Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts
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madness. Their sentries use buzzards for scout’s eyes, did you know? Besides the unsavoury fact that they murder strangers on sight, they serve their retribution by ritual butchery. They could be holding our prince for a barbaric rite of execution!”
“No,” Tarens assured. “I gathered our liege is not under threat.” Muddled with drink and fretful unease, he sought the comfort of back-handed assets. “If the Ettin society is defensively insular, they’re unlikely to sell his Grace out to enemies, or welcome a dedicate invasion sent into their midst by the True Sect priests.”
“They’d skewer our peaceful emissary as readily.” Cosach fingered the dagger struck through his belt. “Don’t think you’d fare any better as town-born. Those savages desecrate their human kills. String the flayed carcasses over the cliffs for their pet vultures to feed on the carrion.”
Tarens offered a hand to the Halwythwood chieftain, grateful this once for the aggressive strength that steadied him onto his feet. “Then we have little choice but to fashion a plan to draw Arithon away.”
Legs braced to offset the surfeit of beer, Cosach shut his eyes in morose forbearance. “I would sooner dig my own grave with bare hands! But in fact, we need help from that gormless worm of a traitor.”
“Dakar?” quipped one of the by-standing scouts. “You want the raunch wastrel shaken down?”
Cosach grimaced. “First we have to find him. Much as the prospect pains me, that spellbinder’s the only spirit we have who might know what caused tonight’s rip in the veil. More, if we have to twist his fat arms and spit him over a bonfire, he’ll serve us with the arcane tricks to blindside the hexed birds that keep watch for the Ettinmen.”
In cold-sober fact, the Mad Prophet would fight tooth and nail before crossing his path with Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn. Although a slow death by roasting seemed preferable did not mean fate granted him a blind eye. Always, his fickle penchant for augury upset his bone-deep cowardice. Where other seers lost their faculties in the static clouding the Storlain flux stream, the discredited master spellbinder sprawled in the gutter, naked and helplessly wrestling to stifle the torrent of unwanted vision.
Ratted out by a doxie, brow-beaten with threats, he cringed at the feet of a furious pimp outside the whore-house in Backwater. “Be off!” The ignoramus tossed Dakar’s shucked clothing after him. “I won’t peddle my girls to dark-mongering devils! Or risk them to the horrors of death rituals and evil practice!”
The spellbinder rolled clear of a puddle of horse-piss. Draped in flung cloth like a ragman, and pinked by the gravel paving, he cradled his splitting headache and winced. Since the region as yet had no temple faction frothing to burn suspect talent, he gave injured tongue in retort. “Crazy jape! Look past the ripe nuggets plucked out of your arse! I have nothing to do with black arts or necromancy.”
“Eternal Light burn your spirit, I’ll hear no more lies!” The bawdy-house rooster slammed his door with a boom that cracked echoes down the lake-front alley. In final retort from a top-storey window, the dainty hands lately prised off Dakar’s pleased flesh jettisoned his orphaned boots. The scuffed footwear plummeted, streaming the tongues of his hose, and thwacked into his hunched shoulders.
Which abuse failed to stem his Sighted view of the disaster unfolding in the high Storlains. Dakar cursed the spiteful doxie with a venom she scarcely deserved. She had not disparaged his prowess in bed, at least until his outburst in actualized Paravian ignited the mattress beneath them. The shocking disruption had done little good: his barrage of Sighted talent continued apace. Better the footwear had knocked him unconscious than to bear further witness to Arithon’s straits.
Dakar unhooked the small-clothes snagged on his ear. Spitting out the taste of horse-urine and sour nausea, he stood and jammed on his trousers. He refused to suffer the ghastly mistake; could not bear watching Rathain’s prince swear child-right at Ettinmere by the Prime Matriarch’s dastardly scheming. Without looking, the Mad Prophet knew how a crystal shard had been imprinted to spring Arithon’s downfall: how not, tricked into falsified belief that his cherished enchantress had betrayed him, with his steadfast love wielded as a tool by a dutiful Koriathain.
No recourse, for the misery: the record was true. A past Prime’s directive once had sought to turn Elaira’s affection against him. But the partial view had shaped a tactical deceit, deliberately planted for Arithon’s search of her cabin. The impact shook the deep bulwark of a trust yet held flawless between them. But only the uncut perspective of the complete incident could refute the invidious fragment of evidence.
Dakar ground his teeth, ridden by the benighted vision of Arithon’s reciting his oath before the Ettinmere elders. No recall of his Masterbard’s knowledge of law had served the gravity of due warning. To his Grace, bludgeoned into numbed bitterness, the sacrificed years while a child matured seemed a meaningless pittance, where by a more callous measure, the stakes should have hurled Vivet’s venal dilemma off the nearest cliff.
“Once in your life, just this once, Arithon!” Dakar fumed. “Be the natural bastard, scrap ethics and fly into a rage! Don’t indulge every damned self-righteous idiot who tweaks your bleeding heart! Lash out! Dharkaron Avenger wept, don’t shoulder the load for a wanton git who’s been gaffed by Selidie’s filthy directive!”
Yet Arithon checked his prickly temper and let himself become shackled.
Dakar winced, as the ceremony of child-right concluded. Stuffed back into his shirt, uncaring the garment was inside out, he ploughed into the marshy breeze off the lake and sought the first lit casement. Shoved into the rowdiest waterman’s dive, he perched like a glum toadstool and ordered a jug of cheap gin. He popped the cork. Swallowing down the raw liquid, he begged sorry fate for the grace to pass out before prescience disclosed the outcome.
Yet even Backwater’s rot-gut gin failed to grant him oblivion fast enough.
Dakar felt the visceral, glass edge of pain as Arithon stepped from the timbered building. Vivet met him on the plank stair, crowned by a wreath of flowers. Pulled forward and pounded on the back by her jubilant relatives, he found himself prodded by too many hands, then seized and kissed by chattering sisters. Revolted, in leashed fury, he endured the embrace of her brothers and cousins, gathered into the circle of family.
Prophet, accursed with true Sight, Dakar caught the wretched reaction twofold: as the fickle flux in the Storlains surged clear, and Elaira suffered the intimate view through Arithon’s dumbfounded eyes. She echoed the recoil of his clubbed surprise. Wept, while the noisy, exuberant crowd received him as one of their own.
Child-right, in Ettinmere, involved more than the rearing of offspring. The horror dawned late, that his earnest consent saddled him with a nuptial celebration. The happy crowd hazed him and plucked at his clothes. Crude laughter and jokes herded him towards a hut to bed Vivet as though joined in marriage.
Dakar recognized the set to Arithon’s shoulders. The Teir’s’Ffalenn met his unwanted bride like the chained dog jerked towards the kennel.
Then the evil belt of the gin did its work; or else static noise broke Elaira’s empathic connection. Cognizant vision dissolved like dashed foam off a breaker.
Dakar crumpled into a slovenly heap, the plunge into drunken unconsciousness welcomed. While his awareness dimmed, alone in Atainia, a last witness followed the turbulent thread of event closed at Ettinmere Settlement.
Warden of Althain, immersed in broad-scale earth-sense, Sethvir beheld Arithon’s vehement rejection of Vivet’s possessive embrace.
“Would you shame her in public?” a shocked celebrant cried, alike enough to be a sibling.
Arithon returned a vitriol glare. “Your customs,” he cracked, “have the delicacy of rats baked into a wedding cake. I’ve accepted guardianship for the child. After that, who sleeps under your kinswoman’s roof is not my affair. Or your business.”
“And if her brat’s yours?” the fellow pursued.
“No