Clammy with chills, hollowed by weakness that sapped like the aftermath of fever, Arithon rested his cheek on the tree limb. He closed his eyes, inhaled the peppery scent of damp bark, and let that fuse with his being. He quieted. His clasped hands settled and sensitized to the languorous flow of sap. His thoughts became the whisper of leaves, the sunlit flight of pollinating bees, the unfurling of green shoots that thickened with each season’s turn, into stately crown and mighty wood branches. His consciousness spiralled down to encompass the thick black depths of earth, the firm anchored network of tap roots.
Through the irreproachable pith of the living tree, Arithon twined his spell. Like the buds, the leaves, the branches, all groping outward for new growth, he spun the fine tendrils of his wards away from the trunk, that any defender who used its bulk to shield his back would be spared. But any attacker facing inward would find his eyes drawn and subtly captured, while his thoughts slowed to syrup, then to the languid drip of sap.
A human mind ensnared in the consciousness of a tree will sleep, immersed in slow dreams that measure time in stately rhythms, of clean sun and silvered snow and seasons that slide one into another like the rain-kissed drift of autumn leaves.
Which meant, Arithon knew, that any Deshan still standing would slaughter his victims in the half-second their reflexes dragged and the hand on driving blade faltered. Unlike the Etarrans entrapped by the shadow maze in the adjacent valley, these townsmen were given no reprieve. Mastery of their fate was reft from them, with no offered moment of free will in which they could choose to turn aside.
Against a powerful temptation to shelter with them in sunwashed oblivion, Arithon disentwined his consciousness from the tree’s green awareness. He opened his eyes too soon. The part of him still paired to heart- sap and earth peace ripped away into noise and the blood-reek of animal carnage. Below him, the beech roots were mulched over with dead men, their wide open eyes still dreaming, imprinted with sky caught reflections of bark and boughs and leaves.
Arithon retched, then forced a tight grip on raw nerves. He clasped the branch in sweated hands and through guilt and revulsion, took charge of the fruits of his conjury.
Madreigh was down and wounded, Jieret at his shoulder with Alithiel bloodied in his hand. Two clansmen, both injured, were still on their feet, while outside the canopy of the beech tree, enemies crumpled to their knees, lost to mind and awareness. Beyond these, more headhunters checked in fear of the bane that had invisibly struck down their fellows. Outrage would soon overcome their apprehension and drive them to vigorous retaliation.
‘Don’t face inward, don’t look at the tree,’ Arithon instructed the surviving clansmen. He then asked numb limbs to move, and proved shaking hands could still grip. Somehow he swung to the ground. Hands tried to steady him as he swayed. He pushed them impatiently away. ‘Don’t trust what you’re going to see. The reinforcements will all be mine.’ He caught his sticky blade from Jieret’s grasp. ‘Just run, and don’t for any reason turn back.’ To the boy’s alarmed look, he added quickly, ‘I’ll be with you. Go.’
He punctuated his instruction with a light slap on Jieret’s shoulder. Then, leaning on Alithiel to keep balance, he knelt, bent his head and spun illusion.
Even depleted as he was, his inborn gift would always answer. Now he was alone and the risks were to himself, he dared risk shadow in limited countermeasure. Darkness flowed freely to his use as water might beat from a cataract. And as he had done another night in Steiven’s supply tent, he bent conjury into the shape and form of warriors.
They emerged from brush and thicket with weapons gleaming, and bows nocked with broadheads in their hands. If their faces lacked character, if their step was inhumanly silent, discrepancy was covered by the scream and clash of fighting that echoed from the grottos by Tal Quorin. Since the appearance of reinforcing clansmen befitted a strategy to cover the flight of three fugitives, any headhunters not turned by the sleep-snare were scarcely minded to pause in analytical study. Caught inside arrow range when Arithon’s shadow-men knelt and pulled recurves, most wisely, Pesquil’s men who still had wits and footing broke and dived under cover.
Their panicked haste might have amused, had the arrows when they arced not been made up of fancy and desperation.
Arithon stirred, looked up, and tried to muster resource to rise and continue after Jieret. He managed neither. His miscalculation was not surprising, after the strictures he had broken. Before the foot and the knee that failed his will lay Madreigh, a tear in his chest that welled scarlet over his buckskins at each gasp.
‘Ath,’ Arithon said. He sat. Stupid with weakness, he met the eyes of the man, which stayed lucid through a suffering that should have eclipsed recognition.
‘My liege.’ Madreigh drew a scraping breath. ‘Go on. After the boy. You’re oathbound.’
A scathing truth; one Arithon understood he had to answer for. Except he was drained to his dregs from misused expenditure of magecraft. Since he could not immediately master himself, he did as he wished and snatched up Madreigh’s wrist. In a whisper that seemed the utterance of a ghost he said, ‘I also took oath for Rathain and look, you die for it.’
Beyond speech, Madreigh looked at him.
Arithon spread the clansman’s limp fingers and pressed them, already chilled, against the bole of the beech tree. He closed his own hands over the top. Then with a gesture that lanced blackness and sparks through his mind, he wrenched back the fast-fading glimmer of his spellcraft and let it flow like a mercy-stroke over the clansman’s consciousness.
Sleep took Madreigh’s tortured frame. His face under its grit and grey hair gentled, all sorrows eased into the sundrenched serenity of ancient trees.
Empty with remorse, Arithon opened his fingers. Half-tranced from exhaustion he regarded his circle of quiet dead, clad in leather and blood; or wearing city broadcloth and chain mail pinched with weedstalks and dirt. The only censure for the mage-trained, he sadly found, was adherence to truth and self-discipline. No mind with vision was exempt; creation and destruction were one thread. One could not weave with Ath’s energies without holding in equal measure the means to unstring and unravel.
The blood had left his head. He understood if he tried to move, he would only fall down spectacularly. Oblivious to the shouting and the battering scream of killing steel, he cupped his chin and surrendered to the shudders that racked him. He had acted outside of greed or self-interest, had to the letter of obligation fulfilled his bound oath to the Deshans. Duty did not cleanly excuse which lives should be abandoned to loss, or which should be taken to spare others: Steiven’s clansmen, last survivors of savage persecution, or Pesquil’s headhunters, still heated from their spree of unlicensed rapine and slaughter. No answer satisfied. No law insisted that justice stay partnered by mercy.
The day’s transgressions abraded against s’Ffalenn conscience like the endless pound of sea waves tearing bleak granite into sand. Through a fog that forgot to track time, Arithon noticed the rhythmic well of fluid from
