Peril’s Gate. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ dare you ignore the Prime Matriarch’s directive!’ Smoothly groomed, her sable hair imperiously pinned since her demeaning affray by the wall, Lirenda advanced in a swish of damp silk.

      Yet Cadgia folded broad arms, unintimidated. ‘Don’t start. Not now. You’re behind on events. The old balance of power has shifted.’

      ‘You’ve had news?’ Paused as though doused by a pail of chill water, Lirenda drew a sharp breath. ‘What are you saying?’

      ‘That when the wards you had set over Jaelot’s walls were breached by the Shadow Master’s passage, we received urgent word from the lane watch.’ Sobered now, without petty smugness, Cadgia delivered the tidings withheld by the Prime’s express command, until Arithon’s escape was past salvage. ‘Your hope is ashes. The succession is already accomplished.’

      Lirenda blinked, gold lit as an old painting against sepia shadow. The impact of meaning took moments to crumble her adamant wall of denial. ‘Prime succession? Then Morriel lost her last faculties?’

      Sensitive to the porcelain-frail note of vulnerability, Cadgia broke the shattering gist. ‘Morriel is dead. We bow to the will of a new Prime Matriarch, who bears all the powers of her predecessor.’

      Lirenda felt emptied, as though earth itself had dissolved from under her feet. ‘Who?’ she forced out in a glass-edged whisper. ‘Which initiate has come to stand in my stead?’

      Cadgia masked pity as she spelled out the cutting truth. ‘Selidie, of course. She was the appointed Prime Senior.’

      ‘But that’s impossible!’ Lirenda’s disbelief uncoiled to rage, her heartbeat a drumroll within her. ‘That lackwitted girl knew nothing at all. She never completed even a fraction of the requisite course of training!’ Granted blank stares from the onlooking seeresses, who abandoned their posts one by one, Lirenda stemmed her shocked fuming. The disparities she mentioned were not self-evident. She alone had once held the candidate’s position within the Koriani Order. Of all ranking seniors, only she had successfully mastered eight of the trials of initiation.

      ‘Nonetheless,’ Cadgia said, matter-of-factly. Informed by the avid stillness that Lirenda’s defeat was too public, she snapped a prompt order to dismiss her subordinate seers. Mantles rustled as the women filed out. While the blast of the storm through the rickety doorway spilled in and tattered the tallow flames, the ranked senior resumed speaking. ‘Should the outcome 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; СКАЧАТЬ