The queen returned the quiet, secretive smile which even now haunted her husband’s dreams at night. ‘You should learn regret, my liege. Kill Arithon, and you murder Lysaer. Maim him, and you cripple your own heir likewise.’
Chilled by apprehension, the crown prince ducked past the guard. He leaped the dais stair in a rush and knelt by his father’s knee. ‘This sorcery might be no threat from Rauven, but a ruse designed by the bastard.’
His words went unregarded. The king acknowledged no advice, but answered only his past wife in words that smouldered with hatred. ‘And if your accursed offspring remains unblemished?’
‘Then the crown prince of Amroth will prosper also.’ Like a shadow excised by clean sunlight, the queen’s image vanished.
The king’s brows knotted into a scowl. He snatched his sceptre from the page with unwarranted force, while an ominous mutter of anger arose from the assembled courtiers. Lysaer stood stunned through the uproar, his attention arrested by the sight of Arithon s’Ffalenn, all subterfuge gone from him. Surprise, and an emotion Lysaer could not place showed briefly on the prisoner’s battered face. Then a halberdier seized the Master’s bruised shoulder. Arithon started, rudely recalled to his circumstance.
‘Turn and hear your sentence, bastard,’ the guard said unpleasantly.
Now frantic, Lysaer had no choice but to stand down. No advisor cared to question whether the sending was a wile of the Master’s, or a genuine ultimatum from Rauven; most showed deep disappointment that a vendetta which had raged through seven generations could be abandoned in a few short seconds.
The king leaned forward to speak. ‘Arithon s’Ffalenn, for the crime of piracy, in reprisal for seven ships and the lives of the men who crewed them, you will suffer exile through the Gate on the isle of Worldsend.’ The king clapped his hands, lips drawn taut with rage. ‘Return the bastard to confinement until escort and a ship can be arranged. Let me not set eyes on him again.’
Halberdiers closed in, eclipsing Arithon’s dark head. Weapons held at the ready, they hurried the prisoner away through the tense, resentful stillness of a crowd whose hungers remained unsatisfied. Lysaer stood torn with uneasiness. Reprieve of any sort had seemed inconceivable, just a scant moment before. Afraid, suddenly, that events had turned precisely to the whim of the Master, the prince braced his composure and touched his father’s sleeve.
‘Was that wise?’ His blue eyes searched the face of the king, as he begged to be heard without prejudice. Whatever passed the Worldsend Gate’s luminescent portal never returned; not even the sorcerers could answer the enigma, and Rauven’s power was great. ‘What if Arithon’s exile becomes my own as well?’
The king turned venomous eyes toward his eldest, fair-haired son, who right now bore unbearable resemblance to the traitorous sorceress who had borne him. ‘But I thought this sending was a ploy, engineered by the cunning of s’Ffalenn?’
The prince stepped back in dismay. His warning had been heard; yet the moment was past, the sentence read. Little gain would result if he qualified what had already been ignored. In silence, the prince bowed and took his leave.
The king’s bitter words echoed after him. ‘You worry for nothing, my prince. Rauven’s terms will be held to the letter. The s’Ffalenn bastard will go free without harm.’
On a high, windswept terrace at Rauven a robed man stirred from trance and opened troubled eyes.
‘The King of Amroth has chosen to banish Arithon through the Worldsend Gate,’ the listener announced to the high mage. Neither knew his words were overheard by a second mind incomprehensibly distant…
In a world of fog-bound skies another sorcerer in maroon robes paused between dusty tiers of books. Misty, distracted eyes turned sharp and immediate as a falcon’s. Sethvir of the Fellowship had kept records at Althain Tower since the Mistwraith had overturned all order and banished sunlight five centuries earlier. Events sifted past his isolation like snowflakes beyond glass; as the fancy struck him, he penned them into manuscript and catalogued them for the archives. Although the listener’s phrase was one of thousands which intruded upon his thoughts hourly, the sorcerer focused his attention instantly to prove its origin.
Power great enough to shatter mountains answered Sethvir’s will. Faultlessly directed, it bridged the unimaginable gulf between worlds and retrieved the vision of the starlit embrasure where a mage sat with a sword of unearthly beauty clenched between his hands. The blade bore patterns of silver inlay, and a spindle of green light blazed in a gem set at the hilt. The mage regarded the weapon with a raw expression of grief, while the clairvoyant tried vainly to comfort him.
Sethvir recognized that blade. Memories of past events aligned like compass needles, pairing fact with circumstance whose significance shattered a calm that was legendary. Sethvir of the Fellowship whooped like a boy. In the time before the Mistwraith’s curse, that same weapon had been carried by an Atherian prince through the Worldsend Gates to the west. Three other royal heirs had fled with him, seeking sanctuary from a rebellion which threatened their lives. Then the Mistwraith’s conquest banished all sunlight; the Gates were directionally sealed on the promise of a madman’s prophecy, and the princes’ exile became permanent. Yet if the royal heirs had been abandoned to their fate, they had not been forgotten. At last, Sethvir beheld the first sign that the princes’ betrayal had not been in vain.
The sorcerer released the image. Blue-green eyes softened with a reverie that masked keen thought. The mage who held the sword had also seemed no stranger; Sethvir himself had trained the man’s ancestor in the foundational arts of power. Only one possible interpretation fitted such coincidence: the sorcerer witnessed the birthpangs of the great West Gate Prophecy, the one which forecast the defeat of the Mistwraith and the return of Athera’s banished sunlight.
Sethvir’s exuberance drove him to run from the library. Disturbed air raised dust from the shelves as he banged through the door and raced up the stairwell beyond; but his thought moved faster still, spanning a distance of leagues to deliver the news to his colleagues in the Fellowship of Seven.
In another place, amid the weedy tangle of a fog-shrouded field, water dripped sullenly down the stems of last summer’s bracken.
‘I bring news of Dascen Elur,’ said an intrusive, familiar voice.
