his grief, leaving the site razed bare.
Twenty-Eight Thousand. Holy fucking SHIT.
Diegan makes it out though.
Diegan heaved in a strangled breath, half-mad from shock and disbelief. He felt delirious; light-headed. As if through the ordinary course of an eye-blink, firm rock had exploded and rearranged itself into some diabolical landscape out of Sithaer.
Sick white, shaking, he scrubbed grit from a skinned forearm, then resettled the rucked weight of his mail and adjusted his sword from blind habit. Through air hazed with pulverized rock, he sensed other movement and belatedly found he was not alone.
Yeah, maybe you should have LISTENED to the warning?
Admittedly, this all does sound gruesome:
The handful of survivors sheltered by the knoll were regaining their feet, coughing dust. Some, crazed beyond reason, had drawn swords. A few were unmanned by fear. One lay moaning in misery, trampled or kicked by someone's panicked horse. The blue-purple pulp of his gutted abdomen established at a glance that he would not be rising, nor would another, apparently thrown onto the impaling point of a pole weapon. Nearby, someone's squire crawled on his hands and knees, sobbing the name of his mother.
And to my immense satisfaction, he IS aware of his colossal fuck up:
The first flame of rage licked through Diegan's horror. His throat was too dry to swallow, and his tongue, too thick to curse the name of s'Ffalenn. Avenor's Lord Commander choked on the tainted taste of soil and shrank in guilt for the warning a band of condemned men had entrusted to his hearing one dismal night in falling rain.
'Dharkaron avenge!' he strangled through a seizure that hooked like a sob in his throat. For the gut-wrenching horror of his straits all but felled him. The diabolical threat sent by Arithon, that he had brushed aside from expediency, had been, every word, meant in earnest.
Unknowing, the Prince of the West had marched his forty thousand into jeopardy.
Thrown headlong into wholesale ruin, Lord Diegan beheld the Master of Shadow's promised vengeance. The scope of the disaster saw every justification to silence the testimony of twenty-five men remade into a fool's play. A brother's self-serving passion for retribution for his sister had cost Lysaer's allies tens upon thousands of lives.
I mean, look. Not to excuse what you did, you little skeeze, but Lysaer didn't HAVE to march forty thousand men to their deaths at all. You can share the blame.
But as mentioned, for all that he's a skeeze and an idiot, Diegan has grown into a decent tactician. He takes stock of what they have. Forty two veterans. A few more of a "scarecrow pack" that respond when he calls. Diegan has one goal now: to get to Lysaer and get him to signal a retreat. The flanking companies can still be saved.
There's a rough bit though. The wounded, who can't help themselves, must stay behind. Lysaer's riding into danger, and per Diegan, his need must outweigh the rest.
And so we appreciate the horrors of war, yet again:
Under the dust-smeared face of the sun, the men mustered. One dragged the sobbing squire away from the casualty with his innards torn out. Over the intermittent crack and rumble as unstable rock gave and settled, or loose boulders tore away from the knife-edged wall of sheared cliffs, his weeping appeal rang shrill. 'I won't leave him! I can't.' On a fresh note of torture, 'He's my brother!'
'Force him,' cracked the sergeant to the man-at-arms who importuned the boy. 'If he doesn't straighten up in a hundred paces, leave him behind for carrion. Our prince's safety comes first.'
--
We move to Caolle with archers on the heights. His clan scounts and tribesmen have very simple orders: shoot to kill when possible, give ground in retreat when threatened. Caolle's job is to be rear guard and to track Lysaer's movements. The big concern right now is that if a wrathful Lysaer corners Arithon, the curse will kick in. There are still enough of the warhost to outnumber the archers. They need to be focused.
So the idea is to keep Lysaer pinned so that the Jaelot and Alestron companies can be hazed off. And oh...they spot Diegan.
Caolle knows the guy is a sitting duck, but instinct kicks in, so he tries to stop his men from killing him...and:
Diegan sought for inspiration to save his last men when the shaft thudded into his side. Its broad-bladed head pierced his surcoat and mail, ripped through the gambeson beneath and drove the last air from his lungs in a wordless, half-vocal gasp. He stumbled forward, clawing at rock to stay upright.
The message of desperate urgency he carried must at all costs reach his prince.
Well. Honestly, there's a certain karmic justice here.
Dull, tearing pain turned him dizzy. Diegan swayed, kept his grip on broken stone until his fingers split with the effort. Weeping tears for the punishment, he managed to stay on his feet.
The wasp whine of the second shaft grazed through the beat of his agony. Its splintering strike caught him to the right of his breastbone, ripped him backward until the world fell away into a shimmering view of a Vastmark sky bleached with haze.
Heheh. I mean, look, obviously I know what Caolle suspects: that Diegan needs to get to Lysaer. And I think everyone would be much happier if he did. But it DOES feel good to see this genocidal asshole get shot with arrows.
And that's when Caolle gets to him. Diegan, already dying, mistakes him for Lysaer and basically delivers his message:
Diegan resigned himself. The barbarian accents were surely cruel dream or delirium. He coughed through a hot rush of fluid. 'There was a warning,' he pressed, laboured now, desperate to get his words out. Sight came and went in tides of blackness, and the pain was spoiling thought. 'Twenty-five men brought me word from the Shadow Master. I ordered them dead lest they tell. But my prince ... he must hear .. . there's grave danger. Tell him. The light signal... retreat, before it's too late.'
'Ath forfend!' cried the man who held him, anguished. 'That accursed misdeed was your doing! Had those twenty-five survivors from the Havens reached Lysaer, you must know. By my liege lord's clear augury and Dakar's prophecy, not a man would have marched on Dier Kenton to die.'
It is pretty satisfying to watch Diegan realize that he's talking to Arithon's men.
'Daelion pity,' he wrenched out. The final breath past his lips ripped through tears of regret, for his bequest could never reach Lysaer s'Ilessid now. His dedicated love and devotion, every pain he had tried to spare his liege and his friend, had all passed for naught.
Well, at least you died in agony, knowing your failure.
So Caolle is disheartened. The clan scout who actually shot Diegan defends himself. And Caolle agrees, there's no way the scout could have known that Diegan planned to call the retreat. No blame. Just sadness.
And a certain poetic justice for Caolle too. He's spent so long wrapped up in his vendetta, and a young scout, "face too young, too bitter, too scarred by early carnage to embrace the concept of mercy", accidently shoots them in the foot.
'I only pray you learn how to pity,' he said to Jieret's Companion. 'It might one day save your life from becoming what mine has, a futile pursuit of old hatred.'
'You always said it's the hate that keeps us alive,' the scout returned.
'Once, I believed that was true.' In the sad recognition he faced a younger version of himself, Caolle raked back a stickied tangle of slate-coloured hair. 'I've since learned there are better ways.' But sooner than any, he knew: if not for his service to the Prince of Rathain, the lesson would have slipped his grasp entirely.
The war captain who had survived the brutal massacre at Tal Quorin, whose very tactics had helped decimate those ranks of Etarrans, found a priceless irony in the thought that, at the end, his hope and a citybred Lord Commander's last wish should be alike to the very bone.
Some of the parallels are really quite exquisite. Caolle, like Diegan, feels that if Arithon dies, everything they accomplished will be brutal and meaningless. Arithon is Jieret's legacy, and the only hope that the clans could escape their lives as hunted fugitives.
I do feel like it's fair to point out that, amidst all these parallels, there IS a difference between growing up as a persecuted refugee whose family is scalped for money by genocidal assholes and being a rich douchebag who believes in their right to scalp people for money and keep children as factory slaves.
But okay, I do take the lesson, Ms. Wurts.
--
We move to Lysaer, (chalk-faced and hawking up dust). There's no way to reconnect the company to the reinforcements. They've lost.
Never in his life had he dreamed of a downfall on this scale.
The campaigns and the ships his royal father had wasted to s'Ffalenn predation on Dascen Elur were insignificant before today's toll of dead at Dier Kenton. Worse, perhaps, was the way his given gift of light had been hobbled and rendered helpless. Throughout, he had been unable to act in defence of his troops. Rancour stabbed deep, for that. Somewhere beyond these rotten scarps of shale, for cold surety, Arithon s'Ffalenn still worked shadows and sorcery. His heart knew no word for mercy. With total impunity, he would wreak what ruin he could upon the rest of the allied warhost.
Lysaer knows about Diegan, by the way, and the other vaguely slashy pairing of the books gets this as a farewell:
Diegan would have understood his liege lord's smouldering rage; Avenor's bold Lord Commander, found dead of a clan scout's arrow on the same violated earth, when Ath's own miracle had spared him untouched from the first fury of Arithon's rockfall. Lysaer felt as stone, beyond tears or regret. If this moment of grim impotence made him burn for revenge, he was never the fool to show weakness before the eyes of disheartened men.
