The Curse of the Mistwraith

he decided what should be salvaged.’ A bored gesture encompassed a lumpish bundle wrapped in leather tied with twine.

‘I wouldn’t handle that,’ Traithe warned, already too late.

The Mad Prophet’s meddlesome fingers triggered a burst of blue-violet light. A crack shocked the air, capped by Dakar’s yell of pain. He recoiled, still howling, while the bundle he had disarranged rolled precipitately off the shelf.

It struck the floor with a note like sheared glass and another blinding flash seared away the leather wrappings. Blinking through a veil of afterimage and an acrid puff of ash, Lysaer saw a melon-sized violet jewel bounce and roll across the flags. The facets blazed and fountained sparks at each contact with the stone.

‘Fiends plague it!’ Dakar licked smarting knuckles and turned a baleful glare upon Traithe. ‘That’s the Waystone of the Koriathain!’

‘Obviously so.’ Shadows swooped in the flamelight as the sorcerer pushed aside his opened chest, leaned down and matter-of-factly fielded the rolling crystal. The sparks died. No punitive sting met his touch.

‘Morriel would sell her virginity to know where that thing went!’ Mollified, Dakar added, ‘She and her pack of witches have been searching for centuries, and Sethvir’s kept her Waystone here, hidden all this time?’

Traithe turned the huge amethyst in his hands, absorbed by the captured light that spiked through its purple- black depths. ‘Since nobody asked your crude opinion, I shall tell you once: the Prime Enchantress had only to inquire after the Waystone’s location.’ His eyes flicked up, piercingly sharp. ‘Naught but Morriel’s stubborn pride kept the jewel at Althain.’

But nuance was wasted upon Dakar, who loosed a boyish whistle. ‘The bitches will be hot, when they learn.’

The prospect of a scandal none but a fool would precipitate spurred Traithe to reproach. ‘We would all be better served if you would go and ask Sethvir for scrap leather that would do for replacement wrappings.’

Too wily to cross a sorcerer who used that tone of voice, Dakar departed grumbling obscenities. Left in the company of an undesirably curious prince, Traithe made an end of the matter. ‘The Waystone was mislaid during the rebellion. As you observed, it is perilously warded. The Koriani Senior Circle was negligent to leave so powerful a talisman unguarded.’

Traithe did not add that the loss of their great focus had also curtailed the order’s propensity for interfering in affairs beyond their understanding. Sethvir was unlikely to volunteer the Waystone’s location to the Prime Circle that craved its recovery. The Warden of Althain could be guileful as Davien the Betrayer when he chose; never mind that he appeared as honest as a clear glass of water.

Traithe fixed Lysaer with a gaze impenetrable as ink. ‘If you’ll finish unwrapping this bundle, I think you’ll find what we came for.’ He set aside the Great Waystone and tossed across one of two items half-swaddled on the lid of the trunk.

Lysaer caught the packet and stripped off the final layers of linen to bare a thin gold circlet, unornamented beyond a thready, age-worn line of runes. The smaller item undone by Traithe proved to be a hexagonal tortoiseshell box. Inside, nested in sheepskin, sparkled a matched collection of rubies.

At least a dozen in number, the set was cut to a perfection beyond reach of mortal artisans. The gems required no setting to impress; their depth of colour glinted like live fire in the flare of the torch by the doorway. Lysaer gasped, dazzled by the legacy that awaited the dyer’s lad soon to be unveiled as the crown prince of Havish.

‘The regalia was melted down for bounty gold,’ Traithe remarked sadly. For an instant he seemed less than wizard, and more a lame, very worn old sword-captain lost in reminiscence of ill times. ‘The desecration was a great pity. But Telmandir was the first of the royal seats to be sacked and set to the torch. Only the jewels and the king’s youngest child could be saved.’

Lysaer noted the sorcerer’s regret, but only distantly. Stark though the circlet in his hands might be it was old; its nicks and dents bespoke modest origins. Diminished to realize how very ancient were the high kingdoms of Athera, and given sense of the wide span of generations the blood lines hand-picked by the Fellowship must have ruled, Lysaer was moved to awe.

The battered circlet of the Princes of Havish, and the rubies torn at need from a regalia whose magnificence could only be imagined implied a stability shattered wholesale; and sacrifice akin to the straits that had caused the Paravians to build Althain Tower in the bleak hills of a wilderness to safeguard an irreplaceable tradition. Lysaer felt humbled.

His inheritance as s’Ilessid on Athera was vast in comparison to the tiny island kingdom left behind on the world of his birth.

The pomp, the wealth, every ceremonial pageantry that had seemed part and parcel of kingship was abruptly rendered meaningless: he perceived how narrow was his experience and how limited his vision. The presumption shamed him, that he had dared to set judgement on the lives of the Camris barbarians. Their plight must be better understood to be fairly handled; a stricture that must start with rebuilding trust with his half-brother. Brought to painful self-honesty, Lysaer realized that to do right by the kingdom of Tysan, he must embrace a new concept of justice. The tinker’s workmanship in the old circlet and the uncanny loveliness of Havish’s crown jewels compelled a cold and difficult review of his mortal strengths and talent.

Lysaer returned the artifact to Traithe, gentled by diffidence he had shown no one living. ‘I’m thankful for your offer to school my gift of light. But I see very clearly: a mage’s training is not my course to pursue. My part in confronting the Mistwraith is but the prelude to healing the rift between townborn and clansman. The greater good of Tysan must demand my total dedication.’

Struck by the depths of sincerity that prompted this prince’s self-sacrifice, Traithe closed his hands, quenching the blood-fire of the rubies. His sorrows as sorcerer compounded with fierce foreboding for the future spelled out by the strands. Like the Great Waystone the Koriani enchantresses ached to recover, the cache of sapphires that were the crown jewels of Tysan must remain in Sethvir’s trust at Althain. That this gently-reared descendant of Tysan’s kings, whose shining talent was inspired rule, should one day through the Mistwraith’s machination refute the fine intentions that now moved his mind and heart seemed an impossibly cruel twist of fate.

Harbingers

In the cold light of dawn, a dark horse with a black-clad rider canters south, for Ghent in the kingdom of Havish; beneath the hunting bow and traplines of a forester’s trade, he bears a concealed set of rubies and a circlet, while a raven swoops on a following breeze over his silver-banded hat…

High above