Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts
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country.” A back-handed swipe of his soaked moustache bared the gleam of pearl teeth. “The place is a botched mess of radical currents. Our talent hunters can’t track wounded game through the griped flux in those ranges.”
“That may well be,” Tarens allowed, and drained his own vessel as smartly. Knowledge derived from the past chieftain’s identity validated Cosach’s objection. “Yet I say you’ve never brangled with Rathain’s royal blood-line in person. Kiss yon rabbit’s foot on the hilt of your eating knife. If you wear that for luck, you’re going to need it.”
Cosach belched behind a clamped fist. “The fuzzy token’s a gift from my sister. I wear the toy because she’s a shrew. Apt to notch the man’s ears who tries to dine with a war blade at her table. And did I hear you wrong? You’ve dared suggest I’m no match for a runt who stands barely chest high to a stripling?”
“Yes,” Tarens said, straight-faced.
“Then you’re mushy as pudding!” Cosach waved to hasten the refill, while to Iyat-thos, he demurred, “Caught in a scrap with his Grace, I’d whack his sovereign head with a stick and drag him senseless by the heels. Which question begs asking. Why didn’t you?”
“Because,” Tarens snapped, “just like you’re doing now, I stopped my ears with the bone-brained notion I knew better than Jieret’s instincts. You won’t blindside his Grace by brute force. He’ll foul your plan while you go for your club and be elsewhere before you can swing.”
As the side-lines chorus devolved to a chant for more drink, and a grizzled brute with a badger-pelt jerkin moved to oblige, Tarens stabbed back, “Who’s grown soft, besides? Under Jieret’s hard wisdom, you should burn down your lodge. Do away with the comfort of cabins, before the Light’s campaign to scour Halwythwood makes your people a sitting target.”
“Dismantle the outpost?” Cosach pounded the boards. “Only after I’m senseless! Defeat me, and by rights, you might pitch that besotted idea to our council. I’d have to be laid out unconscious, first. Else while you’re flensed for the barbaric sentiment, Jalienne would eviscerate me.”
“Fall quick, then,” quipped Tarens. “I don’t fear your wife.”
“Merciful Ath! The more fool you, fellow.” Cosach beckoned the cup-bearer on, while a mirthful companion, gleaming with knives, hefted the beer cask and poured.
Tarens held no illusions. Something uncanny bothered his instincts: unease prickled his skin as he raised the next round. Whether for an unknown threat to his liege, or if the boisterous horse-play at hand masked untoward animosity, Jieret’s heritage as a Sight-sensitive talent lent no edge in the present arena. The legendary past chieftain had not been a hard drinker. No secret, apparently, since the on-going odds stacked fast in Cosach’s favour. Tarens prayed for his brother Efflin’s bone head, while dread worm-holed his gut at the unlucky prospect of failure.
To best his rival before he succumbed, he would cheat for bald-faced necessity.
The raptor’s gleam in Cosach’s eyes suggested he angled to muscle the victory, himself. Surrounded by wolves, Tarens needled, “The fatal flaw lies with the inbred drive of Rathain’s crown lineage.” He demolished his portion and banged down his horn. “Your prince can’t escape his compassionate empathy.”
Cosach belted off his share in turn. “That’s your lame excuse for the fact he shed your escort straight off?”
“Acknowledge the weakness,” Tarens attacked. “If not, you leave his Grace’s back exposed to his enemies.”
The grin Cosach returned showed contempt. “I’d correct your limited grasp of royal history. In this very glen, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn once built a gentle stay for his woman that required Fellowship might to unravel. He’ll protect his own interests if he has a mind.”
Tarens bucked the High Earl’s opinion in earnest, while the flagons were topped for the third time. “Before Arithon regains his full memory and recoups the informed mastery to raise such a warding, someone’s human frailty will flush him from cover.”
“That’s why we’re drinking,” Cosach declaimed. Yet the breath he drew for rejoinder stalled as he fumbled his grasp on his cup.
Splattered by spilled beer, Tarens gained only that instant of warning before vertigo up-ended his balance also. His awareness unravelled: no dizzy rush from inebriation. The surrounding forest appeared etched in light just before the night split under what felt like the shock of a thunderbolt. He sensed fear in the bystanders’ dumbfounded shouts. Then the stretched cloth of his cognizance burst. He plunged, wheeling, into the throes of tranced Sight, envisioned through Arithon’s experience …
… in a closed space heated by a cedar fire, rough hands snatched off the blindfold. Blinking, annoyed, he stood amid expectant quiet in a round log building. Facing him, a row of inimical elders perched like mushrooms on squat hide hassocks. Men and old women, each wore a ceremonial mantle stitched with feathers. Greased hair dangled from conical hats, the felt brims pinned with wheat cockades. A wizened shaman at the centre presided. Thin and unkempt as knotted string, his shaved head wore a crust of dun-coloured clay. Bird-black eyes glared from rims of eldritch red paint, and his shoulders were draped with a cape that stylized a mountain raptor.
Magic coiled here, uncanny and sere as an icicle shot through a hot spring.
Trapped in an amber-tinged moment of dream, Tarens felt Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn draw in a wary, taxed breath. Leashed rage burned as, before those uncanny witnesses, he swore a binding oath that seared his spirit to inward revolt …
… Sighted unconsciousness rippled. Tarens resurfaced to open air, seized in shocked silence. Flat on damp earth, bathed in sweat and trembling, he breathed in the musk scent of Halwythwood’s summer oaks and strove to steady his senses. Sobered faces bent over him. No longer ribald, the sturdy scout who had shouldered the cask knelt in shaken concern.
“Are you with us, Iyat-thos?”
“What happened?” Tarens demanded, confused. “That wasn’t the after-effects of strong drink.”
“An event woke the mysteries and tore through the veil,” murmured someone in tremulous awe.
Before explanation, a bullish intrusion elbowed the stunned onlookers aside.
“You received a tranced vision?” Earl Cosach accosted. “What did you see?”
Propped up by earnest hands, Tarens came back to his wits before the chieftain’s glowering presence. “Why did his Grace raise the wardings over this glen?” When no one answered, he pressed, “Earl Jieret was mage-bound to our liege. Whatever just happened, if the ripple twisting the flux cast an echo, I need to know the connection!”
Cosach folded his arms and reluctantly qualified. “Here, long ago, his Grace was said to lie with his beloved. The union begun was the first, and not consummate. Yet legend and our historical record confirm the couple’s twined passion awakened the mysteries. The linked spirits of the crown prince and his mate excited the land’s electromagnetics and unleashed a grand confluence. The upshift in resonance retuned the octaves this side of the veil. All reactive connections since then are more volatile. Possibly the event you experienced was provoked by a harmonic connection.”
“I dreaded as much.” Tarens covered his face, his anguish muffled through tensioned fingers. “But the fragmented view I received hasn’t disclosed the meaningful impact.”
“What did you observe?” Cosach repeated more gently. “I sensed that his Grace was held in duress. But the impression arose without context.”
Tarens shuddered and bared his flushed features. “If I saw true, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn has just willingly sworn a binding oath under an arcane power.” Burdened with grief, the crofter described the outlandish scene in detail.
Mention of the shaman in black scalded Cosach to swearing