And I genuinely hope somewhere Diegan is aware of this next bit:
His question received the freezing glare of Avenor's prince front on. 'We shall not be going back. Never as long as we have living allies from Jaelot and Alestzon left to fight. What happened here was no accident.'
In a candour that held no apology for the turned ground, the razed stone, the doom of all his proud war-host, Lysaer added in terrible quiet, 'Twenty-eight thousand men died because one sorcerer lured them onto trapped ground with clever tactics, then pulled down a mountain to kill them. There will be no retreat and no safety. Not until this one ruthless criminal has been overthrown and cut dead.'
As his weary war-horse stumbled over a loose fall of shale, the prince gave on the reins from numbed habit. Above the metallic skitter of hooves and the rattling chink of loose rock, he summed up in ironclad resolve. 'Had I the same number to spend over again, I would do so for the same cause. Our losses here prove the true scope of the danger. With all of Athera set at risk, how dare I count a few thousand deaths as anything less than worthwhile? There can be no end. Never until Arithon s'Ffalenn is fully and finally brought down.'
War is a tragedy and this is a monstrosity, but at least we get the comfort of knowing that the universe is telling Lord Diegan of Etarra to go fuck himself.
--
The next subchapter is "Field of Fear"
We're back to Dakar. He's relieved that at least some of Arithon's "damnable scrying" had seen through. The slide worked. Now Dakar has the job to dispatch the north wing of troops: led by Keldmar s'Brydion.
Dakar.
Like I said before, when Dakar picks a side, in clear knowledge, he picks a fucking side.
But remember, the s'Brydions are clansfolk. The terrain may be against them, but they're not quite so helpless as the townsfolk. And they're a disciplined army in their own right:
Dakar puffed flushed cheeks until his beard bristled up like a blowfish. Beyond the passing malice of a bar brawl, he had small love for risks that favoured the chance of getting maimed. At drinking or dice, or for charming paid wenches, he would have had a fair contest against Keldmar s'Brydion. On a field of battle, the odds made a fool's wager, unbalanced enough that the Fatemaster's furies would laugh themselves stupid in prostration.
I love Dakar.
So...what will he do? We don't know. He tells a clansman to tell Arithon to allow him two hours. Sundown. (The scout thinks he's cutting it very close. If the advance isn't stopped before nightfall, people will die. Archers can't shoot in the dark.)
'Well, here's thanks in advance for your proud vote of confidence,' Dakar said, morose and punch-drunk with fatigue.
He scrubbed sweaty palms upon his tunic and chafed. At the moment he felt good for nothing beyond craving for pillows in a cathouse beside some sultry doxy. The wistful heat of wishes could scarcely stir him to desire; not with hard Vastmark shale chewing dents in his backside, and the withering sun limning the hungry steel teeth of the s'Brydion warhost.
No imagination was required to picture how Keldmar would rejoice to see one plump, dishonest gem peddler impaled arse down on a pike.
Inspired to a wicked bent of afterthought, Dakar smothered down a chortle. To the dubious scout who awaited, he said, 'Take my message. If you don't want to spoil your humourless thinking, don't for a second look back.'
I like that Dakar still manages to be fun, even when things are tense. We don't know what he's planning either. But he's looking at the troops with fresh interest.
Dakar bit his lip, his eyes half-closed in anticipation. The spells which exacted the least effort were fashioned illusions, the inconvenient, tangled little bindings designed to hook a man's thoughts and sow from them the dreaming recreation of whatever lust held his heart.
From the ground underfoot, the Mad Prophet selected a stub of shale to use as a stylus. The runes he scribed like tiny seeds upon the air broke into motes, a haze fine as spider's silk caught to a sheen of dimmed silver. The light sparked and multiplied and strewed on the wind, a scarcely visible dusting of energies that by their drawn nature would gravitate and form to the dictates of human desires. For effect, and by way of fair warning, the Mad Prophet laced his finished work through the blank coils of the fogbanks which gathered to descend and girdle the heights after sundown.
In typical fashion for all his maligned practice, some permission or small cantrip skimmed awry. The spell assumed an unruly life of its own and unreeled like blight to gnarl the peace of Ath's order.
Magic is fun!
So a green, uncanny mist starts fanning out. Keldmar braves it, determines it to be an illusion, and they start scouting. Finding nothing. They brave it. And that's when Dakar's trap hits:
Dakar's insidious tangle of seals fixed on longings for distant wives and wenches; of dinner at a trestle and a foaming draught of ale in the camaraderie of a warm taproom; of a soft feather mattress after a hot bath, and uninterrupted sleep. Reality blurred and daydreams became manifest. The next thing men knew, they saw what they craved, in powerful, alluring fits of vision.
One man hallucinates his wife, and tries to kiss her. Another starts stuffing his mouth with dirt and chewing. He sees a basket of pears.
One man hugged his helmet and murmured endearments. Another raised the butt of his dagger to his lips as if he swilled wine from a bottle. One quarter of the middle company simply plonked their arms down for pillows and snored. The bloodthirsty few who wanted to gut enemies screamed bull-throated war cries, whipped swords from their scabbards, and determinedly began hacking rocks.
Buffeted amidst the unravelling chaos of Alestron's best troop of mercenaries, Keldmar stared about, red to the ears with flummoxed rage. 'Have you all gone crazy?'
Basically everyone but the most strong-minded start falling for the spell. We get more hilarious details.
I admit, I rather like this. Of all of Lysaer's warhost, Alestron has the most legitimate grievance with Arithon and are the least horrible, so I'm glad they're not all dying. They can survive embarassment:
Like a jerked tear in a knit, neat drill undid into knots of rollicking celebration. Pikes clattered from emptied hands. Men whooped in abandon and threw themselves into ribald frenzy, stripping off armour and moaning prone on bare rock as if they lay coupled with their lovers. The banner bearer became engrossed in a weepy, long dialogue with his belt buckle. Around his curled form, the troop's most trustworthy captain leaped in tight circles, stabbing at gravel and shrieking about snakes in the grass.
Poor Keldmar and a few others are able to keep it together. They're hunting for the sorcerer, figuring the rest will recover when they get him. There are seventy five men now. And well...
Something whined through the mist. A man four paces off crumpled at the knees and sprawled with a shattering, coarse cry. Blood spread across the breast of his surcoat, and his fingers raked the ground in grasping agony. Then the air came alive with a hail of shafts fired in terrible accuracy.
Sometimes it doesn't pay to be strong willed. They realize that their enemy can see through the fog and they run for it. It's Erlien's clansmen, and they're here to make Keldmar an offer:
'You can fight until you drop,' one antagonist baited in the butter-soft vowels of Shand. 'Or by our high earl's invitation and Prince Arithon's preference, we'll take your weapons and your word in surrender.'
'You have my word,' Keldmar said through gritted teeth. As son of an old blood duke, he could rely on the code of ethics his ancestors shared with these descendants of the displaced clans. He tossed his sticky broadsword with a ringing, flat clash at the feet of the swordsmen who pinned him. Stubborn he might be, but never the fool to die for pointless bravado. 'I'll have my satisfaction. Your earl's fiend-plagued ally, the Master of Shadow, will curse the hour he left me alive.'
So Dakar gets the good news. They need him to keep the mist a bit longer to get Keldmar out safely, but they've got him. Dakar's got a migraine, but the clansmen are pretty impressed.
That said, there's more ominous news from "the Shadow Master" Jaelot's divisions are more stubborn. The tribesfolk are running out of arrows, and Arithon is asking Dakar to clear out an opening for retreat.
Apparently the commander still holds a grudge from Halliron's song (exposing him as being impotent, and his wife as "scratching her itch" with everyone she can find.")
Meanwhile though, the mist is wearing off. And once more, the Fellowship's fucked up idea of consent comes into play:
The spellbinder cringed to imagine how his Fellowship master would reprove his shoddy turn of conjury. Worse, his spreading green fogbank scarcely established a sound base for permission to ensorcel the enemy, since the duke's paid soldiers could not refuse to enter without rejecting orders from their officers. The lapse in proprieties left the spellbinder unrepentant. The only way he knew to divert the troops now was to twist the dregs of his dream binding into a mass hallucination. That Asandir might come to punish him later for chaotic intervention was a point he shrank from examining. The offered stake was the Shadow Master's life.
But then it's moot. Things are VERY desperate on the Jaelot side. (Hey, remember how the grudges of Jaelot and Alestron came about, at least in part, due to Fellowship negligence. They KNEW Dakar was in trouble in Jaelot and that the others wouldn't leave him. They forced a resentful Dakar into Arithon's presence and then let Dakar lead Arithon into a trap. I'm just bringing this up to point out how, yet again, the Fellowship is fucking useless.)
