along with anguished recognition of total helplessness. The deed was done: the sons of Deshir dead. All hacked and disfigured, were the little ones Caolle had insisted be sent to dispatch the enemy wounded because men for that task could ill be spared; amid whose company Jieret would have been, if not for a bloodpact of friendship.
‘Jieret, they’re gone,’ Arithon gasped out in defeat. ‘We’re too late.’
But Jieret’s mute and furious headshake forced back unwanted recollection that the appalling scene by the riverside had failed to include the fated girl. At what point does the strong mind falter, Arithon wondered in a cascade of renewed despair. The feud between Karthan and Amroth had inspired atrocities enough to wring from him all tolerance for suffering. Between town born and clan, the hate ran more poisonous still.
Ground creepers tore at his footfalls as he fought toward the crest of the ridge. At his side, Jieret was labouring, his eyes stretched sightless and wide, as if he viewed vistas of horrors, but lacked any breath to cry protest.
At what point should the strong heart shy off, and preserve itself from wanton self-destruction? To go on was to risk every shred of integrity to the mad drives of Desh-thiere’s curse. Arithon swore in fierce anguish. He tightened grip on his sword, braced tired nerves, and cast off the protective barriers that confined his sight to Jieret’s dream. Every prudent precaution he had taken was tossed away as he reached out direct with his mage- sight.
Disciplined, efficient, too well-versed in the ways of forest clansmen to suffer delay or needless noise, Pesquil rattled off orders. His men crammed dripping trophies in their gamebags. Nearby, wiping a sword whose blade bore chased patterns of reversed runes, a strong, straight man in a ruined surcoat clenched his jaw against the hurt of cracked bones.
Framed in that place, over the bodies of slain children,
Arithon gasped as if hit. His stride faltered, despite Jieret’s efforts, shouting and tugging, to urge him on. He heard nothing, felt nothing beyond nerves pitched and twisted to a geas-driven impulse to attack.
Vision and reflex merged. Alithiel’s blade sang through air. The sour, belling whine as swordsteel sheared through sticks and green bracken jolted turned senses back to reason.
Arithon stood, breathing hard, the sweat drenched over him in runnels. He caught one breath, two, the hand gripped white to his sword hilt trembling in waves of reaction. Fingers could be relaxed into stillness. The mind could be forced to shake off madness. Eyes closed, quivering as if racked by a fever, Arithon called every shred of his training to repress the screaming urge to fling aside Jieret and bolt, not to rescue, but to kill. Through him and through ran the sick recognition that he had tasted worse than his fears. He had fatally near underestimated the havoc that even indirect scrying on his half-brother could unleash through the core of his being.
Half-undone by despair, for there existed no escape from this quandary, he gathered self-command and looked up.
Attending him in staunch readiness were Jieret and eleven clansmen who had without questions left their defenceworks to support him. Enmeshed as he was in sorry fears and the unmistakable throes of wrecked dignity, their kindness offered temptations a curse-marked spirit could ill afford.
Enraged as a scalded cat by the flaw that twisted through his character, Arithon’s first impulse was to let fly with words and send them packing, away from his reach lest he wantonly compromise their safety.
Humility stayed him, and grief. If Deshir’s wives and daughters were still threatened, these men owned their right to defend them, and he must find courage to see how.
Wordless, he turned his grip on Alithiel and pressed the hilt into Jieret’s startled hands. Then he stripped off his swordbelt and thrust it toward the nearest of the scouts. ‘Take this. Bind my ankles. Somebody else, unbend a bowstring and lash my wrists tight behind my back.’
The clansman regarded him, stupefied.
‘Do it!’ Arithon snapped. Salt sweat burned his eyes, or maybe tears. ‘Dharkaron take you, it’s necessary.’
The belt buckle swung from his fingers, flaring in bursts of caught sunlight. No one made a move to take its burden.
‘Mercy of Ath, tie my hands!’ cried their prince, his voice split and baleful with anguish. ‘I’ve a scrying to try that’s very dangerous, and I can’t say what might happen if I’m free.’ He waited no longer, but spun toward Jieret. ‘I beg you, do as I ask.’
‘Don’t put such a task on a boy!’ A blunt, scarfaced man shoved to the fore, prepared in hot outrage to intervene.
Arithon bit back retort, that worse things had been asked and done already. ‘Loop it tight,’ he insisted as the man bent, and tentatively began to lash his ankles.
‘You’ve gone mad,’ someone murmured from the sidelines.
Arithon, eyes blazing, said, ‘Yes.’
He had no time to explain. To Jieret, standing braced with the black blade cradled flat across his forearm, the Master said emphatically and calmly, ‘You’re oathsworn. Now listen to me. I’m going to try sorcery to find out what’s amiss on the riverbank. You must keep my sword and hold it ready. If my body is taken by a fit, call my name. If that fails to rouse me, or if any of these restraints breaks away, you must cut me deep enough to bleed.’
‘But why?’ a man pealed in protest.
Arithon’s attention never shifted from the child.
Under that sharpened scrutiny, Jieret s’Valerient did not waver. The steel rings sewn to his boy’s brigandine flashed in time to rapid breaths and his eyes, grey hazel, never turned. Of them all, only he and Arithon yet knew of the butchery that drenched the moss by Tal Quorin. Between bloodpacted prince and young protege an understanding passed, that word of the atrocity must be kept from the men. The small, square chin, so like Steiven’s and the dark red hair that was Dania’s caused Arithon a spasm of grief.
‘Will you trust me?’ he asked. Man to boy, he made no effort to hide his misgiving. ‘For your family’s sake, can you do this?’
Jieret answered him, faintly. ‘I’ll try.’
