Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ immensely vast and wide. If an isle existed, wrapped under wards, or some hidden, green haven lurked on the shores of the far continent, Arithon would set sail in the Khetienn to seek.

      “Your prince hopes to beg sanctuary from the Mistwraith’s fell curse,” Dakar ended. “That scarcely offers much hope for your clans, but the Fellowship Sorcerers agree, Paravian protection offers his surest possibility of reprieve.”

      Broad-shouldered as a sentinel against drifting mist, Jieret stared out to sea. “The Fellowship Sorcerer, Ciladis, set off on that quest almost two centuries past. He has never come back.”

      “Nobody argues the choice harbors peril!” Dakar snapped. “The old races have no desire to be found, else their presence would be known to Sethvir.” He paused, choked silent by memories very few left alive could understand: of the awesome, pure grace of the unicorns dancing, that could sear sight to blindness from too terrible a surfeit of ecstasy. His very marrow ached for the deep, drowning peace of a centaur’s presence, or the lyrical harmonies in a sunchild’s song. These mysteries, once experienced, could draw mortal minds to forget food and drink, and waste away, lost, until the spirit forsook the body, lured beyond all common things of earth.

      Aggrieved beyond words for the loss done the world by the Paravians’ passing, Dakar was jerked back to the trials of the present by Jieret’s harsh grip on his wrists. “Take care of my liege. By my charge as caithdein, see him happy and secure, or bring him back whole. Else by Dharkaron’s bleak vengeance, I will scour the world’s four quarters to find you, and make sure you suffer my judgment.”

      Dakar gave a raw, hooting chuckle. “That threat cuts both ways, you barbarian wolf. To harry me for my failures, you must first stay alive, and free of a galley slave’s coffle.” He shrugged, disengaged from the clan chieftain’s hold, and heaved his short bulk off the boulder. Around them, the last of the dark was fast fading. Gulls screamed above the jumbled, gray crags, and the knifing wind wore the smells of seawrack and salt. Dakar clasped his arms to ward off the chill, while the charcoal sky brightened and limned his stout form against a lucent pearl backdrop. “Go where your heart calls. The sleep spell I left won’t hold in full sunlight. Your liege will wake and feel rested. He’ll want to see your face and be sure you are well before the hour comes to sail. Give him that much, for the journey he embarks on could easily span the next decade.”

      Between a breath and a heartbeat, the Mad Prophet was gone, vanished into the raw cotton mist as if his presence had been knit out of dreams. Jieret was left to the desolate splendor of the cliff head, consumed by worried thoughts, while the throaty crash of flood tide slammed white torrents over the seamed rocks below. Suspicion remained. The Mad Prophet had not disclosed all he knew. A shiver touched Jieret as he measured how subtly the spellbinder had changed.

      While playing the drunkard, Dakar made it easy to forget his five centuries of study under Fellowship auspices.

      Disarmingly masked behind vexed words and bother, the fat prophet scored his clear point: he could have exerted his trained will at any moment, used powers of sorcery to set one blustering, young clan chief firmly into his place.

      Jieret flushed, then loosed a chagrined shout of laughter. He checked the hang of his weapons out of habit and started back toward the ruined fortress.

      For Arithon’s sake, Dakar had indulged him. Whatever reason underlay the vicious slaughter at the Havens, the shifty little spellbinder had entrusted Rathain’s prince with the dubious benefits of his loyalty. From that, the realm’s caithdein must salvage what peace of mind he could; his liege would not sail westward into peril without an ally to guard his left shoulder.

      “Though Ath Creator,” Jieret ripped out, as if air itself would carry his balked temper back to the Mad Prophet’s ears, “I’d rather be boarding the Khetienn myself than turning tail back to Rathain.”

       Checkrein

      Summer 5648

      For Morriel Prime, Matriarch of the Koriani Order, the rage still burned white-hot, even eight months after her failed attempt to assassinate the Master of Shadow. Due to the intervention of a bungling, fat prophet, Arithon s’Ffalenn still breathed. Morriel shut her eyes. As if by cutting off the daylight which flooded her quilted chair by the casement, she could deny the thorny fact the prince still walked on this side of Fate’s Wheel. Old, withered, reduced by years and longevity spells to a husk of sagged flesh wrapped over porcelain bones, she endured the weary pulse of blood through her veins; each heartbeat a throb of endlessly unquiet pain.

      More than anything she wished the oblivion of death.

      Yet the haven of final rest lay beyond reach. First she must unyoke the chains of command and transfer the massive burden of prime power to the hands of a proven successor.

      Forty-three women before this had perished attempting the trials of succession. Fear remained, to poison all pretense of patience. The years spent training the current candidate might be wasted, despite all her promising talent.

      Morriel breathed in the humid sea air of the southcoast. Decades of handling critically potent forces had chafed her senses to unwonted sensitivity, until the ceaseless barrage of sound, form and smell besieged the desperately held order of her mind. Even removed to this high tower, confined in isolation above the sleepy commerce of Thirdmark’s narrow streets, Morriel battled the distractions. The moldered damp of age-rotted stone, even the salt crystal scour of the breeze through the casement flushed her thoughts to patternless noise. Her cognizance at times felt strung thin as cobwebs, until the air currents themselves seemed to separate into voices. Each passing second tapped a pulsebeat against her dry flesh.

      Moment to moment, she denied the seductive lie. Inanimate matter could not quicken in sentient vibration. She would not permit inert reality to rock off reason’s track, slip the boundaries of discipline, and seduce her to embrace dreaming madness.

      She had handled too many sigils of power in the course of her unnatural, long life. The very currents of her aura had been sealed into containment, to interrupt, then deny nature’s cyclic rhythm of death. Attrition thinned the veil between senses and perception. The spin of bridled power eroded Morriel’s control, until one day no bulwark would remain upon which to snag the purling thread of insanity.

      The Koriani Prime endured with the dangerous knowledge that her age was now more than ten centuries. She had clung to breathing flesh far too long. None of her predecessors had dared test the limits so far beyond earthly balance.

      Her will on the matter had been gainsaid by fate; and now, yet again, Arithon’s persistent survival reduced all her works to futility. The augury she held as fair warning galled most for its absolute, ruthless simplicity: this last living scion of Rathain’s royal line would disrupt the Koriani destiny, destroy a body of knowledge that stretched back into history to the time before catastrophe and war had driven humanity to seek refuge on Athera.

      Morriel listened to the cries of the gulls skimming the breeze above the tideflats. She had never felt so wretchedly helpless. Her acquired depth of vision only mocked her. Earth turned, day to night, careless, herself a mote on its skin no more significant than any other unsettled speck of dust.

      While the Master of Shadow plied the ocean aboard his brigantine, his unformed destiny hung over her sisterhood’s affairs. One malignant chain of latent events would snap a succession unbroken for thousands of years.

      Morriel endured, her frustration contained. As the СКАЧАТЬ