Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts
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to win my agreement?” Davien chuckled. “Or is this an attempt to stiffen your nerve?”
“Why else are you here?” Dakar snapped. “Except maybe to gloat at the on-going expense of your overtaxed colleagues.”
“I am not crowing!” Davien contradicted. The fixated glitter of black eyes and white teeth like the stoat, he slashed for the jugular. “In fact, my courtesy call is a precaution. Don’t waste your effort or your good name. Because if you proceed, I will stop you.”
“Who are you saving?” Dakar cracked, annoyed. Though his nape puckered up into gooseflesh, he pressed, “Daliana? Or Lysaer? Don’t pretend you stirred a finger to spare me. After your handling of the Teir’s’Ffalenn against the grey cult at Etarra, I’d kill myself laughing.”
Davien grinned. “You forget. The mist-bound entities locked down in Rockfell Pit are not free wraiths. If you compromise Lysaer to serve Arithon’s survival, our means to curb Desh-thiere might go down in flames.”
Dakar sighed. “Don’t play me for a gullible idiot, that you have any loyalty left to the Fellowship.”
The Sorcerer’s figure stayed dangerously still, more silent than the primordial boulder under his foot.
Soaked in run sweat, Dakar cleared his throat. “Pray, have you a better solution in mind?”
“Maybe.” Davien shrugged. “If so, the option relies upon Daliana’s cooperation.”
Dakar sat on a nearby outcrop, ribs clutched against wheezing laughter. “If your counsel will move her, by all means, try! Kharadmon failed to cool her devotion. Not even the True Sect war host, with its cohort of priests and diviners, kept her from returning to her liege’s side!”
“She has the brute courage to hammer through bed-rock,” Davien agreed. “Who says I intend to dissuade her?” Before Dakar pushed erect and rushed back towards the wagon, he added, “Don’t bestir your protective instincts to warn her against the hazards of hearing my offer.”
The spellbinder wilted. Chary of the chit’s knack with a billet, he said, hopeful, “Daliana’s already loaded her liege and gone on her way.” Bone-tired, he knuckled his inflamed eyes. “Asandir should have told you I’ve been outfaced since the day of my birth.”
When Dakar looked up, the span of the archway stood empty. Davien had gone. A glance over his shoulder confirmed: the tacked horses with Daliana were already diminished to blots in the dazzle of heat-waves. Since the spellbinder was too pudgy to give chase, he opted to bury his misery and take an oblivious nap in the shade.
Lysaer roused again to a furred mouth, vile with the after-taste of a drugged syrup. His fuddled awareness added a pounding head to the inflamed discomfort of sunburn. Hurting, he stirred, gouged by crushed pumice and tufts of razor-edged grasses. His limbs were cut loose. The breeze that stung his abraded flesh wore the chill of on-coming twilight. Another day waned in the unknown span of his prolonged captivity. If his keepers had not let him soil himself, the affront to his dignity chafed even through the haze of turned senses.
Sundown burnished the snow-capped peaks, their crumpled flanks folded into cobalt shadow, except where spewed smoke from a volcanic vent smudged the horizon. Lava sand gritted between his teeth and invaded his soiled clothing. His stubbled chin itched, and his tangled hair hung rank as the thatch on a bogman’s hovel. Propped halfway erect, Lysaer surveyed the view. Nothing moved. Only the breeze riffled the clumps of stunt thorn, their crabbed twigs darned with tattered foliage.
Lysaer dared not assume Dakar’s watch had abandoned him. Irked to have lost the civilized service of his valet, he examined his wrists, dye-stained where the straps had dug into his flesh. His hose had matching marks at the ankles.
Given freedom of movement, innate caution distrusted the impression of autonomous solitude.
“Forget Dakar’s spectacular failure,” the voice of the woman he thought he had murdered declared from behind him. “The setting’s my choice, and this isn’t my reckoning for your catastrophic behaviour at Morvain.”
Lysaer spun around, terrified. But the diminutive female who faced him in squire’s dress was not an apparition. The pert face with too-bright, tawny eyes raked him over. Her dark brown braid was no longer luxurious but roped into a wisped knot and pinned up with a hazel stick. The worse for him, she witnessed his panic: shock destroyed his prized poise as a statesman. Her intact, living presence slammed through heart and mind, a visceral blow that also hit below the belt.
While Lysaer gaped, paralysed, she attacked first. “I did not burn by your hand, as you see, and nothing between us is finished, yet.”
Lysaer twisted his vulnerable features away. Not fast enough: twice shamed as the force of his anguish unmanned him, he had no way to silence her or any word to fend off her analysis of his weaknesses.
“At least you should know why you failed,” Daliana pursued. “The rage that turned Desh-thiere’s curse against me was no fault of your character. Your demise was set up. In fact, you fell prey to the tricks of the Koriathain.”
But excuses were empty. Nothing relieved the responsible ethic demanded of his royal upbringing. His short-falls and his privacy were subject to no one’s ruthless dissection, far less any female bent on interference. Once laid open by Talith, and after the inexcusable pretence of his political marriage to Ellaine, Lysaer s’Ilessid brooked no exception. The merciful woman would withdraw as a kindness; likewise, the stout-hearted one plunged beyond her depth.
But this brazen creature respected no boundaries. Her courage possessed too much gall to salve his beleaguered spirit. The locked pause extended. Coarse with the whisper of breeze through the brush, the grey mantle of nightfall continued to leach the last colour out of the world.
Yet falling darkness lent cover, at least. Lysaer torqued his facade back into the semblance of equilibrium. His voice was ice, and his nerves, armoured steel, before he tried speech. “I want you gone.”
Her calm contained the strength to eviscerate. “I won’t oblige. Leave on your own merits.”
She would not enable a coward’s retreat. Or else she understood him too well and refused the reprieve in his plea for rejection.
“Hold out in vain, then.” Lysaer gathered himself to arise, shocked by the quiver of atrophied muscle and sun-poisoned nausea. How long had he languished in drugged oblivion at the whim of his self-righteous guardians? Bitter, he wondered if he also suffered withdrawal from an addiction. Dakar knew his herbals. Given a wagon equipped to haul casualties, the slippery spellbinder could have plied him with a war-time stockpile of narcotic remedies.
Daliana addressed that transparent suspicion, aware that he sorted his appalling infirmity for evidence of further treachery. “You were not dosed with poppy.”
She extended a hand to him.
Lysaer stifled a fury that clenched his jaw, brought to his knees by sapped vitality and cruel despair. Pride refused to yield. He hoarded his right to unfettered autonomy and spurned her care though he scrabbled like a dog to buy distance.
Darkness hid his agony, while the vertigo ebbed. When in due time he commanded himself and used a boulder to claw himself upright, Daliana did not mock or step in to brace up his wracked balance. Instead, she silently offered the bridle of one of her two saddled mounts.
“If you go, the choice becomes yours alone.” Golden eyes pinned him, direct beyond quarter, though her grasp on the reins trembled with distress. “I will not leave. No matter if you succumb to the curse, or how brutal the provocation, nothing you do, alive in this world, can make me abandon you.”
Which lashed him to fury and cut him in places too harrowed to bleed in her sight.
Destroyed, the last shred of control he possessed: Lysaer strove to drive such innocence past the hazard of reckless endangerment. Proximity to him would see her dead, and far worse, unravel the dregs of his self-control that