The Curse of the Mistwraith

connected her through the matrix to the crystal’s reservoir of stored energies. Elaira’s trial record was drawn forth and a set of personal emotions over-rode Lirenda’s selfhood with an intimacy as stifling as suffocation.

Unable to speak or escape, she could only feel. The sensation forced upon her became a turbulence that transported – to a cheerless cellar in a fire-scarred inn where Elaira had lived through early childhood. In a raw and cruel detail, Lirenda experienced the misery of a hovel shared with beggars, and scabby, disease-ridden prostitutes…

Shivering in noxious rags and the sour, shedding leathers of spoiled furs, she remembered wakeful nights spent listening to the wet, tearing coughs of the old man who looked after her as he lay wasting of lung-sickness. Friends were all the wealth a child of the streets might possess. Food, shelter and belongings could be wrested away; as an orphan, disciple of thieves, Elaira well knew how easily. But love and good memories could outlast misfortune, even death.

Until the hour her fledgling talents had led her into straits with the town constable, who sold her into Morvain for rearing in Koriani fosterage, Elaira had made her life rich with caring.

Entangled in the Skyron link, Lirenda felt the mannered austerity she had cultivated as a rich man’s daughter give way before simpler joys that lured her toward destruction like a siren’s song. Wrenched awry by distaste, she forced her violated senses not to pull back and break trance. Her burning ambition to gain a prime’s ultimate power and knowledge lent her strength. She embraced disillusion, accepted the forge-fire of emotion that comprised Elaira’s nature for her own, as Morriel and the demands of the scrying into Kieling Tower required.

The matriarch’s prompt reached her across a haze of distance. ‘Nicely done. Be ready. I shall tie into the lane- force now.’

Morriel’s praise reaffirmed concentration. Though prepared for a shift in perspective, the touch of the fifth lane’s powers did not kindle as Lirenda expected. Trapped in Elaira’s persona, she experienced as the girl would have done, a sensation as wretchedly unpleasant as a drenching cloudburst. Fighting abhorrence and instinct, Lirenda endured this shocking, alien perspective of a spirit attuned to spellcraft through water, when she herself was all fire, unalterably opposed. She must not falter, nor even flinch in disgust, even as self-identity became immolated by Elaira’s unruly passions.

As trance discipline reduced the fifth lane’s energies to a shimmering play of static, Lirenda drifted, embraced by the high, sweet vibration of earthforce. Since Morriel manipulated the scrying, her First Senior’s altered consciousness could not track the flow of time. The next sensation Lirenda experienced was a view of translucent blue twilight over snow-clad hills.

The merlons of an embrasure jutted upward in silhouette; illuminated by what she first took for torchflame, three figures clustered in a semi-circle. Two stood, while the other crouched with hands tucked under the elbows held pressed to his sides. By dint of clothing concocted from what looked like frayed layers of rags, Elaira’s awareness identified the stout person of Dakar the Mad Prophet. The light proved not to be flame, but a spark that seemed fuelled by nothing beyond empty air.

Presented with a view of dark cloaks and hoods harried close by wind to hide the faces inside, Lirenda by herself could not differentiate between the royal half-brothers. Elaira’s more exacting perception discerned at once that one figure was taller. A twist of blond hair flicked loose by a gust established and dismissed him as s’Ilessid. Fixed at once on the smaller man, the imprinted pattern that comprised Elaira’s subjective reaction was swept by an ungodly thrill.

Framed by magelight and a backdrop of louring fog that imposed false dusk upon the scene, Arithon raised his head and looked around. Recognition suffused his glance as if he could sense the Koriani contact bridged through from Camris by crystal.

As acting surrogate for Elaira, Lirenda felt scorched by that gaze. But the rapport that would have quickened her sister initiate to excitement only tantalized the First Enchantress as elusively as the receding edge of a dream. She shivered. As if touched to recoil by empathy, the s’Ffalenn prince on the parapet frowned. He tossed back his hood in sudden tension as a man might measure an opponent. Through a space while the winds whipped his dark locks into tangles, his hand flicked a gesture to Dakar. Captivated by the movement’s instinctive grace, and spontaneously struck by stray recall, Lirenda shared a past memory – of those very same fingers plucking straw from her hair with a tenderness impossible to forget.

Morriel’s voice jabbed through the diversion in a whiplash tone of command: ‘Do not get involved, First Enchantress!’

Lirenda struggled to bridle Elaira’s fascination as Arithon knelt before Dakar.

Whispered words passed between them. Then the Mad Prophet’s face rearranged in pure devilry. ‘You’d never dare.’

A lift of Arithon’s chin gave challenge as he rose back to his feet. ‘Ah, but I would.’ Beneath laughter, his voice held a dissonance like mallet-struck iron. Were Lirenda in control, she would immediately have severed contact; but Elaira’s entrancement hampered judgement. The scrying enchantress dwelt a second too long and Arithon s’Ffalenn seized his opening.

He called to Lysaer, who raised his hands. For a heartbeat, the half-brothers centred a gathering vortex of pent power. Then light speared skyward, virulent as summer lightning. The hollow, booming report of heat-stressed air thundered outward over ruined Ithamon. Lirenda saw the Mistwraith boil clear with a howling clap of wind, to be razed aside by shadow that iced its vapours into a spindrift fall of new snow.

Then, impossibly, Koriani safe-wards crumpled, and the concatenation of reaction surged past shields and into the Skyron focus. Lirenda was tossed physically head over heels. She had no chance to feel bruises. A second surge erupted from Lysaer’s clenched hands, followed by another and another, until her eyes were dazzled sightless and hearing was stunned by rolling waves of sound. The link between the earl’s court and Ithamon buckled into pinwheeling chaos as the lane connection surged into backlash.

Lirenda barely felt the jerk as the Skyron crystal was wrested from her grip. Her awareness of Kieling Tower shattered and Elaira’s persona ripped away, shocking body and mind beyond reach of coherent sensation. Lirenda never felt the cyclone of turbulence that scoured Morriel’s chamber. Cushions exploded like confetti and chests tumbled; the rose and grey marble flooring erupted into a thousand eggshell cracks that showered sharpened fragments through the hangings. Daylight sliced in through rent felt and Lirenda came back to herself. She lay unable to move, winded, befuddled and half blind from the after-image of multiple bolts of pure light.

‘Ath, most merciful Ath,’ her own voice cried across confusion, the envy in her heart unmasked. ‘They hold command of elemental mastery, both of them.’

Through drumrolls of fading thunder and a headache that blossomed like a starburst, Lirenda heard Morriel’s shrill outburst. ‘Imbecile! Fool!’