So Dakar decides to be pretty fucking badass:
He ripped out three summonings, scribbled runes in cold air, then threw his vivid, disordered imagination into a vision to raise terror.
His unpremeditated jumble of forced power cast a baleful snap of fire across the zenith.
Dakar embellished this with his most evil remembrance of nightmares brought on by cheap gin. In garish, deafening splendour, an apparition burst from the glare, made manifest through an irresponsible explosion of spells.
His finest rendition of Dharkaron's Chariot roared into the arc of the sky.
The visitation was drawn in sable splendour by the Five Horses of Sithaer, harnessed in lightnings, their coats polished ebony and their nostrils flared to expose dark red linings. White-stockinged hooves struck sparks off the very roof of heaven. After them rocked the dread chariot of black lacquer and bone inlay, its narrow, spoked wheels a whirl of steel rims which sliced clouds in their path like spent smoke.
Ath's avenging angel grasped the lines in his gauntleted fist. Not by accident did the face beneath its raven hair bear resemblance to Rathain's sanctioned crown prince.
Hee.
You really do care, don't you, Dakar.
So okay, the Alestron folks are screaming and fleeing. Woo.
--
The last subchapter is Severance and oh shit, y'all. We're back with the Koriani. Morriel has her waystone back.
Morriel preferred the ambivalence. Her skin the yellow of aged, crumpled linen in the light of a single candle, she rejoiced for the freedom restored by the Great Waystone cradled in her lap. Never again need she leach borrowed energy from the diurnal rhythms of the earth. The passage of days and seasons no longer ruled her arcane might.
You know, Sethvir, while it was a dick move to take it, you probably could have held off on giving it back for a while. Wait for a time when they DON'T want to kill your supposed last hope?
Anyway, we get background on the stone: it's powerful and dangerous. Used badly, the wielder can go insane, and Morriel had once cared for past victims as a novice. She intends to take her time now. She intends at least a decade of instruction before Lirenda can try to use it on her own. And she can't really spare that time, if Lirenda is unfit.
There's some nice description here:
Unlike the properties of the Skyron focus, the great amethyst met the mind which sought dominance in vast and ominous quiet. Morriel closed lightless eyes to strain her thoughts clear of distraction, then linked her awareness to the crystal. Swallowed into smothering darkness, undermined by the old, familiar dread that the Waystone's pooled malice might slip her control and unstring the coils of her sanity, she held her mind in balance. She was too old, too wise to be baited to insecurity. Neither did she ease her guard as the stone's vast quiet gentled into seductive invitation.
Eventually it turns into a real battle of wills. Pretty tense, but you know, I'm a little more concerned with what's happening in Vastmark. But well, as we know from Dakar's vision, this could be relevant.
She's also focused on Lirenda and her flaws, because apparently no aspirant can succeed or even survive the last test, if they don't cleanse themselves of imperfections:
Lirenda's training was far from complete. Scrying clearly mapped those weaknesses yet to be conquered. Morriel tracked them, methodical: the small ambitions that blinded it. Tomorrow's imperfect handling of a dispute between two novices; then the annual placement of boy wards in craftshop apprenticeships evincing a stubborn prejudice still ingrained from an overly privileged childhood. Envy of the Fellowship's sure grasp of grand conjury would give rise to a critical inattention. And like a chained snag in knit, that moment yielded in turn to a faulty understanding of a minor sigil which, another day, would fail to halt an affliction that caused stillbirths.
For each shortcoming, Morriel marked out the corresponding lesson to enforce the desired correction. She sounded the sureties to discern which seal spells to use to impose subtle influence to curb, then realign and hone the last rough edge from Lirenda's self-awareness.
Wow. This is creepy as fuck.
But of course the BIG issue is that Lirenda is fascinated by Arithon, or possibly to be more specific, the compassion that ruled him.
That's actually an interesting note. Somewhere in a Q&A, Wurts said something about the Fellowship basically embodying a form of Justice, with the Koriani representing a warped form of compassion.
I think it's harder to see that in the Fellowship. Though maybe in the way they ratify the rulers and caithdeins, and the way they keep the laws of the compact (such as taking the knowledge of gunpowder from the s'Brydions). But then, they don't get involved in mortal matters, such as Maenalle's execution and they're happy to let the clansfolk get slaughtered. So I'm skeptical of this association. Of course, they're better than Lysaer himself.
The Koriani though, yeah. They have their sanctuaries and Elaira at least has been village healer in a few places. But we've seen the draconian rules, the oaths visited upon literal children, the power plays. The fact that they're supporting Lysaer, even though they initially refused, rightly recognizing the danger he poses to peace, but because he gave them something they wanted, and Morriel thinks Arithon's a threat.
It's no wonder, really, that Lirenda is drawn to something more sincere.
It's also hilarious. Arithon's so hot that he wins over MULTIPLE members of a celibate crystal cult.
Um!
Aware of shimmering danger in that single thread, Morriel Prime traced the span of coming happenstance with the delicate care of a spider spinning webs above a waterfall. Her augury took hold, unreeling in fierce energy to yield a scene set in falling sleet against the shadowy postern of a coastal city's back alley.
There, the vision of Lirenda, lost in Arithon's embrace, a flush to her cheeks, and her hair a fall of spilled sable down the violet cloak of the order.
For this startling glimpse of lapsed vows, Morriel was caught in blank astonishment. Before she could ponder, the sequence reeled on, inexorable, a lightning strike partnered by thunderclap.
A fired burst of passion, then heartbreak stanched in ice, this followed in sequence by a second, clearer vision: in a bleak tower dungeon, and the same prince, bound captive in iron and spread-eagled upon a stone slab. The s'Ffalenn features were stamped to mocking irony. In contempt for his helplessness, Arithon spoke a phrase whetted to a glib stab of satire.
I...don't remember this happening. I'm intrigued.
SO anyway, Morriel then gets a vision of her own death. You'd think this would be a good warning not to make enemies with Arithon, but nope, she's decided that he absolutely needs to die.
For the imbalance was no longer so small as Lirenda's' starved craving, or her female fascination with male attraction. If Arithon s'Ffalenn was left a free hand with fate, Morriel faced a permanent failing. She could become the single matriarch since the first to break the chain of inherited power. The deepest of mysteries, the keys to prime inheritance itself, would pass the veil with her, forever lost from the Koriani Order's living store of knowledge.
Maybe it should be lost? You guys kind of suck. So anyway:
Somewhere there lurked an unguarded mind with the passion to wish Arithon dead.
Her task was to ferret out that individual, to assist just one bitter enemy to couple the means with the moment. If she spun her desire through subliminal suggestion, her bit of small meddling would never be traced to link her hand or her order to a plot of assassination.
Well, Dakar will know.
So, our sneak peek for the LAST chapter set of the book (and maybe beyond?)
1. Alestron's fleet is having trouble as they're pushed to deep water by one very effective brigantine. Most importantly: the flagship is missing, and Mearn s'Brydion is lost with it.
2. Rathain clansmen lay siege to a supply train, rob it, and in the process, seize Parrien s'Brydion.
If you're counting, with Keldmar from before, all three of Bransian's brothers are missing or captured.
3. Lysaer is writing a letter to Bransian sharing his sincere grief and royal regret that Keldmar hasn't been found.
And with that, we are getting damn close to the end of this book. Jeeze. I'm going to need to decide what comes next.
Last time: Arithon got high and committed a war crime in the hope that Lysaer would then call his army back and save more lives. But that plan's dead on arrival, as Diegan makes sure Lysaer never hears about the event at all. Fucking Diegan. On the plus side, Dakar seems to be finally getting a clue?
Hey, I wonder if the Fellowship ever even bothered to TELL Dakar about the Black Rose Prophecy. They mention it to US often enough, but you know, it might have helped if Dakar knew there was a reason that they want to keep Arithon alive.
But well, let's be honest, when have the Fellowship ever bothered to HELP either Dakar OR Arithon?
So anyway, we start off in Vastmark. Dakar is brooding (apparently his hair and beard are screwed into rings, by the way). Caolle is also brooding. Apparently since the Havens, he had "lost flesh. . The skin pressed like cured leather over the craggy jut of his face bones, and his hands, never wont to pause between tasks, turned the blade in forced deliberation."
Basically, they've learned that the "commit warcrimes to scare off Lysaer" tactic has failed. And honestly, I wonder if there's a subtle point to be made about tienelle scryings in this series. The Fellowship did a tienelle scrying and determined that all hell would break loose if Lysaer was crowned, and the only hope was if Arithon was. And well, we saw how THAT turned out.
Not that I necessarily think it would have been better if Lysaer HAD been crowned. At least if he'd gotten cursed. But it's because they were willing to sacrifice him that he had been cursed, and all this genocide and war happened.
