Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ to whipped elf-locks, Sethvir straightened to interrupt the tirade.

      “Ah, no,” Kharadmon ranted, “you’re too cleverly glib! Don’t try again to excuse Davien’s back-stabbing games or brush off his baggage of vengeful neglect. Isn’t the criminal practice of the Koriani Matriarch busting our bollocks enough? That’s if our Fellowship has got a virile pair left intact between us!”

      While the Warden of Althain stared, owlish, Kharadmon delivered his blistering grievance. “Well, you must have seen how that web-spinning crone’s blindsided Elaira’s perception.”

      Sethvir did not flinch, which spoke volumes. “Do you think,” he lamented, “that current awareness of Arithon’s straits could do aught but destroy her last peace of mind?”

      The wind devil seethed up by Kharadmon’s ire spiked hoar-frost across polished stone. “She would be free to act if her sight were not compromised!”

      Althain’s warden blinked. “Free? At the risk of breaking her crown prince’s trust?”

      Which unmalleable point should have reined a more sensible colleague’s rant up short: for Arithon’s need to secure Elaira’s safety, the enchantress who loved him had sworn she would keep his past liaison with her under a seal of secrecy.

      But no appeal to moral nuance tamed Kharadmon’s agonized tirade. “Just what is Prime Selidie masking from view?”

      Sethvir blinked again, and doggedly side-stepped. “You’re needed elsewhere. Traithe must be escorted away from Rathain. Yes, with all speed! He’s at dreadful risk. Twice, he’s been hounded by True Sect diviners since he challenged the trial for witchcraft as Daliana’s advocate.”

      Which bitter heroic had failed, in the end, to prevent the True Sect usurpation of Lysaer’s governance of Etarra. Kharadmon stilled his arctic tantrum to object.

      “No! Forget Asandir.” Sethvir shoved erect. “He’s posted back to Havish directly to finish the High Queen’s instruction.” Past argument, the risk of King Gestry’s tragic sacrifice must not be repeated. “If the next ill turn calls a crowned sovereign to rise to the kingdom’s defence, we don’t have another grown s’Lornmein heir strong enough to bear the succession!”

      “But Havish lies under no threat, tonight!” Kharadmon blasted in rejoinder. “And if, in fact, Traithe was in serious jeopardy, you’d have dispatched me there directly without this hopscotch summons through Althain Tower.”

      Sethvir crumpled and sat, his eyes glacial turquoise. “You can’t break charter law. Or kite off to beard the Prime Matriarch without touching off a mass catastrophe.”

      Kharadmon snorted with freezing contempt. “Thwarted by your shell game of diversion? I might wish instead Davien’s treasonous anarchy would smash Asandir’s unholy pact with the sisterhood at a stroke! Someone should obliterate that nest of harpies.”

      “I know.” Sethvir foresaw all the bleak probabilities. The Seven’s hamstrung resource could scarcely stem the bleeding breach as Selidie’s plots pitched their guardianship of Athera to shambles. Tough as nails amid building disaster, he folded veined knuckles and temporized. “The short-term defeat may not lose us the war. And I lit up the tower on the outside chance Davien might take notice. A token show of his support at this pass might give the Prime wary pause.”

      But even provoked a third time, Kharadmon never swerved. “What rankling ploy is that she-spider hatching?”

      “Today? Another manipulation against us.” Sethvir picked a loose thread from his sleeve and sighed. “Her mission is desperate. Either she must snare a talented candidate strong enough to survive the succession, or she has to defeat the compact and fall back on her order’s cache of proscribed secrets. For one cause, or both, she’s playing a puppet initiate from Deal as the woebegone victim of rape.”

      “And?” Kharadmon prompted, while the anguished pause stretched to the whicker of candleflame.

      Sethvir glanced up, desolate. “The chit’s being used as the baited trap to exploit the glaring flaw in Prince Arithon’s character.”

      The discorporate Sorcerer recoiled, aghast. “To acquire his blood-line?”

      “Or break him,” Sethvir said, unflinching. “Either convenient happenstance suits the sisterhood’s cause.”

      The worrisome scene tracked by Althain’s Warden unfolded in the Storlains, well into the nadir of night. The old ice-cutter’s cabin by then was snug, even cozy under latched shutters. Lit rushes spilled softer light over the makeshift trestle, littered with wintergreen sprigs shorn of berries to compound a liniment.

      Vivet refused the astringent paste, mashed to soothe her livid bruises. “I’ll not touch the rank stuff!” She puffed a vexed breath. “It stings, and the smell makes me queasy.”

      Seated opposite, his bowl of spurned remedy a strained declaration of tension between them, the Crown Prince of Rathain measured her sullen regard, too canny to rise to the bait. A woman scorned, Vivet well might try rejection as her next inveigling weapon. Braced by the tingling scent of crushed herbals, he matched her complaint with cool silence and did not volunteer to poultice her injuries.

      Vivet slapped down her comb. Reclothed, erect in the tatters of her dignity, she began with crisp yanks to rebraid her hair. Arithon watched, careful to dampen the outrage smouldering beneath his leashed temper. As deeply betrayed by another woman, even yet beloved beyond measure, he dared not lose his grip on the embedded hurt that clouded his mage-sighted discipline. Vivet’s pique perhaps stemmed from misdirected pain and not venal manipulation.

      Mindful of his thoughtless power to wound, Arithon waited for accurate insight, while she eyed him sidewise, unchastened. Empathy forgave her contrary behaviour, given how little he knew of the crisis she battled. Trauma alone would not drive an intelligent young woman to fling herself on him, try suicide, then irrationally neglect the physical marks of abuse.

      Initiate restraint must outlast moody tumult. Tidied himself, reclad in his marred shirt, and in charge of both knife and his shoulder-slung sword, Arithon perched on the makeshift log seat.

      He could do nothing else.

      Althain’s Warden witnessed, in full, the invidious thread of Prime Selidie’s design. An innocent female, cast as victimized pawn, paired with the damning, implied falsehood sown by an incomplete record left planted in crystal, had skewed Arithon’s internal boundaries. The mix spelled disaster. Vivet’s straits grappled his vulnerability, abrasive as slivered glass on torn nerves in the confines of the remote cabin.

      The blood-bound tenets of Rathain’s crown heritage disallowed comfort, or distance. S’Ahelas foresight stayed silent, as well, while Arithon’s recoil sought the blind solace of an outside distraction: easier for him to redress Vivet’s woes than to bear his own desolation.

      Sethvir’s flash-point acuity plumbed the abyss of uncertainty caused by the prince’s blocked memory. Stripped of Tarens’s steadfast loyalty, Arithon’s purposful character lost firm direction. Where safety and solitude would have granted space for mage training to master the impasse, Arithon endured in resigned suspension, his innate faculties entrained on another’s behalf.

      The battered victim in front of him trembled, too damaged to function. Sent as she was on a mission to ensnare him through her human СКАЧАТЬ