Peril’s Gate: Third Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
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‘I don’t leave them my wounded,’ said the Prince of Rathain. He arose, yanked the cloak off the third corpse, and breathed a blessing to Ath’s grace as he found the trapper slipped beyond consciousness. At least that small mercy would spare him the torment of being moved in the sling of a drag litter.
Three days later, the fur trapper used his last, labored breaths and named his next of kin to his prince: an uncle who ranged with Earl Jieret’s clans in Halwythwood, and a married daughter settled with a cooper in Eastwall. ‘’Twas my grandame who said I’d die tended by royalty. She had clan lineage, and with that, the born gift of Sight.’ A long pause, then the afterthought, trailed off in self-damning irony. ‘Though I thought these mountains were as far as a man got from the finicky habits of princes.’
Arithon gathered the slack, cooling hand, his touch firm through the wracking spasms. ‘My finicky habits don’t run to court ceremony. But that doesn’t explain the big-hearted trust that stood ground under torture to spare me.’
‘Thank grandame for that,’ gasped the trapper, eyes closed. ‘She said I would choose if the prince who called down Dharkaron’s Black Spear died beside me.’
‘You failed nothing and no one,’ Arithon assured, though remorse all but choked him from speech. ‘I could name you hero, gild a plaque in your memory that proclaims the cornerstone for a crown will stand on the strength of your sacrifice. But the truth casts down rhetoric. A man who holds hospitality sacred is worth much more to the land than a king.’
For answer, an unearthly sweet smile touched lips already blued to corpse pallor. ‘Long life, and my blessing. The Fellowship Sorcerers are right to restore you.’
Arithon bent his head. Left beggared by a giant’s generosity of spirit, he said nothing through the final, torturous hour while the huge man’s wracked lungs fought an exhausting passage, and the heart labored through the gasping last rattle of breath.
Nor did the ending bring peace or reprieve. Arithon arose. Though the hour was past midnight, urgency rode him. He packed satchel and saddlebags by the flickering glow of a precious stub of wax candle, then bundled his weapons and provisions outside. Around him, the night was a wind-tossed maelstrom, stars and moon mantled under the cloud of another westbound storm front. Threat of snow rode the air like subliminal lightning. Arithon ached for grief, but dared not pause for decency. He sealed the trapper’s remains in the root cellar, unable to grant the small grace of a pyre, or a bard’s song to honor the crossing. Not while Jaelot’s patrols swept the territory in force, lashed on by their zealot captain. The sole tribute he could grant this man’s sacrifice was his unbending dedication to survive.
Arithon judged his best chance was to travel fast and far as he could before daylight. The diligence of his care meant the horses would answer his whistle for feed in the dark.
The thirty-five-league passage through the Skyshiel uplands resumed and became a feat of grueling endurance, on both sides. Driven off the Baiyen trail by unsettled dreams and queer hauntings, and chased by the balefire of ghosts, Jaelot’s troops scoured the high forests in small search parties. They rampaged down slopes of pristine snow, and axe-cut young trees for their bonfires. Flame was believed to drive back the haunts, and proved more reliable than the echoing dispersion of horn calls as a signal to muster or regroup.
Men quartered the gulches and ridgebacks on foot, or plowed in mounted columns through winding valleys. Despite ice and winds and bleak storm, they persisted, while their quarry slipped past like the fox. He evaded their lines, unseen and unheard, under cover of shadow, or night. The wind and the elements were his tireless ally, until the skilled trackers exchanged sullen whispers, calling him demon and fiend, an unnatural sorcerer who left no footprint on the worldly face of the landscape.
Then contrary evidence would move them to scorn, as they found frozen hoof marks and dung, or broken ice on a stream, or a swatch of young maple bearing the teethmarks of browsing horses.