Arithon does a tienelle scrying twice, both times, basically learning that his ONE chance to save everyone is to do fairly awful things. He does. And both times, his efforts end up failing because of the actions and choices of other people that tienelle couldn't predict.
Maybe that's the underlying message. In the end, you can't rely on an outside source to make your decision or justify terrible things. Make your choices and own them.
Maybe not. It'll be interesting to see if it comes up again.
So anyway, Caolle doesn't want to be the one who tells Arithon. But Dakar says that Arithon already knows. He told Dakar "last night" that he'd felt the stirring of the curse, meaning that Lysaer is pressing forward. What were you two doing last night? They have basically until noon before the curse becomes unmanageable. Yay.
And miracle of miracles, Arithon is being reasonable for once and actually trying to rest. Dakar is miserable about this, probably because, like us, he realizes that if Arithon is actually being reasonable, things are bad.
We get some beautiful description of the valley:
The mists that presaged autumn in Vastmark could hug the land like raw silk, impenetrable, then part without warning to some unseen caprice of changed air. The vale at Dier Kenton emerged out of stainless, cloaking white like an uneven bowl draped in furrows of burlap left out and beaten by weather, then salted with dirty flecks of shale. Mountains arose around the rim. The mild range of hills which invited easy access from the west built ever higher as the pitch of the valley steepened. The east wall swept up, a sheer face of grim scarps that speared blue-green shadow across the knoll where Caolle stood.
There's a decoy set up: steel helms on stakes with standards set up according to clan custom. (Shand first, purple and gold, then Vastmark, a black on grey wyvern, then finally Rathain's leopard, green, sable and silver. I feel cheated by the fact that we've yet to actually SEE a leopard in this series. Are they extinct?)
They can see the front body of the warhost in the distance: "an unnatural, living carpet a league and a half in width." All that, to kill one dude. Caolle thinks it's uncanny. He's not wrong. And you'd think maybe more of Lysaer's followers might realize that. Even if Arithon's the worst person in the world, is he really worth THIS?
I don't intend to recap every maneuver here. I'm not really interested in military tactics. Basically, there's a reason Arithon chose this terrain and made an army of people experienced with it, and with stealth warfare.
Caolle seems a changed man since the Havens:
Caolle shut his eyes, aching inside for what must come. For the stakes were no longer malleable. Each side would kill in defence of its prince; the living would mourn and the slain would stay dead. As Arithon had most cruelly foreseen, the recent blood spilled at the Havens in the weight of this moment seemed a pittance. A man could stand atop the knoll at Dier Kenton where the trap would be sprung and wonder if five hundred planned casualties had been enough; whether more than one raid and a thousand more corpses could have stemmed the flood of tens of thousands. Then if not a thousand, how many more, until the goading question of if and if again caused the mind to shudder off its wretched track and embrace the plunge into despair.
He's thinking of his own ghosts. The caravan drovers and couriers that he's left with slit throats. The corpses left on the ledges. And now these people.
A stranger to himself, to feel harried by a young man's uncertainties, Caolle found the prospect of drawing steel abhorrent. Nor did any cause under sky seem reason enough to claim another life. In the wrong place, years too late, he realized his pride and his skills as a killer led nowhere.
But hey, at least angst brings company:
'I have no one else I trust to see this through,' husked a quiet voice near his elbow.
Caolle started, spun, and met a face as haunted as his own. His liege lord had arrived without sound at his side, the change in him since the Havens the very epitome of heartbreak.
Too thin, too pale, too worn, Arithon met the mirrored anguish in his war captain's glance. Again he answered the unspoken shock for the changes to his appearance. 'It's as much Desh-thiere's curse and the draw upon my will as Lysaer approaches our position as any single burden from the past.'
Caolle calls Lysaer a murderer and admits that the tactic at the Havens was a "mere pittance". But, rather surprisingly, Arithon still has some amount of faith in his brother:
'No.' Arithon studied the overwhelming, massive deployment, unable to mask his expression. Or perhaps the strength in him was too self-absorbed to spare any token thought for privacy. While the wind flicked his loose sable hair, the compassion that in this moment lacerated him from within showed in scraped pain through his words. 'Lysaer's not yet blinded to mercy. I have to believe that. Our twenty-five survivors never got through, nor had their chance to deliver fair warning.'
Maybe the tienelle vision did some good after all. It may have been useless in terms of the greater stakes, but this is the first time in a long time that Arithon's been able to think about his brother as a person. Or at least talk about him as one. And I'm reminded of how close they became in Mistwraith. And his early desperation to find common ground with Lysaer even before that.
This must hurt.
Anyway, we're told that Arithon learned his lesson at Merior. He's not going to abandon his allies to suffer Lysaer's "curse-twisted influence".
Caolle regarded his prince with an uneasy mix of pity and wary apprehension. 'You have a will Dharkaron himself should fear to cross,' he said, then spun on vexed reflex to meet a scrambling disturbance at his back.
It's interesting that Wurts chose to use Caolle for this rather than Jieret. Jieret and Arithon had their resolution of sorts, in Merior. Things were always tenser with Caolle. I think I'm happier this way though. I don't think Arithon OR Caolle would have wanted Jieret mixed up in this. Even after everything he's been through, Jieret represents something a little cleaner and more hopeful than this mess.
They rejoin Dakar, who is low key freaking out about something:
Dakar crested the rise, wheezing like a holed bellows. Beneath his tousled hair and the wiry bristle of his beard, his complexion showed the blued pallor of half-congealed candle wax. 'Nothing alive should be standing here,' he gasped. An expressive roll of his eyes encompassed the surrounding peaks, this moment clogged under clouds. As if chased by a thought, his brows furrowed underneath his woolly bangs. 'Fiends plague, Arithon. So that's what you were doing mooning about, walking this place over and over again at night throughout the spring.' He turned an impossible shade paler.
Where's that Pikachu meme again? Surely you realize that Arithon multi-tasks his angst and his machinations.
It's a little cryptic here, but Arithon admits that he was "listening to the pitch of the stone." Dakar is doing something magical here and he's a little bit cranky/hysterical about it, insisting that no one sneeze, and that he just wants to finish this spell pattern and hunker down on high ground.
I THINK they're planning a rock slide.
This bit amuses me though:
Caolle edged aside as though faced by coiled snakes. Magecraft and mystery lay a rung below cheap trickery in his opinion, but he knew better than to waste breath arguing points of honour with a madman.
'Dakar adheres to Fellowship teaching,' Arithon reassured. 'Any spell he works upon life or substance must be founded upon free permission.'
Yeah. Right. Caolle is as skeptical as I am. And this is interesting:
'You say!' The war captain snorted his disbelief, dark eyes squinted down the valley out of habit to mark tactics as the warhost began its last stage of deployment. 'So, they're smart enough after all not to charge their light horse over stone. You'll face pikemen in squares with archers at the centre. Slow but sure. The gullies will hamper their advance, but not much.' The war captain paused to slice a glower up the rise, where Dakar paced off a slow circle around the banners and helmets, his head tucked in frowning concentration. 'And I don't believe yon soldiers all chucked you a grin and bent their stupid necks to be witched.'
The Mad Prophet paused between steps, his offence expressed in a crafty glint of teeth that might have been a smile behind his beard. 'Not in so many words. But Lysaer's soldiers, to a man, allowed themselves to be deluded. The mesh I weave here will only cause them to see exactly what they believe they should find.'
The Fellowship has a very interesting definition of consent. But what's more important, and just sinking in for me now, is that for the first time, Dakar has picked a side.
He's not just aimlessly following and occasionally plotting barely competent mischief against the man he hates but doesn't understand. This is a Dakar who's had a clear eyed look at both Arithon and Lysaer, who is now able to say with certainty, who's deluded and who's not. And he's an active and formidable participant.
He sees more than that too, of course:
'Which means, prince, you'd better have distance between and a blindfold on when it happens,' Dakar retorted.
Arithon did not respond, but held his regard on the warhost below in cat-eyed concentration. The Mad Prophet glanced at him, sharp, then spun to the war captain in a high-strung concern that was strikingly out of character. 'Caolle, for the love you bear Rathain, get your liege lord out of here, now!'
The curse is stirring.
--
So we jump ahead a few hours. The wind's died and the banners of the warhost are draping limp. The horses are having trouble. And we get a look at Diegan, who is a changed man from when we first met him:
Grateful for the one coarse mount in his string too tough to pull up lame, Lord Diegan leaned over its unstylish, thick crest to tighten the strap on his helm. He lowered a sweaty wrist tinged in rust and swore. Armour polished inside of three days already showed attrition from the damp. No longer the dandy to fuss over appearances, the soldier he had become reviled the neglect to his gear.
