Asandir shivered in an icy blast of wind. He tugged his cloak closer to his shoulders and discovered himself alone on the battlements of Kieling. Lysaer and Dakar had abandoned him to solitude, and to the depthless mist that sheathed a glowering twilight sky. The Paravian towers seemed to brood through the gloom, lightlessly and empty and dark.
Elsewhere in Ithamon’s ruins, Arithon perched on the curve of a fallen corbel, his lyranthe rested silent on his knee. He had chosen his vantage site at random. The littered courtyard before him in prosperous years had served the merchants who supplied broadcloth to the tailors. Those slates not scabbed over with grit and moss showed wheel scars from the drays that had carried imported velvets and brocades from weavers in Cildom and Narms. But Arithon gave that past no thought where he sat, his hands clasped limp on his soundboard, and his eyes pinched closed in frustration.
His every nerve end was raw.
Music, which had always been his first solace, this day came to him soured. He could not play. Each time he set fingers to strings, the perception that inspired his art left him defenceless against the insatiable whirl of spirit life imbued within ruined Ithamon. Ancestors winnowed past his innermind, calling his name and imploring. Those whose ends had come untimely in the upheaval of the rebellion troubled him less than others born of an earlier era, when Paravians had inhabited the surrounding hills, and diversion of the Severnir’s waters had not rendered all the land barren. Spirits whose passage through time had left no regrets to sigh in descant between the winter winds; these had touched rock and soil and the weathered remains of fine carving with resounding vibrations of content. Their fragile, lost chord of celebration hurt an uncrowned prince the most, for in the absence of heritage and inhabitants, their song cried out for restoration of the city that lay splintered in ruin.
Hounded to sadness by misfortune that he alone was empowered to redress, Arithon sighed. He should have chosen a sword to accompany his mood in this place, not the instrument he cradled in a silence that painfully accused. Stubbornness held him rooted. He would deaden his ear and strike notes that were feelingless, even false, before he opened himself to sorrows that had utterly reft his peace.
A fool he was, to have disdained Asandir’s warning in Caith-al-Caen!
Mage-taught wisdom reproached him: any gift of power was two-edged. The awareness of Paravian beauty he had accepted in blithe carelessness now chafed him like a thousand raw sores. But to do without, to close off that channel of inner vision, was to render himself pitiful, to blind himself to hope, and what he now recognized for the shining, enduring truth that set the spirit outside time and mortal decay.
Sooner would he bind himself to the misery promised by the crown of Rathain. Ties of kingship, after all, were only temporary. Death would free him, at the end.
Dusk blurred the pewter edges of broken stone. Light bled out of the mist, leaving murk as dense as musty felt. Arithon hunched against the chill, his arms crossed over Elshian’s superlative lyranthe, unaware. If he heard the step that approached, he dismissed it along with the spirit forms that plucked incessantly at the conscience he held closed and barred against them; and others, more sinister, that reached as if to tear his living flesh.
‘Blessed Ath, here’s twice I mistook you for a statue!’ Lysaer called through the muffling layers of the scarf he had wound at his neck. The temperature had dropped since afternoon, and the air smelled of snow. ‘You must be freezing.’
Arithon opened his eyes and saw that full night had fallen. He changed grip on his lyranthe, discovered his fingers were numb and flipped down his cuffs to shelter his knuckles from the tireless bite of the wind. A musician’s instincts to preserve the hands from the elements died hard.
‘Move over, will you?’ Lysaer demanded of the half-brother who appeared to have forgotten him. ‘I’d like to sit down.’
Arithon inclined his head in belated greeting. He shifted aside, his tunic snagging on edges of chipped fretwork. As he braced his shoulder against the broken door post at his back, a gust sang through the lyranthe’s exposed strings.
Unsettled by the mournful ring of harmonics and by the close-bound air of desolation, Lysaer crowded in and attempted without success to settle comfortably. ‘You pick the most miserable sites for your brooding. Is it perversity, or a masochistic effort to drive away unwanted company?’
Arithon faintly smiled. ‘Probably both.’ He did not ask what brought his half-brother out into a dismal winter night when Dakar had slaughtered the ewe bought away from a migrant herder. A savoury mutton stew was sure to be bubbling over the fire in Kieling’s lower ward room, where, uncommon to stone buildings anywhere else, draughts did not chill a man’s blood.
Unsurprised to be offered no opening, Lysaer picked at the lichens rooted deep in old carving and said, ‘I wanted to ask. Did you notice this place is haunted?’
Arithon loosed a bark of sharp laughter. ‘Did I
Lysaer stayed his impulse to draw away. He might not share his half-brother’s inclinations, to set music before the needs of kingdom and people, but he had sworn to try to understand. Since Asandir had done little by way of kindness to compensate for unwanted burdens, Arithon’s pique was forgivable, if not entirely just.
His eyes on the grain of the marble revealed under his fretful touch, Lysaer tried a fresh approach. ‘I don’t have a mage’s sensitivity. Where you and Asandir see mysteries, I find only broken stone that fills me with an unmanly urge to weep.’ He gestured toward the interlace his hands had cleared of debris. ‘Except for the remains of their artistry, the Paravians to me are just a name, and the wistful feeling that’s left of a dream after waking.’
A sidelong glance showed Arithon’s manner still inclined toward abstraction.
Reluctantly aware he must reveal himself to establish rapport, Lysaer pressed on. ‘I think of home, and am not comforted. Somehow I sense that Amroth would disappoint me if I were to find my way back. As if this place held a truth that taunts and eludes me.’
Arithon turned his head. He was listening with no trace of his earlier, corrosive sarcasm.
Yet the captured quiet of the Master’s attention became no more reassuring; a mage’s mystery backed his calm, indefinably poised, and though it might not overtly threaten, it observed in ruthless detail. Lysaer put aside his fear of seeming foolish and forced himself to continue. ‘The haunting I speak of is not at all the same. I notice it when we are outside the protection of the tower. It seems to grow stronger, more suffocating, the longer we battle the Mistwraith. I wanted to know if you felt anything similar. Do you think the sensation could be connected? With Desh-thiere, that is, not Ithamon.’
Now Arithon shivered once, violently, as though his prolonged exposure to the cold all at once caught up with him. His reply came dry in the darkness. ‘Why not ask Asandir?’
