spirits were torn from life in the bursting pain of mortal wounds could and had unhinged reason. Barriered as tightly as he had ever been through his nerve-haunted stay at Ithamon, Arithon engaged his talents with the delicate precision of a clockmaker winding the coil for a mainspring.
Throughout the previous night, he had walked the valley barefoot, crossing and recrossing familiar ground as he laid in spell and counterspell and anchored them in fragile tension to the subliminal pull of the compass points. This oak, and that stone, and eastwards to west, a sentinel line of brush and saplings and old trees; a thousand points of landscape became his markers. Now he played his awareness across the fine-spun net of his night’s labour; he tuned his wards, or moved them, or cajoled them from strength to dormancy, the results all balanced to a hairsbreadth to spin a maze-work of shadows across the vale. To this, the strategy painstakingly wrought from the fruits of his tienelle scrying, he layered energies to warp air and deflect the natural acoustics.
If he did not engage his talents in direct intervention to take life, the distinction was narrowly made.
By his hand, the neat ranks of Etarra’s right flanking division blundered abruptly into darkness. The rocks, the mires, the twisted stands of runt maples broke their advance into chaos. Calls of inquiry rebounded between distressed soldiers, while the orders of officers to rally split to untrustworthy echoes and sent whole cohorts stumbling awry through rock-sided ravines and marshy dells.
The shadows themselves defied nature. A townsman who spun round to backtrack would see his path open to clear sunshine. If he yielded to fright and instinct and fled that way in retreat, he encountered no further hindrance. But any Etarran soldiers high-hearted enough to use that reprieve to recover their bearings at next step became swallowed by darkness. Blinded and lost to direction, they thrashed through branches and bogs, twisted ankles and bruised shins on an unkindness of rocks and crooked roots. The terrain funnelled them north, where they floundered, battered and disoriented, into a dazzling brilliance of sudden sunlight.
Arrows met them in whispered, even flights loosed off by hidden clan marksmen. Soldiers screamed, and crumpled and died; others warned of ambush by the cries of their fallen ducked back toward the cover of the shadows, to be cut down in turn by companions too rattled to distinguish town colours from the deerskins of enemies.
Bewildered shouts and groans of agony, all rebounded into echoes, recaptured by webs of complex conjury. Arithon sensed like ebb-tide the continuous draw on his resources. Like a killing frost out of season, the spellcraft taught by his grandfather mixed uneasily with murder. The line was most critical where mage-craft subsided and dying men spasmed like seines of dredged fish, gasping their final breaths. As though he wound silk past raw flame, Arithon worked to a perilous paradox: attuned to the outermost demands of sensitivity, while sealed still and deaf within self-imposed strictures of silence. He heard, but did not answer the quips between the archers as they sorted fresh arrows, or passed around waterskin and dipper. Pressed by doubt, and by knife-edge awareness that townborn enemies must only be allowed to break through in manageable numbers, Arithon beat back the weariness that pressed aches to the core of his flesh. Should he slip, lose track and grip on just one lancer or foot cohort, Steiven’s clansmen could be swiftly overrun. Engrossed in concentration that must target exactly which victims to release, he sensed nothing momentous as, by the river course over the east ridge, the lifeblood of Deshir’s young sons soaked on the banks of Tal Quorin.
But young Jieret, who had Sight, cried aloud, ‘Ath, Ath, it’s Teynie!’ He threw down his bow and tugged Arithon’s shoulder in dawning, agonized horror. ‘Hurry! She’s going to betray them all.’
Dazed and burdened with his interleaved mesh of maze-woven shadows and defence wards, Arithon neither heard the words, nor felt the boy’s urgent touch. He roused anyway. The oath lately sworn with Steiven’s son had been a blood-ritual, and for the mage-trained such things became binding beyond a mere promise; his life and the boy’s were subtly twined. Like a man slapped out of a coma he mustered back full awareness and moved; but not in time.
Lost to panic and raw grief, Jieret shoved past the archers and vaulted the palings that served as cover.
No chance existed for second remedy. Arithon dropped hold on the spells, let them collapse in a tangling cascade of frayed energies. The shadow-barriers being easiest to stabilize, he locked a lightless pall across the valley that would partially hamper Etarra’s troops. ‘You’re on your own,’ he informed in clipped apology to the archers. ‘Stand or retreat as you will, but at least send a runner to warn your fellows.’
Then he was over the breastworks and after Jieret with his sword sliding clear in mid-air.
Of the scouts posted with him, half remained. The rest grabbed up weapons and bows and jumped after, hailing companions as they went. ‘Jieret’s run off, the prince after him. Divide your numbers and come, they’ll need support.’
Dodging through elders and thin brush, Arithon spared no thought for regret. Had Jieret’s spurious talent recaptured the vision that led to the slaughter of Deshir’s innocents, any futures traced through his tienelle scrying would now carry unknown outcomes.
If Deshir’s clans were beyond saving, he had vowed that Steiven’s son be spared.
He poured all his heart into running, slammed through a last stand of birch, and at last overtook the fleeing boy. Once abreast, he made no effort to stop, but matched stride and gently guided, bending the child’s flight toward the thicker stands of forest on high ground. ‘Easy. Up here. That’s better. Fewer pikemen, and don’t forget the swamp.’
Jieret choked back a sob and plunged through a gully in a furious rush that tripped him up.
Arithon caught him as he stumbled, steadied him through the moss-slicked rocks up the bank. Between heaving breaths he kept talking. ‘Explain. What about Teynie? We’re bloodsworn. It’s my oath to help.’
‘The tents!’ Jieret pushed through a stand of witch hazel, whose downy spines powdered his jerkin. ‘She’s going to lead headhunters to the tents!’
Slammed by a wave of foreboding, and fending off branches that raked his face, Arithon squeezed the boy’s hand. ‘Don’t talk,’ he gasped. ‘Just think in your mind what you dreamed and imagine that I can see it too.’
But panic had already impelled the vision to the forefront of Jieret’s awareness. The instant Arithon opened a channel to test the boy’s distress, the ties of the bloodpact took over. Jieret’s terror became his own. The prescient vision that tienelle scrying had snatched back in fragments unfolded now in entirety. The scrub-grown hillside seamed with weather-stripped gullies blurred out of vision as mage-sight unveiled another place…
…of torn earthworks and slaughtered bodies, where Pesquil’s advance troop of headhunters tracked prints across blood-rinsed earth. In swift, efficient silence they exchanged swords for daggers and cut scalps to claim bounty for their kills.
The corpses raised by the hair for the knife-cut were small, the faces smudged in leaf mould and gore unlined by life and years…
Boys, Arithon realized with a choke that all but stopped his heart. He tripped hard on a stone, felt the tug of Jieret’s grip save his balance. Present awareness slapped back,