Murder takes it out of you, I guess. It's interesting that I have a different emotional response to Arithon ambushing the invaders to Diegan having them assassinated. Some of it may just be bias. I like Arithon and hate Diegan. But also, they were invading when they died to Arithon's arrows. Whereas they were trusting Diegan's hospitality.
And of course, Lysaer gets some prose:
At his side, a figure bright as a gilt-trimmed icon in a steel cuirass edged with gold chasing, Lysaer s'Ilessid turned blue eyes spiked to a baleful charge of humour. 'Why mind the rust? Your gear's sure to need scouring tonight just to clean off the bloodstains.'
Anyway, Diegan's nervous. He's also a much better soldier than he'd been once. He's thinking back on how unseasoned garrison men boasted about chasing archers away. He thinks there's a good chance they're being led somewhere today.
It's funny how Diegan has now become like Pesquil. Meanwhile, Lysaer "in frigid certainty" tells us that the time is close. He can sense Arithon's presence.
And the decoy seems to work:
His eyes, cold sapphire, stayed fixed on the crest of the knoll as he accepted the brass casing and snapped its segments open. Trained upon the summit, the eyepiece yielded a grainy view of silver-pebbled helms, a ranked thicket of pole weapons, then the standards of Shand and Vastmark, accompanied in presumptuous arrogance by the leopard device of Rathain.
Lysaer felt a sharp sweep of heat cross his skin. His eyesight seemed to blur momentarily out of focus. A half-sensed brush of cold that might have been magecraft prickled the hair at his nape. For an instant, he almost saw a black-haired figure lift a mocking, triangular chin to taunt him over the blade of a black sword.
"Presumptive arrogance" is an interesting response. Regardless of anything else, Arithon is the recognized heir of his country. And the device was used in Karthan as well. Anyway:
The animal snarl that arose in his throat was nearly too savage to repress. Fired to white fury, Lysaer clenched his fingers on brass and fought a blistering, sharp battle to retain his grip on self-command. Wise in restraint since the disaster provoked at Minderl Bay, he jerked down the glass and snapped it shut. 'He's there. There's a fighting force behind him.'
I find it interesting whenever Lysaer fights the curse, because I think it does tie in with his fatal flaw. Admittedly, unlike Arithon, he doesn't really know (or at least believe) what he's dealing with. But he CAN recognize when he's losing control. He CAN fight this. He just...doesn't. A lot of the time. Even when atrocities happen.
And this is interesting too, in light of Lysaer's arc over the next few books:
Which statement required no name to qualify; his steely majesty hammered over in tight anticipation, the Prince of the West met his Lord Commander face on. 'In my name, for the deliverance of all people, lead the advance. Let right prevail over darkness.'
Have you noticed throughout this book, a fairly subtle thread about Lysaer not wanting to display weakness or human reaction? And the tone of some of his more grandiose statements? In the opening prologue of Mistwraith, the "Lord of Light" was a religious figure. And over the next arc of the series, we're going to see how that happens.
I think Diegan's response is interesting though:
Diegan's salute held matching eagerness. 'Mine the honour, highness. In your name and for the memory of Etarra's city garrison sacrificed on the banks of Tal Quorin.' And, he added inwardly, for the dishonour of my lady sister.
"In my name", Lysaer says, for deliverance. He's taking steps toward claiming religious devotion. But for good or ill, Diegan's devotion was always to a man. A prince. That's what he means when he says "in your name" linked with the garrison and with his sister. (Ignoring of course that the sacrifice of the garrison was, arguably, made by Lysaer himself as the invading force. Or that Lysaer is the one who declares Talith dishonored.)
So finally, the action starts. The army goes in first, while " At their backs, a figure of inspiring magnificence on his gold-maned war-horse, Lysaer raised his fist. He threw back his head and shouted in glad satisfaction as his gift swelled and answered. Then he opened mailed fingers. Raw light slapped forth, a blinding hot fireball hurled skyward to carve a scalding arc across the heavens."
This isn't just drama of course, this light, visible for leagues, will alert Jaelot and Alestron's forces. The steel ring is closing. And Lysaer's ready. He's been training his powers for years, and now has the finesse to create a countershield for both archery and shadows. If need be, we're told, he'll fire the mountain itself.
Can he do that? Really? Seriously Arithon and Lysaer's grandfather, what the FUCK were you thinking?! "Let's make god-like power a fucking dowry!"
--
We switch scene to something shippy:
Tucked into a rocky declivity in the rimrocks above Dier Kenton Vale, the Mad Prophet stood at Arithon's back, his plump hands pressed white against the royal shoulders that had not stopped trembling since Lysaer's signal bolt had roared aloft.
'Steady,' he murmured. 'Hold steady.' Then, as the distant glitter of the s'Ilessid bodyguard settled on station behind the rear ranks amid the low hills to the west, 'For the love of Ath, don't look now.'
Arithon gave a choked-off smile. Balled in a crouch with his hands locked around his knees, his eyes swathed under a black binding tied off with spell-turned knots, he was most effectively blinded to the movements of his enemy. Dakar and his war captain must serve as his eyes. Since the botched tienelle scrying aboard the Khetienn, the spellbinder had earned the clear right to ask permissions of him even a Fellowship Sorcerer might hesitate to impose.
God. Look at them. Look at how far they've come. Arithon hopes that his "unreserved consent" will give Dakar the leverage to help if the curse's madness gets too great. Wow. And of course, if that doesn't work, there's the final threat: Alithiel, the black sword, unsheathed and waiting.
The chance shrank his heart, made his nerves flinch in dread, that the terrible, edged beauty of the Paravian starspell might be turned against him again. He dared not frame the possibility that one day even this measure might fail him. The sweat which ran down the slant of his jaw arose as much from that fear as from grief for the trap set in the path of Lysaer's warhost.
Okay, for ONCE. FOR ONCE. I'll allow you some "my sword is too cool" angst, Arithon. Because it would be pretty scary for the sword to be used against you.
...Ahem:
The spread of thin sun on his shoulders, the smell of wild thyme and wind-caught evergreen held the untrustworthy peace of a drug dream. Needled by circling thoughts, Arithon shifted.
A firm, bearing pressure thrust him down as Dakar said, 'Damn you, prince, not yet.'
...
I will forever be sad that these books came out a little too early to build a true internet fandom, because I would be utterly gleeful to see these lines repurposed into a fanfic sex scene.
So Dakar keeps watch, filling Arithon in. He's amused when Diegan's men discover the ruse. But also...
Yet Lord Diegan had learned deadly caution under Pesquil. Tenacious as a lashed mastiff, he deployed a half-company to quarter the ground to be sure. The knoll swarmed with movement. A foot soldier rendered toy-sized against the span of the vale raised a sword and in a fit of silent fury hacked down the royal leopard standard.
That flash of bare steel and the wind-caught shreds of green silk for some unnamed reason ignited Dakar to slow rage.
When Dakar finally, truly, and in full knowledge, chooses his side. He fucking chooses his side. Now, he tells Arithon, who deploys his shadow.
Shadow ripped out and battened Dier Kenton under implacable darkness.
Cries of terror ripped up from the valley, followed in fated sequence by Lysaer's defending counterplay of light. The burst of illumination sheeted through to create a flickering, sulphurous twilight. No longer the green fool, the Prince of the West would not fire blind strikes at an enemy which offered no target. His response came tempered, sufficient in force to provide his troops with the illumination they required to close and fight.
'More,' Dakar whispered.
Arithon spun his darkness thicker, deeper, smothering his half-brother's effort in what seemed an effortless parry.
They note Lysaer's increased strength with his gift. But this is all part of the plan. And OH...I see what's happening. Lysaer has learned a lot from the events in Mistwraith and Merior, but maybe because of the curse or because of his own nature, he didn't learn the real lesson of Minderl Bay.
He keeps blasting. And I see what Dakar meant by consent now. Because neither Dakar or Arithon are the cause of the rockslide. LYSAER is. Arithon chose the ground (detecting the unstable harmonics), Dakar's spellwork presumably helps direct it (I think, it's not 100% clear), but it's Lysaer's own blast that sets it off.
A tortured rumble rocked bass echoes down the vale. The grumble built, compounded into a grinding, full-throated roar as the shoulders of the mountains front and centre buckled and let go, followed like unravelled crochet work by the slopes on either side. Soil and vegetation sliced away from the scarp. Half-glimpsed through torn thickets of shadow, lit lurid by the unnatural tangle of sheared light kinked like sword cuts through absolute dark, the slow-motion crumple of boulders and torn soil gained frenetic speed in a race to meet the exposed valley. As if ploughed to rolling chaos by the impact of a giant's fist, the mass surged in a wave down the steep rims of the vale.
