Stormed Fortress: Fifth Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
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war in East Halla.
Sidir had lost his tolerance. ‘I’ll haul her back, trussed and gagged in a game sack!’ Become the firm arm that supported the bereft mother, the tall, grave Companion had gathered his weapons forthwith. ‘Fiends plague that girl for her idiot timing!’
Jeynsa’s volatile grief, heated by young-blood ignorance, outstripped the concept of dangerous. Etarra was unhinged by the cleanse of a death cult. Every sword-bearing Sunwheel fanatic frothed to burn suspect talent for liaison with Shadow. No kinsman stepped forward to argue the need, that the Teiren’s’Valerient must be fetched back by the scruff of the hair she had cropped in defiance of custom.
Sidir was not sanguine with the perils he faced. Now arrived at the verge of wide-open country, he knew that he shouldered an effort predestined to fail. The girl was a fit tigress, and she had an eighteen-day start on him. Worse, his hopeless journey was not made alone: the Koriani enchantress whose fate was entangled with Arithon’s packed her satchel in stride alongside.
‘You will need arcane help,’ Elaira insisted, against the innate distrust her kind aroused from the clans. ‘Or else waste the time you don’t have to go wrong, chasing hunches down a cold trail.’
Since no forest-bred talent could challenge her power, Sidir took charge. He would take her from Halwythwood, if only to keep her order’s suspect machinations under his direct sight.
Their hot-foot chase after Jeynsa had brought them to the fork in the River Arwent five nights past the dark of the moon. Now that the safe forest coverts must be left behind, the enchantress prevailed against the Companion’s rife urgency: she would take pause and use her arcane knowledge to measure the outlying territory.
‘You should heed my counsel,’ Sidir resisted, his impatient grip on his sword reflecting his disapproval.
‘We’re not at odds,’ Elaira reminded, loath to rattle the thorns under lying their mismatched alliance. Steamed by worry herself, she crouched with the wood at her back and pressed her spread palms to the earth. ‘I won’t risk letting our crown prince know why Jeynsa’s bolted hell-bent into trouble.’
The liegeman viewed her stifled need as transparent: to reach for heart’s ease through subtle awareness and link with her distant beloved. The concern was not groundless: her longing desire yearned towards the south. The same, searing stars that Arithon experienced at Sanpashir glimmered here, but not softened by late-summer heat haze. The torpid air would not wear the scent of high grass, or the song of the nightjar that stitched lonely notes through the shrilling of nocturnal insects. Elaira kept her firm hold on restraint. She limited her trace to the deep strata of bedrock, listening for the delicate, shimmering current that carried the local lane flux.
Looming above her, Rathain’s grim Companion unleashed his overtried nerves. ‘This is no secure place to dally for scrying. We should cross the north ford and push into the Barrens by daybreak to avoid the risk of a sighting by trackers.’
The enchantress persisted despite sound advice, stubborn beyond her slight build. She did not look the part of the initiate Koriathain. Clad in cross-laced leathers, her braided bronze hair tied with deer-hide, she could have passed for a forest-bred scout, searching for game sign; except her response second-guessed a man’s mind, before he set words to his thinking.
‘I won’t need a fire,’ Elaira demurred. ‘This near the fourth lane, just a rock-pool at the verge, where shoaling rocks don’t riffle the current.’
Which choice seemed the worse, to a forest clansman whose instincts were pressured. In this border-line country, where the Arwent’s deep channel could float an east-bound, keeled barge, more trespassing merchants each year dared to route their perishable freight through the lake-side town of Daenfal. Free wilds or not, no clansman crossed them without an armed company at his back. Never mind that traders caught flouting crown charter must be waylaid, or that the fools born outside of blood heritage did not perceive how their venal invasion disrupted Athera’s grand mysteries. The compact that served the aware heart of the land could not tolerate any compromise that degraded the harmonic flow of the fourth lane.
All the worse, that Jeynsa had tried this passage alone, when impending war drove invasive town interests to ever-more-vicious reprisal. Sidir shifted his sweating grip on his blade, not liking the fact his back was exposed as quarry for league-hunting bowmen.
Scalded at last by his smoking unease, Elaira broke off and stood. ‘Sidir, believe me, your fuming is groundless. The flux lines are pulsing in natural harmony. If any townsmen are hanging about, they will be peacefully dead!’ Against his stiff quiet, she finished off, clipped, ‘Anyone living who isn’t mage-shielded would stamp an emotional signature.’
Sidir raised a dark eyebrow, the silvered hair at his temples distinct even under faint starlight. ‘I should rely on your vision?’
Elaira sighed. ‘My dear man, are we dancing in blindfolds through hoops? I’ve stood tours of lane watch for my meddling order since I was a starving waif culled from an alley. Seen mirrored in earthforce, your distrust of my character may as well be a deafening shout.’
Not caught aback, Sidir chose his words to avoid a pitched fight. ‘I don’t like the fact I can’t fathom your motives.’ Grey eyes that discerned with birth talent for truth never flinched from unkind reservations. ‘If you’re wanting that pool, I’d as soon have this done with.’
Nonetheless, his guidance was considerate as he threaded the rough course through the overgrowth to the river-bank. Southside of Halwythwood, where Daon Ramon Barrens crumpled against the plateau of Araethura, the buttressed seam opened into a gorge. Beneath, the boisterous sluice of the Arwent thundered over its bed of split boulders. Poured ink since the set of the waxing moon, the misted air smelled of wet mineral. Game trails left by otters skeined through the scrub, raked to a leaning tangle of thatch by the floods at spring thaw.
Summer’s drought tamed the rampaging spate. Scoured stone scalloped the water’s edge, lapped by the cold depths where the trout swam.
‘Here.’ Elaira caught Sidir’s wrist before the tall clansman withdrew. ‘Stay as you wish. I won’t have secrets that fan the least doubt that I’d use my powers to betray you.’
‘To seek Feithan’s daughter, perhaps not,’ Sidir challenged. ‘But a man who serves Rathain’s crown has to wonder. Whose hidden cause are you backing?’
‘The civilized mask was already stripped, that night in the glen by the Willowbrook,’ Elaira snapped, a touch acid. Day upon day of exhaustive, harsh company chafed the barbs lying under the skin. ‘From chastened, need I grovel to beg a reprieve from the on-going punishment? I have no desire to harm your clan interests! My order’s knowledge will not be engaged, even for straightforward scrying.’
Sidir watched her elfin features turn haunted as she strained to recoup equilibrium. Not callous, at heart, he stripped away pretence. ‘Dare I suggest your concern for Jeynsa might further your sisterhood’s plot to trap Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn?’
‘You helped tear him from me,’ she shot back, uncowed. ‘What could have changed?’ Her tight smile followed, both poisoned and wry. ‘My oathsworn obedience is not all-encompassing. Life has another facet called choice. You’ll see that girl safe because you cherish Feithan. Is my care as an honest woman no less? Or must one bad thread condemn the whole cloth? Which one of us isn’t embroiled in mankind’s stewpot of intrigue? I’ve been magnanimous,’ Elaira said, stung. ‘For the bitch in blind heat, my balked need’s in plain sight. It’s your mulish candidate for Rathain’s caithdein whose spiteful agenda might fray Arithon’s personal integrity.’
Sidir fielded her accusation, flat calm. ‘The crown liege whose shoulder I guarded at Vastmark would never abandon his oath of protection, sworn before death to her father.’
‘He wouldn’t,’ the mettlesome enchantress agreed. ‘That’s the reason our hopeless mission can’t fail and why you might want to muzzle your next slashing leap