leaves. Lysaer felt sucked under by tides of faintness and confusion.
Voices that were human turned distant, broken, then surged back clearly as a hand strongly steadied his elbow.
‘Well done!’ The tones, Asandir’s; the touch, that of a sorcerer enfleshed. Kharadmon’s enslaving presence had withdrawn.
Lysaer leaned into the support, breathing hard, and dizzied past reach of self-control. His mind felt scoured; empty. Even his gifted sense of light seemed deadened, consumed as flaked ash in a smelter’s pit. Fragments of nightmare flitted through his grasp and faded even as he grasped to recall them. A frustrated urgency remained, disrupted as Asandir spoke again.
‘Lysaer? You’ve been party to a miracle. The Mist-wraith’s captivity is accomplished.’
Belatedly aware he still breathed, that his palms stung with blisters that could heal, Lysaer at last managed speech. ‘It’s bottled?’
For answer, Asandir drew him gently to his feet and forward two stumbling steps.
The narrow jasper cylinder still rested upright on the battlement. Ward-light shimmered over its contours, which now showed no opening at all. The container was permanently sealed seamless, and the sky, cloaked in natural darkness, showed a terrifying tapestry of stars.
They were hard-white, blue, and stinging violet, too bright by half to be mistaken for the heavens of Dascen Elur that Lysaer had known throughout childhood. None of the constellations matched any taught him by the chancellor.
The meaning took a long, sweaty moment to register.
‘Desh-thiere,’ Lysaer croaked. ‘It’s banished.’ His handsome, weary face showed the grace of relief before he crumpled in exhaustion against Asandir.
For a moment the sorcerer who supported him showed an expression of unalloyed sorrow.
Then, roused to purpose, he called brisk command to the Shadow Master braced against the wall. ‘Help me get your brother down to shelter. After that, if you can manage the lower stair, call Dakar in. He’s going to be needed to doctor burns.’
The evening after Asandir had ridden south with his discorporate colleagues to better secure the imprisoned Mistwraith, Lysaer sat with his back to the lee of a stone embrasure that once had been favoured as a trysting place by generations of s’Ffalenn princesses. Between hands swathed in bandages and healing unguents rested a flask of telir brandy, left as a courtesy by the sorcerer before his departure.
The contents were already half-consumed.
Disappointed to have slept through the first day of restored sunlight, the s’Ilessid prince applied himself to belated celebration as he pondered Athera’s savagely brilliant constellations, strewn in cloudless splendour overhead. ‘To our victory,’ he toasted and offered the flask to his half-brother, who paced, too quietly for his step to be heard through the ongoing sigh of the winds.
Arithon paused, a dark silhouette against a million points of light. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I’d drink instead to the crown that awaits you in Tysan. You’ve fully earned your right to royal privilege.’
The expected note of bitterness was absent from his half-brother’s manner. Taken aback, that the Shadow Master’s quirky nature should relentlessly continue to confound him, Lysaer smiled as Arithon accepted the brandy, took a token swig and gently handed back the flask.
‘You can’t be looking forward to Etarra,’ Lysaer pressed. ‘There’s more on your mind than you let on.’ He touched the bottle to his lips. The telir brandy went down with hardly a burn in the throat; the warmth came later, a glow like a bonfire in the belly. ‘You might feel better if you drank.’
Arithon returned a quiet chuckle. ‘I don’t feel bad. Just monstrously tired. Still.’
‘Still, what?’ The liquor was subtle: it undid barriers as a rake would seduce a prim virgin. When Arithon forbore to respond, Lysaer frowned in mildly euphoric irritation. ‘You’d think, after Desh-thiere’s defeat, the almighty Fellowship of Seven could reward you by finding a replacement hero to shoulder Rathain’s throne in your place.’
Arithon turned smoothly and set his hands on the wall. For a time he, too, seemed absorbed by the stars. ‘They won’t because they can’t, I suspect.’
‘What?’ Lysaer elbowed up from his slouch, setting off a gurgle of sloshed spirits. ‘What do you mean by
A disturbance sounded from inside the roofless chamber that fronted the flagstone terrace. ‘Dakar,’ Arithon observed, though he had not turned to look. ‘Hot on the scent of the brandy, no doubt.’
Sounds of a stumble and a muffled curse from the ruins affirmed his idle supposition.
Yet Lysaer on a binge could be bullishly stubborn; in judgement impaired further by fatigue, he resisted the interruption. ‘You’re implying, friend, that our
Not exasperated, but only lingeringly weary, Arithon said, ‘I think not. My best guess being that, with or without our ancestor’s knowledge, somebody meddled with our family history.’ Silent, perhaps frowning, he tipped his head sidewards in inquiry.
‘Consent was given,’ affirmed Dakar from the depths of the archway that led to the terrace. ‘On behalf of your line, sealed in blood by Torbrand s’Ffalenn, on the day Rathain’s charter was drawn by Ciladis of the Fellowship.’
‘There you are,’ Arithon said in light irony to his half-brother. He accepted the brandy that s’Ilessid diplomacy offered out of instinct to console; after a deep swallow and a sigh he relinquished the flask and ended, ‘I leave you all the joys of the night. I’m certainly too spent for witty company.’
The Shadow Master vanished into the archway, even as the Mad Prophet emerged, wearing an unlikely