The vanguard of Lord Diegan's troops glimpsed their doom through the sickly yellow twilight, their panicked screams battered under and lost in the roaring complaint of outraged earth. Horses reared on shaking ground. Pennons dipped, cast out of nerveless fingers. Ranks of pike-men compressed in raw terror, their weapons juddered into recoil like a tailor's pins in crushed cloth.
Then the caroming breaker of rock and soil smashed down from the middle, and on both flanks. The companies in the vanguard were sprayed aside, then harrowed under like shell soldiers abandoned to the muddied teeth of flood tide.
Sorry for the long excerpt but this is pretty satisfying. And hey, Lysaer's boast was right. He COULD light the mountain up. But that doesn't work very well when your own army is underneath.
Strewn at Lysaer's very feet, in disembowelled earth and crushed hope, a mass grave site: ploughed into irretrievable oblivion the pulped bits of tissue, wood and dented steel of what once had been twenty-eight thousand dedicated men.
The howl of the Prince of the West clove the morning, shrill with grief and wild pain. The light of his gift left his fist. A flashfire bolt of distilled energy shrieked across distance and slammed against the summit of the knoll. Impact carved up a flying gout of rocks, an eruption of dead matter that yielded his rage no balm of satisfaction.
Lysaer wept for his impotent strength. The Shadow Master's spelled decoy of banners and empty helmets flamed and melted under impact of his grief, leaving the site razed bare.
Twenty-Eight Thousand. Holy fucking SHIT.
Diegan makes it out though.
Diegan heaved in a strangled breath, half-mad from shock and disbelief. He felt delirious; light-headed. As if through the ordinary course of an eye-blink, firm rock had exploded and rearranged itself into some diabolical landscape out of Sithaer.
Sick white, shaking, he scrubbed grit from a skinned forearm, then resettled the rucked weight of his mail and adjusted his sword from blind habit. Through air hazed with pulverized rock, he sensed other movement and belatedly found he was not alone.
Yeah, maybe you should have LISTENED to the warning?
Admittedly, this all does sound gruesome:
The handful of survivors sheltered by the knoll were regaining their feet, coughing dust. Some, crazed beyond reason, had drawn swords. A few were unmanned by fear. One lay moaning in misery, trampled or kicked by someone's panicked horse. The blue-purple pulp of his gutted abdomen established at a glance that he would not be rising, nor would another, apparently thrown onto the impaling point of a pole weapon. Nearby, someone's squire crawled on his hands and knees, sobbing the name of his mother.
And to my immense satisfaction, he IS aware of his colossal fuck up:
The first flame of rage licked through Diegan's horror. His throat was too dry to swallow, and his tongue, too thick to curse the name of s'Ffalenn. Avenor's Lord Commander choked on the tainted taste of soil and shrank in guilt for the warning a band of condemned men had entrusted to his hearing one dismal night in falling rain.
'Dharkaron avenge!' he strangled through a seizure that hooked like a sob in his throat. For the gut-wrenching horror of his straits all but felled him. The diabolical threat sent by Arithon, that he had brushed aside from expediency, had been, every word, meant in earnest.
Unknowing, the Prince of the West had marched his forty thousand into jeopardy.
Thrown headlong into wholesale ruin, Lord Diegan beheld the Master of Shadow's promised vengeance. The scope of the disaster saw every justification to silence the testimony of twenty-five men remade into a fool's play. A brother's self-serving passion for retribution for his sister had cost Lysaer's allies tens upon thousands of lives.
I mean, look. Not to excuse what you did, you little skeeze, but Lysaer didn't HAVE to march forty thousand men to their deaths at all. You can share the blame.
But as mentioned, for all that he's a skeeze and an idiot, Diegan has grown into a decent tactician. He takes stock of what they have. Forty two veterans. A few more of a "scarecrow pack" that respond when he calls. Diegan has one goal now: to get to Lysaer and get him to signal a retreat. The flanking companies can still be saved.
There's a rough bit though. The wounded, who can't help themselves, must stay behind. Lysaer's riding into danger, and per Diegan, his need must outweigh the rest.
And so we appreciate the horrors of war, yet again:
Under the dust-smeared face of the sun, the men mustered. One dragged the sobbing squire away from the casualty with his innards torn out. Over the intermittent crack and rumble as unstable rock gave and settled, or loose boulders tore away from the knife-edged wall of sheared cliffs, his weeping appeal rang shrill. 'I won't leave him! I can't.' On a fresh note of torture, 'He's my brother!'
'Force him,' cracked the sergeant to the man-at-arms who importuned the boy. 'If he doesn't straighten up in a hundred paces, leave him behind for carrion. Our prince's safety comes first.'
--
We move to Caolle with archers on the heights. His clan scounts and tribesmen have very simple orders: shoot to kill when possible, give ground in retreat when threatened. Caolle's job is to be rear guard and to track Lysaer's movements. The big concern right now is that if a wrathful Lysaer corners Arithon, the curse will kick in. There are still enough of the warhost to outnumber the archers. They need to be focused.
So the idea is to keep Lysaer pinned so that the Jaelot and Alestron companies can be hazed off. And oh...they spot Diegan.
Caolle knows the guy is a sitting duck, but instinct kicks in, so he tries to stop his men from killing him...and:
Diegan sought for inspiration to save his last men when the shaft thudded into his side. Its broad-bladed head pierced his surcoat and mail, ripped through the gambeson beneath and drove the last air from his lungs in a wordless, half-vocal gasp. He stumbled forward, clawing at rock to stay upright.
The message of desperate urgency he carried must at all costs reach his prince.
Well. Honestly, there's a certain karmic justice here.
Dull, tearing pain turned him dizzy. Diegan swayed, kept his grip on broken stone until his fingers split with the effort. Weeping tears for the punishment, he managed to stay on his feet.
The wasp whine of the second shaft grazed through the beat of his agony. Its splintering strike caught him to the right of his breastbone, ripped him backward until the world fell away into a shimmering view of a Vastmark sky bleached with haze.
Heheh. I mean, look, obviously I know what Caolle suspects: that Diegan needs to get to Lysaer. And I think everyone would be much happier if he did. But it DOES feel good to see this genocidal asshole get shot with arrows.
And that's when Caolle gets to him. Diegan, already dying, mistakes him for Lysaer and basically delivers his message:
Diegan resigned himself. The barbarian accents were surely cruel dream or delirium. He coughed through a hot rush of fluid. 'There was a warning,' he pressed, laboured now, desperate to get his words out. Sight came and went in tides of blackness, and the pain was spoiling thought. 'Twenty-five men brought me word from the Shadow Master. I ordered them dead lest they tell. But my prince ... he must hear .. . there's grave danger. Tell him. The light signal... retreat, before it's too late.'
'Ath forfend!' cried the man who held him, anguished. 'That accursed misdeed was your doing! Had those twenty-five survivors from the Havens reached Lysaer, you must know. By my liege lord's clear augury and Dakar's prophecy, not a man would have marched on Dier Kenton to die.'
It is pretty satisfying to watch Diegan realize that he's talking to Arithon's men.
'Daelion pity,' he wrenched out. The final breath past his lips ripped through tears of regret, for his bequest could never reach Lysaer s'Ilessid now. His dedicated love and devotion, every pain he had tried to spare his liege and his friend, had all passed for naught.
Well, at least you died in agony, knowing your failure.
So Caolle is disheartened. The clan scout who actually shot Diegan defends himself. And Caolle agrees, there's no way the scout could have known that Diegan planned to call the retreat. No blame. Just sadness.
And a certain poetic justice for Caolle too. He's spent so long wrapped up in his vendetta, and a young scout, "face too young, too bitter, too scarred by early carnage to embrace the concept of mercy", accidently shoots them in the foot.
'I only pray you learn how to pity,' he said to Jieret's Companion. 'It might one day save your life from becoming what mine has, a futile pursuit of old hatred.'
'You always said it's the hate that keeps us alive,' the scout returned.
'Once, I believed that was true.' In the sad recognition he faced a younger version of himself, Caolle raked back a stickied tangle of slate-coloured hair. 'I've since learned there are better ways.' But sooner than any, he knew: if not for his service to the Prince of Rathain, the lesson would have slipped his grasp entirely.
The war captain who had survived the brutal massacre at Tal Quorin, whose very tactics had helped decimate those ranks of Etarrans, found a priceless irony in the thought that, at the end, his hope and a citybred Lord Commander's last wish should be alike to the very bone.
Some of the parallels are really quite exquisite. Caolle, like Diegan, feels that if Arithon dies, everything they accomplished will be brutal and meaningless. Arithon is Jieret's legacy, and the only hope that the clans could escape their lives as hunted fugitives.
