Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
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free wraiths. These had been lured from the dead world of Marak through the Fellowship’s effort to learn of Desh-thiere’s origins. Threatened by possession, his countermove forced out of cornered desperation, Sethvir had fragmented and scattered his consciousness to deflect the force of the assault. Voracious in malice, the wraiths had closed in. For a nightmarish second, Althain’s Warden relived the torment, while malevolent spirits savaged his being like vivisection done with hot knives.
In that darkest hour, while the wraiths had devoured those disparate bits of his spirit, Sethvir had experienced the paralyzing horror of a consciousness wormholed with gaps. Shocked to revelation, he perceived the probable cause of Traithe’s plight. In the hour of past crisis, Traithe had engaged grand conjury to unmake the spells which enabled the South Gate as a portal to cut off Desh-thiere’s invasion. As battle was joined, the collective mind of the Mistwraith may well have bid for possession.
Traithe had lost memory. Repeated scryings to reconstruct the event had exposed only surface images. But there had been a spell unleashed that appeared to recoil in backlash upon its creator. Through logic and theory, Sethvir knew Traithe’s act had not been any miscast conjury.
On purpose, a sorcerer beset beyond hope might shear off tainted portions of his being. For the mage-trained, the perils of possession and conquest were too terrible a risk to set loose on the world at large.
Worse, far worse, if such maiming defense had not immolated those truncated fragments. Laced still in shared contact, Sethvir masked dismay. Those severed shreds of Traithe’s consciousness might well still exist. If they had survived the cautery of conflict, they would live in the clutch of the wraiths which devoured them. That lost essence of self could be nowhere else but mewed up under the deranging vibrations of the wards over Rockfell Pit. The chance was too real, that Traithe’s hope of healing lay imprisoned with the Mistwraith’s stew of warped spirits.
The Warden of Althain snapped his fine band of rapport. Cast free of Traithe’s blinkered awareness, he shivered. The ordinary dark of the King’s Chamber enfolded him, its brimstone tang of spent carbon commingling with the faded fragrance of the herbs that kept moths from spoiling the heraldic banners. Sweat drenched him. A bone-deep dread compounded his earlier heartache.
He scarcely dared move, lest Traithe be led to sense something amiss and begin a distressed round of questions.
“Get some rest,” Sethvir urged, amazed that his voice should still function. He managed no more. The devastating scope of his findings overcame him, and pity closed his throat like poured lead.
While Traithe relieved the ache of his scars in sleep on a cot in the wardroom, the other four Fellowship Sorcerers in residence gathered in the cushioned nook off the pantry.
The unwelcome impact of Sethvir’s discovery had spun into brittle silence.
Asandir’s charcoal eyebrows met above his hawk nose. Seated at a deal table grayed with old rings left by flowerpots, he plowed the last crumbs from an oatcake into mazes of meaningless lines. In the window seat opposite, feet tucked up on a tapestry stool leaking horse-hair stuffing in tufts, Althain’s Warden peered into the dregs of a much chipped earthenware pot. A mug turned for a sunchild’s proportions sat clasped between his knobby knees. Sethvir found nothing useful to say. The tracks between soggy clumpings of tea leaves held no remedy to heal Traithe’s affliction.
“How often ignorance stings less than knowledge,” Asandir said at last.
By then, a wintery aquamarine dusk tinted the room’s makeshift casement. Hoarfrost tendriled the bottle-thick rondels, crudely set into leading and mortar to seal the aperture of an arrow loop. Failing light glinted on the diamond inset in some forgotten aristocrat’s fancy table knife. The bone handle had yellowed, and a blade lapsed to tarnish wore butter in undignified smears. Nearby, a tin spoon stuck upright in the bubbled glass jar of a farmwife’s elderberry jam.
A current of cold out of phase with the season prowled the rim of the table. “What does dung do in a byre but get deeper?” remarked Kharadmon’s drifting presence.
To stall his rank flippancy, Luhaine spoke from the niche between the rococo cupboards of the larder. “If Traithe’s chance of healing is linked with the quandary of Desh-thiere’s damned wraiths, in horrid fact, we’re left with a dearth of alternatives.”
“Just the sort of crux in a chess game to drive logicians and theorists to fits.” Kharadmon crossed the window in a puff of miffed agitation. “We might be advised to set calming wards to safeguard your sanity as precaution.”
“How belated,” Luhaine retorted. “I’d sooner go mad from your incessant, childish inanities!”
Kharadmon blew back a raspberry. “Leave things to you, we’d hear you pontificate ‘til the fish in the sea become fossils.”
Long since inured to old spats between shades, Asandir twiddled crumbs, and Sethvir pondered tea leaves, each one immersed in perturbed quiet. None cared to broach the difficult quandary, that Traithe’s tragic predicament made the cursed princes’ lives all the more indispensable. Their elemental mastery of shadows and light could be needed to sort through the Mistwraith’s damned entities. The outlook on that future stayed unremittingly grim, with Arithon half-deranged by the pinch of s’Ffalenn conscience, and named as a hunted criminal; and Lysaer s’Ilessid poised to launch holy war under threat of Paravian judgment.
Traithe’s raven fluffed obsidian feathers from the keystone over the doorway, while Luhaine intoned arch opinion. “There could be a benefit to this day’s bad work. A reprieve might arise out of darkness, if Lysaer’s aberration of prime law would draw the Paravians out of hiding to denounce him.”
“No grace remains for discussion in any case.” Sethvir raised his nose from the dregs of his tea mug, his mood diffused into vagary. “We’ve got company. Morriel Prime’s just arrived at the gates to demand our immediate audience.”
Winter Solstice 5649
Winter gloaming cloaked the sedges, and the raked, brown stalks of dry weed heads flattened to the gusts that sheared off the Bittern Desert. At the edge of the dunelands, under sky like translucent enamel, Althain Tower reared up in blunt contour, spidery runners of ivy and splotched lichens clotted to its southern side. Morriel Prime worked age-stiffened joints through the snipped-off fingers of her gloves. Swathed under layers of thick, hooded cloaks, she drew a deep breath of the knifing, cold air, and quashed back a riptide of old rage.
Koriani feud with the Fellowship of Seven had lasted since Third Age Year One.
Behind her, fidgety amid the slurry of mud and rimed ruts which seized the stone flags by the gate arch, her young deaf-mute servant stared with his mouth slacked open. No other but Iyan attended her. Too much power and too many secrets lay housed at Althain Tower. Mortals who asked a Sorcerer’s hospitality were wont to reemerge changed, since the impacting force of a Fellowship presence was too heady to encounter without sparking an altered perception. No enchantress dared count herself exempt. Despite the strict code of the initiate’s oath, Elaira’s faulted faith in the Koriani Order had stemmed from just one illicit talk with Asandir.
Morriel sized up the massive grilled portal, impenetrable before her high arts. That irritation galled her with surprising ferocity. Learned as she was, disciplined in the mysteries and dedicated as fine steel in her convictions, even still, the spelled wards on the gates lay outside her means to command. Seals conformed in dire forces unsettled her attuned senses. The ache of them raised bone-stripping twinges from the longevity bindings laid in live currents through her flesh.
In the moan of winter winds, under a zenith deepened to fathomless cobalt, the thorny coil of past event transferred its harsh sting to the present.
Morriel cupped the wrapped Waystone against her breast, the grip of her left hand white knuckled to secure her cloak against the gusts. Althain’s