Peril’s Gate. Janny Wurts
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Worst case, she might face the supreme punishment for oathbreaking, if Prime Selidie’s promise of unfettered choice did not allow her to claim full initiative. Elaira braced against the washstand, too wrung with dread to question the price she might pay for unbending self-honesty. The tin cup with its fateful cargo of seawater all but slipped from her nerveless grasp. She forced her wrist steady. One by one, she stamped down the gathering fears that threatened to shred her resolve. Her love for Prince Arithon was caught in the breach. She dared do no less than employ concrete safeguards.
Elaira unhooked the silver chain at her neck and drew off the strung quartz that served as her personal spell crystal. Talisman for her power, carrier of the seals and sigils which held the focal point for her talent, the sliver of stone had been her companion since the hour she passed her novice initiation. Today, the flaring warmth of the stone’s presence engendered no surge of confidence. Set against the Prime Matriarch’s insidious designs, its familiar quiet radiance masked pitfalls and dangers. Elaira could not evade the harsh truth. The crystal itself belonged to the order. It would be reclaimed and cleared at her death, then reissued to another enchantress. The fact its possession was a borrowed resource could pose an unseen liability. Elaira poised the tin cup. Shaking, she prepared to reject the temptation that its everyday usage might serve to trap Arithon under Koriani obligation.
She would clear the quartz, living, and unbind its attunements, and bear the gamut of unknown consequences.
Poised over salt water, the crystal looked innocent, a flashy bauble that sheared light into rainbow refractions.
In reality, its function sustained an intricate balance of forces. A personal spell quartz bonded with its wearer. The complexity of its matrix evolved with use, often aligned with prerogatory directives imprinted by the will of the Prime’s Senior Circle. Elaira fought ebbing courage. Twenty-eight years ago, Morriel Prime had selected her for longevity. The crystal held haplessly dangling had bindings laid into its fields that sustained and renewed living tissue. To clear out the quartz would disrupt patterned energies, with the recoiling effects of unsanctioned release rewritten in her hapless flesh.
All her experience with healing and craft lent no guidance to predict the near future. She had no grace for soul-searching thought, and no safe chance to seek deeper knowledge. The cleansing properties of salt were most final, and utterly unselective. Once the crystal was submerged, the spells of suspension that revitalized her body would unwind, then bleed away into entropy.
She could but hope, as she steeled nerves and will, that the shock of release would not kill her. To leave Arithon’s fate to Lirenda’s design posed the potential for outright disaster.
Eyes tightly closed, Elaira tried and failed to calm the rushed pound of her heart. The rasping itch of wool mantle against skin; the draw of each breath through her lungs; the tempestuous shrilling of wind: all subtle sensation conspired to unstring her resolve and mire her in hopeless dread. Life tied her too strongly. The looming fear of greeting death’s shadow urged her to shrink from impeccable commitment. Worse, she might live, wasted or crippled by backlash thrown off as the linked sigils in her aura dispersed.
‘Ath help me, I can’t do this.’
Yet even as she wavered, stark honesty stung her. At the crux, she loved Arithon more. The integrity that cemented his trust crossed beyond life, went past nerve, flesh, and bone, and the bounds of sane limits and safety.
Elaira released the dangling chain. Hard braced for the shock of inflexible fate, she let her quartz take the plunge toward salt water.
The same instant, a firm hand closed over her slacked fingers. A half-sensed, fast movement, and a soft sigh of cloth intercepted the crystal’s immersion. A gentle voice chided, ‘There are better ways to establish the safeguards you seek.’
Elaira recoiled, instinctively too wise to scream. Her wide opened eyes met a white-robed, male figure who stood as though bathed in moonlight. His grip on her hand was warm, and not harsh. She could have pulled free on a wish, had she chosen. But the unearthly calm of his presence was not either forceful or threatening. The silver and gold ciphers that patterned his hood marked him out as an adept of Ath’s Brotherhood.
‘How did you get here?’ she gasped, stupid and stammering with shock.
His smile lit the bare room like new sunlight. ‘Sethvir of the Fellowship thought you needed help.’ He released her fingers, then pried the tin cup from the frozen grasp of her hand. The fluid economy of poured water graced each move as he set the tin next to the basin. Then, his brown, almond eyes deep and grave, he regarded the spell crystal caught in the cloth-wrapped palm of his hand. ‘Do you mind if I hold this?’
‘By all means, be my guest.’ Elaira stepped back, folded at the knees, and dropped rump first on the cot. Dust flew from straw ticking. She sneezed, blotted wet cheeks with the back of her wrist, then surveyed her uncanny visitor. ‘If I had a chair, I’d invite you to sit. Since I don’t, please feel free to share my perch on the landlady’s mattress.’
Beyond middle age, Ath’s adept inclined his head, then pushed back the folds of his hood. Graying ash hair tumbled over his shoulders. His face was strong boned, and serene as rubbed ivory, and his knuckles, workworn as a farmer’s. ‘Thank you. Be sure I won’t stay one moment more than I’m welcome.’
‘Sit then.’ Elaira slid over and made room. ‘Why didn’t I hear you come in?’
His step on bare floorboards was light, but not soundless; his weight settled like snowfall beside her. His clothes smelled of balsam, and his laughter fell rich as the deep shade of tropical night. ‘Well, you didn’t because the gateway that brought me resides in the crystal you just claimed from the market.’
Elaira opened her mouth, closed it, and forcefully stilled her clamor of thunderstruck nerves. ‘Then I need not be concerned that the peer seniors in my order should suspect I have mystical company?’
The initiate opened his palm and revealed her quartz pendant nestled inside a halo of grainy, gold light. ‘You need fear for nothing. This room, and our words from here forward are as a dream, one step removed from the reality you know. Sigils can’t breach this octave of vibration, far less carve a foothold for impact.’
‘Traithe once built a fire,’ Elaira allowed, too stressed and too tired to grapple nonlinear logic. ‘Since your time is a gift too precious to waste, I’ll let you explain without my green questions and curiosity.’
‘On the contrary.’ Settled at ease on his end of the cot, one shoulder braced to the wall, the adept seemed a figure loomed from ghostly silk and spun light from ethereal vision. ‘Time is an illusion shaped by need and belief. The trust you have embraced for Prince Arithon’s sake cannot be sustained without honesty. I’m here to open a doorway to knowledge, beginning with explanations.’
Elaira’s expression of owlish thought broke under the relentless strain. She arose and paced. The cramped garret could scarcely contain the scope of the terrors that threatened to shatter her. Since the fires of Sithaer yawned at her feet, she opened the point that could catapult her into trouble. ‘I made no conscious appeal to Sethvir.’
‘You did not.’ Ath’s adept tracked her agitation, amused, but not patronizing. Aware her question scratched only the surface, he answered her core of concern. ‘Your Prime Matriarch has been given no grounds to serve punishment, unless you can be taken to task for acquiring a piece of rock crystal. No rule forbids you. Yet there’s a quirk in your order’s history that’s only revealed to those in the highest ranks. Your major focusing jewels, and all personal quartz crystals held in Koriani use, were never mined on Athera.’
Elaira poised against the ice-etched panes of the dormer, her level brows pinched with reflection. ‘The stones were brought in when mankind begged sanctuary? Then those crystals won’t be tied by the compact?’
‘More.’ Smile vanished, the adept met and matched her determined stance. ‘Those crystals are not of Athera. Therefore they exist outside the scope of Sethvir’s earth-sense, as well.’
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