I do feel like it's fair to point out that, amidst all these parallels, there IS a difference between growing up as a persecuted refugee whose family is scalped for money by genocidal assholes and being a rich douchebag who believes in their right to scalp people for money and keep children as factory slaves.
But okay, I do take the lesson, Ms. Wurts.
--
We move to Lysaer, (chalk-faced and hawking up dust). There's no way to reconnect the company to the reinforcements. They've lost.
Never in his life had he dreamed of a downfall on this scale.
The campaigns and the ships his royal father had wasted to s'Ffalenn predation on Dascen Elur were insignificant before today's toll of dead at Dier Kenton. Worse, perhaps, was the way his given gift of light had been hobbled and rendered helpless. Throughout, he had been unable to act in defence of his troops. Rancour stabbed deep, for that. Somewhere beyond these rotten scarps of shale, for cold surety, Arithon s'Ffalenn still worked shadows and sorcery. His heart knew no word for mercy. With total impunity, he would wreak what ruin he could upon the rest of the allied warhost.
Lysaer knows about Diegan, by the way, and the other vaguely slashy pairing of the books gets this as a farewell:
Diegan would have understood his liege lord's smouldering rage; Avenor's bold Lord Commander, found dead of a clan scout's arrow on the same violated earth, when Ath's own miracle had spared him untouched from the first fury of Arithon's rockfall. Lysaer felt as stone, beyond tears or regret. If this moment of grim impotence made him burn for revenge, he was never the fool to show weakness before the eyes of disheartened men.
And I genuinely hope somewhere Diegan is aware of this next bit:
His question received the freezing glare of Avenor's prince front on. 'We shall not be going back. Never as long as we have living allies from Jaelot and Alestzon left to fight. What happened here was no accident.'
In a candour that held no apology for the turned ground, the razed stone, the doom of all his proud war-host, Lysaer added in terrible quiet, 'Twenty-eight thousand men died because one sorcerer lured them onto trapped ground with clever tactics, then pulled down a mountain to kill them. There will be no retreat and no safety. Not until this one ruthless criminal has been overthrown and cut dead.'
As his weary war-horse stumbled over a loose fall of shale, the prince gave on the reins from numbed habit. Above the metallic skitter of hooves and the rattling chink of loose rock, he summed up in ironclad resolve. 'Had I the same number to spend over again, I would do so for the same cause. Our losses here prove the true scope of the danger. With all of Athera set at risk, how dare I count a few thousand deaths as anything less than worthwhile? There can be no end. Never until Arithon s'Ffalenn is fully and finally brought down.'
War is a tragedy and this is a monstrosity, but at least we get the comfort of knowing that the universe is telling Lord Diegan of Etarra to go fuck himself.
--
The next subchapter is "Field of Fear"
We're back to Dakar. He's relieved that at least some of Arithon's "damnable scrying" had seen through. The slide worked. Now Dakar has the job to dispatch the north wing of troops: led by Keldmar s'Brydion.
Dakar.
Like I said before, when Dakar picks a side, in clear knowledge, he picks a fucking side.
But remember, the s'Brydions are clansfolk. The terrain may be against them, but they're not quite so helpless as the townsfolk. And they're a disciplined army in their own right:
Dakar puffed flushed cheeks until his beard bristled up like a blowfish. Beyond the passing malice of a bar brawl, he had small love for risks that favoured the chance of getting maimed. At drinking or dice, or for charming paid wenches, he would have had a fair contest against Keldmar s'Brydion. On a field of battle, the odds made a fool's wager, unbalanced enough that the Fatemaster's furies would laugh themselves stupid in prostration.
I love Dakar.
So...what will he do? We don't know. He tells a clansman to tell Arithon to allow him two hours. Sundown. (The scout thinks he's cutting it very close. If the advance isn't stopped before nightfall, people will die. Archers can't shoot in the dark.)
'Well, here's thanks in advance for your proud vote of confidence,' Dakar said, morose and punch-drunk with fatigue.
He scrubbed sweaty palms upon his tunic and chafed. At the moment he felt good for nothing beyond craving for pillows in a cathouse beside some sultry doxy. The wistful heat of wishes could scarcely stir him to desire; not with hard Vastmark shale chewing dents in his backside, and the withering sun limning the hungry steel teeth of the s'Brydion warhost.
No imagination was required to picture how Keldmar would rejoice to see one plump, dishonest gem peddler impaled arse down on a pike.
Inspired to a wicked bent of afterthought, Dakar smothered down a chortle. To the dubious scout who awaited, he said, 'Take my message. If you don't want to spoil your humourless thinking, don't for a second look back.'
I like that Dakar still manages to be fun, even when things are tense. We don't know what he's planning either. But he's looking at the troops with fresh interest.
Dakar bit his lip, his eyes half-closed in anticipation. The spells which exacted the least effort were fashioned illusions, the inconvenient, tangled little bindings designed to hook a man's thoughts and sow from them the dreaming recreation of whatever lust held his heart.
From the ground underfoot, the Mad Prophet selected a stub of shale to use as a stylus. The runes he scribed like tiny seeds upon the air broke into motes, a haze fine as spider's silk caught to a sheen of dimmed silver. The light sparked and multiplied and strewed on the wind, a scarcely visible dusting of energies that by their drawn nature would gravitate and form to the dictates of human desires. For effect, and by way of fair warning, the Mad Prophet laced his finished work through the blank coils of the fogbanks which gathered to descend and girdle the heights after sundown.
In typical fashion for all his maligned practice, some permission or small cantrip skimmed awry. The spell assumed an unruly life of its own and unreeled like blight to gnarl the peace of Ath's order.
Magic is fun!
So a green, uncanny mist starts fanning out. Keldmar braves it, determines it to be an illusion, and they start scouting. Finding nothing. They brave it. And that's when Dakar's trap hits:
Dakar's insidious tangle of seals fixed on longings for distant wives and wenches; of dinner at a trestle and a foaming draught of ale in the camaraderie of a warm taproom; of a soft feather mattress after a hot bath, and uninterrupted sleep. Reality blurred and daydreams became manifest. The next thing men knew, they saw what they craved, in powerful, alluring fits of vision.
One man hallucinates his wife, and tries to kiss her. Another starts stuffing his mouth with dirt and chewing. He sees a basket of pears.
One man hugged his helmet and murmured endearments. Another raised the butt of his dagger to his lips as if he swilled wine from a bottle. One quarter of the middle company simply plonked their arms down for pillows and snored. The bloodthirsty few who wanted to gut enemies screamed bull-throated war cries, whipped swords from their scabbards, and determinedly began hacking rocks.
Buffeted amidst the unravelling chaos of Alestron's best troop of mercenaries, Keldmar stared about, red to the ears with flummoxed rage. 'Have you all gone crazy?'
Basically everyone but the most strong-minded start falling for the spell. We get more hilarious details.
I admit, I rather like this. Of all of Lysaer's warhost, Alestron has the most legitimate grievance with Arithon and are the least horrible, so I'm glad they're not all dying. They can survive embarassment:
Like a jerked tear in a knit, neat drill undid into knots of rollicking celebration. Pikes clattered from emptied hands. Men whooped in abandon and threw themselves into ribald frenzy, stripping off armour and moaning prone on bare rock as if they lay coupled with their lovers. The banner bearer became engrossed in a weepy, long dialogue with his belt buckle. Around his curled form, the troop's most trustworthy captain leaped in tight circles, stabbing at gravel and shrieking about snakes in the grass.
Poor Keldmar and a few others are able to keep it together. They're hunting for the sorcerer, figuring the rest will recover when they get him. There are seventy five men now. And well...
Something whined through the mist. A man four paces off crumpled at the knees and sprawled with a shattering, coarse cry. Blood spread across the breast of his surcoat, and his fingers raked the ground in grasping agony. Then the air came alive with a hail of shafts fired in terrible accuracy.
Sometimes it doesn't pay to be strong willed. They realize that their enemy can see through the fog and they run for it. It's Erlien's clansmen, and they're here to make Keldmar an offer:
'You can fight until you drop,' one antagonist baited in the butter-soft vowels of Shand. 'Or by our high earl's invitation and Prince Arithon's preference, we'll take your weapons and your word in surrender.'
'You have my word,' Keldmar said through gritted teeth. As son of an old blood duke, he could rely on the code of ethics his ancestors shared with these descendants of the displaced clans. He tossed his sticky broadsword with a ringing, flat clash at the feet of the swordsmen who pinned him. Stubborn he might be, but never the fool to die for pointless bravado. 'I'll have my satisfaction. Your earl's fiend-plagued ally, the Master of Shadow, will curse the hour he left me alive.'
So Dakar gets the good news. They need him to keep the mist a bit longer to get Keldmar out safely, but they've got him. Dakar's got a migraine, but the clansmen are pretty impressed.