Several times, a rider was spotted, crossing over a ridge. The men dispatched to investigate circled and climbed, but found only unscalable, ice-clad ledges, where neither horseman nor unmounted scout could give chase. Some claimed the sightings were apparitions designed to lead them astray; others argued that sorcerers had spellcraft which enabled them to walk upon demon-made bridges of air. Whatever the subject of carping dispute, the conclusion was self-evident: Jaelot’s pursuit of the Spinner of Darkness was a harebrained feat of madness in the Skyshiels.
And yet, the guard captain held his ground, unremitting. Jaw hard, eyes narrowed, with gloved thumbs jammed in the cross belts that hung his hunter’s quiver and map case, he insisted, ‘Mayor’ll dice my liver if we turn back without the quarry we came for. Now saddle up!’
No suggestion to withdraw was allowed thought or weight. The order to advance stayed relentless. Each dawn, the parties ranged outward in search.
For Arithon s’Ffalenn, the nights passed in desperate flight, those days he was flushed out of hiding. Time and again he was turned from his course, or hazed between patrols back over terrain just traversed through rugged hardship. The days became patchworked fragments of memory, stitched together by dark intervals spent in furtive flight, or tension that wore like etched acid. One fair afternoon, armed riders overtook him when he went foraging for wintergreen to brew an astringent for his gelding’s puffed fetlock.
Snow and fierce wind had masked their approach. Caught in the open, Arithon scrambled up rocks and snatched refuge on a cliff ledge scarcely an arm’s reach over their heads. There he panted, chilled and motionless, while one man dismounted to piss in a snowdrift, and three others cut diligent circles below him. In sore misery themselves, the scouts missed the dimpled depressions of his footprints; the drifts, dry and light, were too fluffy to hold outlines. Had a man of them glanced upward, he was utterly exposed. Nor could he attack and kill all of them cleanly before someone sounded the alarm.
The rider who relieved himself mounted up, whistling, and the patrol moved off up the ridge. Arithon laid his cheek to iced stone, wrung wretched with shivering relief.
Days and nights, he endeavored to keep faith with Luhaine and reach promised refuge at Ithamon. He dogged his own hunters to steal cached supplies, then set off through seamed cliffs to the high country. Nights, under starlight, he picked his way over the scoured rock past the timberline. Shadow masked him, while his ears rang and burned to the language of wind, singing litanies over bared granite. He weathered gales in the smothered glens of the valleys, and slept under banked drifts, the warmth of his breath pocketed by the laced boughs of the firs that framed the eaves of his crude shelters.
He tracked deer, and surprised wolverine, and drank bracing waters freed from their armor of gray ice. His beard grew. The jet hair he had no chance to groom whipped in snake tangles over his shoulders. His eyes creased with the squint of haunted apprehension, and constant survey cast down his back trail. The sun shone on him, gold and glaring and without warmth, and the snows howled and stung, lashed by the bitter east wind. Higher, he ranged, into the black-stone summits of the Skyshiels, laddered with glaciers and the cobwebbed patterns of snow trapped in filed bands of sediment. Nor was he free, or alone in that wilderness that could and had torn the sinew out of all but the strongest hearts.
Against natural odds, beyond the limiting frailties of flesh, Jaelot’s bewitched guardsmen tracked him. He watched them, filing like ants up the valleys, or burning fires of green fir that streamered flags of smudged smoke. He saw them break and run from the queer lights on the Baiyen, and wait, starving, for their supply lines. Like desperate, flushed game, Arithon ran before them, sometimes in the same glass-eyed panic, and other times in nerveless planning that left him as a stranger to himself.
The hand that stubbornly failed to heal grew a mass of raw, welted scar tissue. He boiled rags for bandages, and rebound the weal, and used his blades left-handed. In tight-focused effort, he mastered the pain and forced his arrow shots accurate. The few times he killed deer, they died cleanly. In their swift death, he found his sole measure of victory: his private, ongoing reassurance he had not been abandoned by mercy, and could still grant the same grace to an enemy.