motion that must not now be undone.
Cut by regret and infinite pity, he bent also and gathered Arithon’s shivering shoulders into the embrace a parent might show to a child about to be orphaned. ‘You can block the visions at will by sealing off your inner sight.’
Arithon twisted against the sorcerer’s hold, his face all puzzled delight. ‘Why ever should I want to?’
Asandir released his grip as though burned. Too choked to breathe, far less speak, he whirled away and strode off.
The spirits that haunted Caith-al-Caen were as pale glimmers, their measure a dance of celebration incanted and renewed through countless turns of seasons. Here the Paravian singers had transmuted only joy. The vibrations imbued within the ruins of the traditional s’Ffalenn seat of power, Ithamon, where the Fellowship proposed to see Desh-thiere’s stranglehold over sky and sunlight broken, were not at all the same.
Amid foundations shattered by the uprising and the bones of unburied dead, the four towers raised by the Paravians still stood, their wards pristine and still radiant. The contrast between their enduring, virginal harmony and the tormented backlash of magics unleashed by the fall of the King’s Tower that coiled like a wraith through the wreckage was a thousand times more poignant than the haunting of Caith-al-Caen, and stark with the blood and tragedy of displaced lives and dreams.
Arithon might shut such clamour out, but at the cost of his bardic inspiration; and the compassion that was permanently ingrained in every scion of the s’Ffalenn line would disallow any such voluntary deafness.
Irony within irony, Asandir knew, as his feet stumbled in unabashed haste and his clothing hooked on the briars. The king for Rathain would be bought in false guilt against every dedicated principle of the Fellowship whose first task was to foster enlightenment. For the prince now entranced by the unicorn spirits lacked the hardened self-wisdom to stand down Ithamon’s past. He was too young, too strong and too much the puppet of pity to perceive that responsibilities were always self-imposed.
On fostering that lie, Athera’s need depended; and on a tender innocence paired like a curse with resilience enough not to flee.
The road across Daon Ramon Barrens was barely more than a dirt-track, half overgrown and winding between hills raked by winds that never seemed to quiet. Tired of the whisper and rattle of dead bracken, of the incessant tug and snap at his cloak hem and hair perpetually whipped into tangles, Lysaer kept good spirits, buoyed by certainty that the interval of being adrift without kingdom or purpose would end after conquest of Desh-thiere.
Never mind that, league on league, the landscape was unremittingly deserted and bare; that winter rains soaked his clothing and blankets, and Dakar’s invective worsened since the morning he woke up with iyats in his boots, and Asandir once again had to rescue him from the energy sprites’ bedevilment. No other diversions arose through weary days of travel, for their route took them far from even the most isolated initiate’s hostel: tinkers, traders and caravans did not travel the old road to Ithamon. As if the way itself, with its lichened markers and rolling, briar-grown hills was haunted, not even the ruins of farm hamlets or villages remained to remind of a prosperous past.
‘That’s because there were none,’ Asandir confided over the jingle of harness and the booming grind of the dray’s wheels over bare scarps of stone. The rain had stopped at midday and water puddled silver in the hollows. ‘Daon Ramon in the old tongue means “golden hills”. The place was the province of the Riathan Paravians and unicorns require no dwellings.’
Unwilling to let the sorcerer lapse into the forbidding silence that had gripped him since Althain Tower, Lysaer gestured toward the hillsides with their cover of bracken and thorn. ‘It seems hard to picture this place as fertile and green.’
‘It was, and beautifully so.’ Asandir urged his mount over a gully where the road had washed out and the slates lay jammed like old bones in a spongy bed of moss. His silver-grey eyes seemed to pierce the mantle of mist and peer far into distance. ‘All that you see was a grassland, rich with herbs and wildflowers. Winters were short and mild. But that changed, after the rebellion. Townsmen believed the magic of the Paravians could not abide in a land without water. They went to astonishing lengths to assuage their fears. The governor’s council of Etarra funded a force of mercenaries to dam the Severnir. A great canal was cut through the Skyshiel Mountains to divert the river at its source. The current flows east, now, and empties into Eltair Bay.’
‘That seems a mighty effort to base on a superstition,’ Lysaer commented.
Asandir rode on in troubled silence. Then he said, ‘So long as these hills remain a desert, no Paravian would return to dwell here. So you see, the townsmen’s intent was suited after all.’
The damp weather held and night fell early. By then, Asandir’s party made camp in a grotto formed by a jutting outcrop of cracked boulders. The only bit that stayed dry was the nook where the fire burned and Dakar crouched there, roasting rabbits that Arithon and Lysaer had snared before dusk. Asandir knew where to find herbs, and beside the odours of wet earth and damp horses, the air carried the savoury smell of stew.
Lysaer huddled between the slow drip of a natural spring and a falling spray of run-off, shirtless, his cloak tossed across his shoulders. With a needle and thread borrowed from the supply-pack, he was immersed in determined effort to mend a tear where a briar had torn his sleeve. Attendant on his progress was the Mad Prophet, in rare high humour at the prospect of a meal of fresh meat.
‘You’re making that thing into ruffles better suited to a tavern doxie,’ Dakar said in unasked-for criticism.
Embarrassed by his ineptness when he had been surrounded by women at their embroidery all his life, Lysaer managed a laugh. ‘If the ruffles keep out the cold, I don’t care.’
Dakar sampled the contents of his supper pot, licked the spoon, and resumed stirring. ‘Don’t jerk the stitches so tight. Everybody knows you’re irritated.’
At a loss for subtle rejoinder, Lysaer welcomed the intrusion when Arithon stirred from the shadows and insinuated himself in the fray.
‘Don’t gloat,’ the Master advised the Mad Prophet. ‘Princes don’t freely choose to keep their clothes until they rot in rags off their backs.’
Laid open to insult by his threadbare and weather-faded plaid, Dakar subsided to a glower. To his half-brother, Arithon added, ‘If you don’t mind wearing what looks like a sail-maker’s patch, there’s a better way to fix that.’
Lysaer surrendered needle and linen with a gratitude that unfailingly melted hearts. ‘These clothes would hardly impress anyone before they were torn.’ To Dakar he added quietly, ‘The s’Ffalenn bastard’s made a fool of you