That said, there's more ominous news from "the Shadow Master" Jaelot's divisions are more stubborn. The tribesfolk are running out of arrows, and Arithon is asking Dakar to clear out an opening for retreat.
Apparently the commander still holds a grudge from Halliron's song (exposing him as being impotent, and his wife as "scratching her itch" with everyone she can find.")
Meanwhile though, the mist is wearing off. And once more, the Fellowship's fucked up idea of consent comes into play:
The spellbinder cringed to imagine how his Fellowship master would reprove his shoddy turn of conjury. Worse, his spreading green fogbank scarcely established a sound base for permission to ensorcel the enemy, since the duke's paid soldiers could not refuse to enter without rejecting orders from their officers. The lapse in proprieties left the spellbinder unrepentant. The only way he knew to divert the troops now was to twist the dregs of his dream binding into a mass hallucination. That Asandir might come to punish him later for chaotic intervention was a point he shrank from examining. The offered stake was the Shadow Master's life.
But then it's moot. Things are VERY desperate on the Jaelot side. (Hey, remember how the grudges of Jaelot and Alestron came about, at least in part, due to Fellowship negligence. They KNEW Dakar was in trouble in Jaelot and that the others wouldn't leave him. They forced a resentful Dakar into Arithon's presence and then let Dakar lead Arithon into a trap. I'm just bringing this up to point out how, yet again, the Fellowship is fucking useless.)
So Dakar decides to be pretty fucking badass:
He ripped out three summonings, scribbled runes in cold air, then threw his vivid, disordered imagination into a vision to raise terror.
His unpremeditated jumble of forced power cast a baleful snap of fire across the zenith.
Dakar embellished this with his most evil remembrance of nightmares brought on by cheap gin. In garish, deafening splendour, an apparition burst from the glare, made manifest through an irresponsible explosion of spells.
His finest rendition of Dharkaron's Chariot roared into the arc of the sky.
The visitation was drawn in sable splendour by the Five Horses of Sithaer, harnessed in lightnings, their coats polished ebony and their nostrils flared to expose dark red linings. White-stockinged hooves struck sparks off the very roof of heaven. After them rocked the dread chariot of black lacquer and bone inlay, its narrow, spoked wheels a whirl of steel rims which sliced clouds in their path like spent smoke.
Ath's avenging angel grasped the lines in his gauntleted fist. Not by accident did the face beneath its raven hair bear resemblance to Rathain's sanctioned crown prince.
Hee.
You really do care, don't you, Dakar.
So okay, the Alestron folks are screaming and fleeing. Woo.
--
The last subchapter is Severance and oh shit, y'all. We're back with the Koriani. Morriel has her waystone back.
Morriel preferred the ambivalence. Her skin the yellow of aged, crumpled linen in the light of a single candle, she rejoiced for the freedom restored by the Great Waystone cradled in her lap. Never again need she leach borrowed energy from the diurnal rhythms of the earth. The passage of days and seasons no longer ruled her arcane might.
You know, Sethvir, while it was a dick move to take it, you probably could have held off on giving it back for a while. Wait for a time when they DON'T want to kill your supposed last hope?
Anyway, we get background on the stone: it's powerful and dangerous. Used badly, the wielder can go insane, and Morriel had once cared for past victims as a novice. She intends to take her time now. She intends at least a decade of instruction before Lirenda can try to use it on her own. And she can't really spare that time, if Lirenda is unfit.
There's some nice description here:
Unlike the properties of the Skyron focus, the great amethyst met the mind which sought dominance in vast and ominous quiet. Morriel closed lightless eyes to strain her thoughts clear of distraction, then linked her awareness to the crystal. Swallowed into smothering darkness, undermined by the old, familiar dread that the Waystone's pooled malice might slip her control and unstring the coils of her sanity, she held her mind in balance. She was too old, too wise to be baited to insecurity. Neither did she ease her guard as the stone's vast quiet gentled into seductive invitation.
Eventually it turns into a real battle of wills. Pretty tense, but you know, I'm a little more concerned with what's happening in Vastmark. But well, as we know from Dakar's vision, this could be relevant.
She's also focused on Lirenda and her flaws, because apparently no aspirant can succeed or even survive the last test, if they don't cleanse themselves of imperfections:
Lirenda's training was far from complete. Scrying clearly mapped those weaknesses yet to be conquered. Morriel tracked them, methodical: the small ambitions that blinded it. Tomorrow's imperfect handling of a dispute between two novices; then the annual placement of boy wards in craftshop apprenticeships evincing a stubborn prejudice still ingrained from an overly privileged childhood. Envy of the Fellowship's sure grasp of grand conjury would give rise to a critical inattention. And like a chained snag in knit, that moment yielded in turn to a faulty understanding of a minor sigil which, another day, would fail to halt an affliction that caused stillbirths.
For each shortcoming, Morriel marked out the corresponding lesson to enforce the desired correction. She sounded the sureties to discern which seal spells to use to impose subtle influence to curb, then realign and hone the last rough edge from Lirenda's self-awareness.
Wow. This is creepy as fuck.
But of course the BIG issue is that Lirenda is fascinated by Arithon, or possibly to be more specific, the compassion that ruled him.
That's actually an interesting note. Somewhere in a Q&A, Wurts said something about the Fellowship basically embodying a form of Justice, with the Koriani representing a warped form of compassion.
I think it's harder to see that in the Fellowship. Though maybe in the way they ratify the rulers and caithdeins, and the way they keep the laws of the compact (such as taking the knowledge of gunpowder from the s'Brydions). But then, they don't get involved in mortal matters, such as Maenalle's execution and they're happy to let the clansfolk get slaughtered. So I'm skeptical of this association. Of course, they're better than Lysaer himself.
The Koriani though, yeah. They have their sanctuaries and Elaira at least has been village healer in a few places. But we've seen the draconian rules, the oaths visited upon literal children, the power plays. The fact that they're supporting Lysaer, even though they initially refused, rightly recognizing the danger he poses to peace, but because he gave them something they wanted, and Morriel thinks Arithon's a threat.
It's no wonder, really, that Lirenda is drawn to something more sincere.
It's also hilarious. Arithon's so hot that he wins over MULTIPLE members of a celibate crystal cult.
Um!
Aware of shimmering danger in that single thread, Morriel Prime traced the span of coming happenstance with the delicate care of a spider spinning webs above a waterfall. Her augury took hold, unreeling in fierce energy to yield a scene set in falling sleet against the shadowy postern of a coastal city's back alley.
There, the vision of Lirenda, lost in Arithon's embrace, a flush to her cheeks, and her hair a fall of spilled sable down the violet cloak of the order.
For this startling glimpse of lapsed vows, Morriel was caught in blank astonishment. Before she could ponder, the sequence reeled on, inexorable, a lightning strike partnered by thunderclap.
A fired burst of passion, then heartbreak stanched in ice, this followed in sequence by a second, clearer vision: in a bleak tower dungeon, and the same prince, bound captive in iron and spread-eagled upon a stone slab. The s'Ffalenn features were stamped to mocking irony. In contempt for his helplessness, Arithon spoke a phrase whetted to a glib stab of satire.
I...don't remember this happening. I'm intrigued.
SO anyway, Morriel then gets a vision of her own death. You'd think this would be a good warning not to make enemies with Arithon, but nope, she's decided that he absolutely needs to die.
For the imbalance was no longer so small as Lirenda's' starved craving, or her female fascination with male attraction. If Arithon s'Ffalenn was left a free hand with fate, Morriel faced a permanent failing. She could become the single matriarch since the first to break the chain of inherited power. The deepest of mysteries, the keys to prime inheritance itself, would pass the veil with her, forever lost from the Koriani Order's living store of knowledge.
Maybe it should be lost? You guys kind of suck. So anyway:
Somewhere there lurked an unguarded mind with the passion to wish Arithon dead.
Her task was to ferret out that individual, to assist just one bitter enemy to couple the means with the moment. If she spun her desire through subliminal suggestion, her bit of small meddling would never be traced to link her hand or her order to a plot of assassination.
Well, Dakar will know.
So, our sneak peek for the LAST chapter set of the book (and maybe beyond?)
1. Alestron's fleet is having trouble as they're pushed to deep water by one very effective brigantine. Most importantly: the flagship is missing, and Mearn s'Brydion is lost with it.
2. Rathain clansmen lay siege to a supply train, rob it, and in the process, seize Parrien s'Brydion.
If you're counting, with Keldmar from before, all three of Bransian's brothers are missing or captured.
3. Lysaer is writing a letter to Bransian sharing his sincere grief and royal regret that Keldmar hasn't been found.
And with that, we are getting damn close to the end of this book. Jeeze. I'm going to need to decide what comes next.