Janny Wurts - Warhost of Vastmark

Arithon soothed back crusted hair to bare the mauled ruin a wyvern had left when its front talons had raked and grasped her face. The rear claw had sunk through her shoulder and chest; deep gashes had torn when it flew. Ends of separated bone and ripped cartilage showed blue through the shreds of her blouse.

It wasn’t Ghedair’s fault,’ the girl blurted. ‘He was watching. But I ran off. Then wyverns came.’

‘Hush.’ Arithon added a phrase in lilted Paravian, too low for Dakar to translate. But the powerful ring of compassion in his tone could have drawn out the frost from ice itself. ‘I know that, Jilieth. Stop fretting.’

In merciful relief, the child’s one eye slid closed.

‘Your bard’s gift let her sleep?’ the Mad Prophet asked.

Arithon soothed her cheek against Dakar’s rough clad shoulder. ‘That’s the best I could do.’ In the moment he glanced up, the deep empathy of his feelings stripped his face beyond hope of concealment. ‘Keep her quiet if you can.’

Stupid with shock, Dakar clung to the girlchild while the Shadow Master bent to tend the boy. The blood on the torn saffron jerkin proved more the dead wyvern’s or his sister’s than his own. The arm, bundled out of its swathe of shredded cloak, bore deep punctures and gashes swollen to angry red. The break above the ankle was clean beneath the swelling. Arithon patted the boy’s crown, arose, and in a fit of balked grace, kicked the rank, knife-hacked corpse of the other fallen wyvern over the edge of the outcrop. The implication was enough to stop thought, that somewhere lay another slain mate.

The resourceful boy owned courage enough to shame a full-grown man.

While the rest of the drake pack, in a squalling, stabbing squabble, glided down the gorge to scavenge the remains of their dead, Arithon disrupted Dakar’s appalled stupor in brisk and fluent Paravian. ‘We’ll have to splint the leg first. Arrow shafts should do for the purpose. I’ll tie them with my cuff lacings. The girl, we’ll have to bind up as we may. I hate the delay, yet we’ve got no choice. They’ll have to be moved. The herbs in my satchel and some of the roots can be pounded up to make poultices. But I can’t brew the remedies without water and sheltered ground to make a fire.’

‘There ought to be springs at the base of the cliffs,’ Dakar said.

‘Then we’ll find a path down.’ A leap and an athletic slither saw Arithon up to the ridgetop. He returned with his quiver and spare shirt. Before need that disallowed the indulgence of his hatreds, Dakar lent his hands to the grim work of splinting and binding.

The boy gave one full-throated, agonized cry as his shinbone was pulled into line and set straight. