Peril’s Gate: Third Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ surprise you? Beyond every doubt, you failed your test here in Jaelot. I have not asked to know how the Master of Shadow managed to make his escape. Nor will I concern myself further. My seeresses tried, but their best efforts cannot salvage your gaffe. For the future, no one yet knows if Prime Selidie will renew the mandate for Arithon’s capture. She has sent her summons. We are all to present ourselves for audience in the coastal city of Highscarp.’

      Lirenda did nothing but close tortured eyes, a futile gesture. She had guarded against every setback but this, to be supplanted by an idiot initiate who could scarcely be trusted to silk wrap a quartz crystal; a mere child she knew had never progressed to the point of mastering even the least potent of the order’s array of great focus stones. Still stunned by the shock of monumental betrayal, Lirenda fought to muster a civilized response. ‘Go. Leave me. I need time to accept what has happened.’

      Cadgia curtseyed. Her large-boned frame and careful tread crossed the dust-shafted glow of the dips. A barrage of raw wind and the clang of the latch saw her gone, leaving Lirenda to choke on the aftertaste of defeat.

      She had no comforts, here; no soft carpets; no hot bath; no warm, perfumed mantle to ease the frayed rags of her pride. While the crawling spill of flame light cast overlapping haloes across the uneven floor, and the water abandoned in the scrying vat puckered to paned ice in the cold, Lirenda stood huddled in fine silk and grade wool, shivering through crushing disappointment.

      The nadir to which she had fallen lay beyond words to express. Cast from the pinnacle of needy ambition into an abyss of total anonymity, Lirenda beheld the death of her most cherished hopes. She could live for six centuries on longevity spells, and at best earn the title of Second Senior. Always, forever, she must stand behind Selidie, whose interests she had blatantly spurned, and whose youth must inevitably outlast her.

      ‘Life does have more than one facet, you know,’ observed someone in gentle reproof.

      Lirenda spun in recoil, to find Elaira awake and regarding her. The unranked initiate she had always despised sat erect in the shadows, the auburn hair she seldom troubled to plait spilled over her snugly clasped cloak. Between them, unspoken, hung the shared knowledge of Arithon’s recent escape. Elaira had witnessed the despicable drama, had stood by and applauded as Lirenda’s inexcusable lapse granted Rathain’s fugitive prince the loophole he needed to exploit.

      Yet Elaira’s gray eyes held no trace of contempt; only sympathy clothed over the steadying framework of prosaic conversation. ‘The Prime’s seat has its drawbacks.’

      ‘What would you know?’ Lirenda snapped, all at once crushingly weary. Forgetful this once of marring her silk, she braced on the rim of the grape vat.

      ‘Everything to do with having nothing left to lose.’ Elaira tucked up her feet. Her small, marring frown came and went for the fact her ankles had numbed from the chill. ‘One learns, in the streets, what cannot be taken. Friendship, courage, self-respect. The world’s weave is set on a very broad loom. A single snapped thread doesn’t have to mar the whole fabric.’

      Lirenda tipped up her chin. ‘Fine words for you. Easily said, since you never passed into rank.’

      Elaira just looked at her, an odd little smile arguing the gravity of the moment. ‘I can’t have what I want, either. That can be supported. There are other joys, other goals, many avenues in which to seek human growth and fulfillment.’

      A moment fled by, filled by the moan of the wind, while the tallow dips fluttered and streamed oily smoke, and the door shook on its ill-fitted hinges. Then Lirenda looked away. Had anyone else offered companionship through her hour of abject defeat, she might, perhaps, have loosened the grief fastening her shackled heart. But Elaira’s straight tolerance did nothing but refire the memory of the s’Ffalenn prince’s face, and a tenderness held in the depths of green eyes that, now and forever, would only be there for another.

      Elaira had made herself outcast for a love well returned.

      For Lirenda, Arithon’s boundless compassion had touched and uprooted her sense of inner alignment. His cool removal left her exposed and unpartnered. ‘You cannot help me,’ she told the woman whose bedrock dignity eschewed refined clothes, and whose bone-simple courage surpassed her. ‘I asked to have privacy. Do you mind?’

      ‘No. Not at all.’ Elaira arose. She tucked up her cloak hood and let herself into the night, in the earnest, but mistaken, belief she left her sister initiate to the healing virtues of solitude. For Lirenda, alone in the frigid isolation of the derelict vintner’s shed, rage and shame far outstripped any wounding of sorrow. Truth nipped like a gadfly. If Arithon’s kiss had unstrung her defenses and bared her most glaring weakness, the betrayal of Morriel’s promise of redemption assuredly had preceded the bastard’s flight out of Jaelot.

      ‘Damn you to Sithaer’s nethermost pit!’ Lirenda cursed the lately departed spirit of the Prime. ‘You had to have planned this! Why else should you contrive your passage of the Wheel while I was diverted by the pretense of proving my worth?’

      Why indeed; the stabbing resurgence of logic hitched her breath. Lirenda chafed her numbed hands. A frown marred her ivory forehead, while her mind turned in bitter calculation. The events were too perfectly aligned for less than a calculated endgame. She saw, for all time, that she had become the duped butt of Morriel’s manipulation. The old Prime had set her up, blindsided her with distractions, even played upon her flaws to ensure she would be distant and preoccupied through the crucial change in succession.

      Lirenda reviewed the irregular facts, doused by the needling, certain awareness that her presence at hand would have posed a sure threat. Only a former First Senior could have known of Selidie’s outright incompetence. The young woman had never been remotely capable of surviving a second-level initiation, far less the rigors of the ninth test required of all aspirants who had achieved the seat of Prime office.

      ‘What have you done?’ Lirenda demanded of the departed spirit of the crone who had wrangled and cheated her. ‘Ath, oh Ath, what was your grand plan, that you dared not risk me as a witness?’

      The wind gusted, rattling the door on its hinges. Snow crystals scattered in driven bursts against the gapped board walls. Inside, ignited to towering fury, Lirenda paced, the dust lashed to billows at her back. Her cloak snagged a hook on the bottle rack. She snapped the hem free, uncaring as the lining tore with a scream of ruined silk. Her skirts with their elaborate layers of gold stitching flared to her agitation like the charge in an oncoming squall line.

      No human balm could absolve her deep pain. The hate scalding through her lacked target or recourse. One stroke had cut off the prize she had pledged her whole life to pursue. The ignominy galled. Her initiate’s vow to the Koriani Order would permit no release into freedom. All her days, she would suffer in dog-pack subservience for the sake of a kiss in an alley. Arithon’s unconscionable intervention sealed her fate. Her name would now wear the same taint of disgrace that Elaira had borne for three decades.

      ‘May you scream, chained in Sithaer, prince and Spinner of Darkness!’ Lirenda swore under her breath. Even still, his near memory scalded her mind. She relived the branding, hot passion, unwilling, of her lips against his, pliant with ecstatic surrender. Damned for all time for a liaison of the heart, she reviled the love she could neither banish nor conquer.

      She would suffer Morriel’s most wretched revenge for that failing. Another ignominy piled on the first, when impatient ambition had driven her to break the original grand construct designed to snare the Master of Shadow.

      She had not righted one shred of the balance. СКАЧАТЬ