The Curse of the Mistwraith

‘Get into the wagon and hold on,’ Asandir commanded.

Dakar leaped the buckboard and scrambled to snatch up the reins. Lysaer scrambled over the high sides behind the wheel, while the sorcerer strode forward, grasped the paint’s bridle, and positioned his feet precisely upon the nexus of the focus.

Sethvir called out in farewell and the vault burst asunder in an explosion of unbearable blue light.

Darkness ripped down hard after, relentless as the void between the Veil. If Lysaer cried out, his ears recorded no sound. His senses overturned, as if he, the rough wood he sat on, even the horses tied by their bridle reins overturned in a gut-twisting series of somersaults. Too late he recalled Dakar’s flippant comment: but having no breakfast in him to lose, only bile burned the back of his throat.

Thrilled and frightened by the pull of forces beyond understanding, Lysaer clung to fast-fraying shreds of self- control.

Then a jolt slammed the boards beneath his body. Wind compressed from his lungs and his stomach plummeted back into his middle in a wrench fit to tear a gut. The unsprung dray hit earth with a crash that jarred the supplies in the back, Arithon’s limp form and everyone else’s teeth with undivided viciousness. Pebbles spanged out from under the iron-rimmed wheels, and with an appalling creak and a clatter of hooves from panicked horses, the vehicle lurched and rolled as natural order intended.

Winter wind slashed through Lysaer’s hair. He recovered a ratcheting breath, discovered his eyes squeezed shut and his hands locked rigidly to the side-boards. When he mastered the wits to risk a look, disbelief shocked him like icewater. Tower, vault and pattern were wholly swept away. Through a dissolving haze of blue sparks and an after-stink of ozone, he beheld a changed landscape and mist silvered with new day. Under a brooding grey sky, gusts raked through feathered brown grass, stripped trees and black, striated rock that gouged through soil and dead briar. Lysaer felt dizzied, sick and disoriented. He was still battling to reconcile his shaken nerves, when the impossible solidity of the land, the rutted dirt lane the dray thundered down and the flying clods gouged up by the horses, who raced ahead in stark fear – everything pretematurally made real by the loosening coils of grand magic – tilted hard sideways and overturned.

‘You’re going to faint,’ Asandir said with incisive clarity from a point somewhere inside the wagon.

Vertigo swallowed Lysaer’s sight. He sensed no pain as his gold-thatched head banged into a sack of iron cooking-pots, but heard only the clang of impact melded with words made blurred through a distance of fading awareness. ‘Ath’s mercy on you, prophet, for I’ll show none if the s’Ilessid heir falls out.’

The Paravians called the place Caith-al-Caen, Vale of Shadows, by the dawn of the Second Age. Common usage corrupted the name of the ruin there to Castlecain, though from a vantage halfway up a mist- cloaked hillside the reason seemed obscured. The site never held any fortress. All that remained of the clay and thatch croft where Cianor Sunlord had been born were hummocks where orchards had stood. Yet as Asandir wound his way over ground that once had held gardens of scented, flowering trees, his eyes saw beyond bleak mist and sere landscape. If he looked with his mage’s vision, the shadows, the memories, that abiding resonance of mystery that lingered wherever the old races had cherished the earth skeined like star-lit thread through the cross-laced, dead canes of briar.

Ballads held that a place beloved by unicorns never quite lost the aura of their presence. At Caith-al-Caen, the adage held true; while Asandir strode through weeds napped like velvet with dew, his peripheral vision and the limits just beyond hearing entangled him in echoes of the past. Here, when the splendours of the Second Age were yet young, the Riathan had gathered each solstice to renew the earthpowers and to rejoice in the turn of the seasons. The ecstasy in their music had marked the very soil, and now wind itself mourned the loss. Even after a thousand years, the land remained blessed with a grace that haunted. An energy coursed through the soil that glorified life; even under Desh-thiere’s curse, the hills each spring put forth a knee-high carpet of flowers and rowan still thrust through the bracken.

Now, under winter’s frosts, only the spirits lingered, ethereal as shadings in silverpoint, their dance songless and silent. The sorcerer walked, careful not to look too closely to either side. The memories of too many friends watched his back with pity and reproach. Sorrow had scribed too many creases around his eyes, and hope had eased too few.

‘Dael-Farenn, kingmaker!’ lisped the wind as it curled through his hair. ‘What have you done with your hope, your dreams, your joy? The dance is not ended, not yet. For the song will renew with the sunlight.’ Could Asandir close his ears he would have; but the hearing of a mage went beyond reliance on the flesh. The voices and the spirits dogged his innermind, each step; he would answer their pleas, but at a cost that anguished to contemplate.

He crested the rise. Beyond spread the hollow where the Ilitharis Paravians had first Named the winter stars. The place retained a serenity that would abide through ages still to come, however much strife marred the world. Informed of the Master’s presence by a bright-edged spill of lyranthe notes, Asandir stopped dead. His hands and his throat tightened. As though touched by his sharp trepidation, the voices on the wind palled to murmurs and the spirits swirled away, brilliance dimmed; while through a perception that threatened to unman him, Asandir heard Arithon play Maenalle’s gift with a touch unfettered by bitterness.

Arpeggios rippled and soared, linked by grace-notes that revealed, like unfinished tapestry, the latent promise of the bard. Cut diamonds had less clarity. The s’Ffalenn heir already possessed a skill that could pierce the heart; offered freedom to pursue his desire, and given the right master, his talent could be refined to a grace that held power to captivate.

Woodenly, Asandir pressed forward. His deerhide soles grated over stone, deliberate warning to the minstrel that solitude had been breached. Arithon glanced over his shoulder, saw his visitor and smiled. The reflexive, hair- trigger wariness that on prior occasions had hardened him never arose. As if his licence to share the risks in quelling the meth-snakes had triggered catharsis, the music flowed from him unchecked. By the lyrical, ringing undertone, no Fellowship sorcerer could mistake that this time the s’Ffalenn heir played to share unconditionally.

Asandir fought his wish to turn away, to retrace his path to the valley and leave Caith-al-Caen to the spirits and the bard; instead he steeled his will and assimilated the hurtful whole: his mage’s vision showed him the colours of Arithon’s aura shot through with absolute trust.

The final steps toward the hollow became unbearably hard to complete. Asandir managed, though the wear left by centuries of service suddenly bore down on him and the wind pried his hair and clothing like the tug of hostile hands. He reached the stone where Arithon sat and regarded the mist and the shadows until the song reached its natural end. When the last note faded into stillness, he settled at the Master’s side.

‘Why?’ he asked softly, though in depth, he already knew.

Arithon settled the lyranthe into the crook of his elbow and answered the question’s drift. ‘I finally had proof that your promise of free will was genuine.’ Green eyes turned, but Asandir could no longer meet them.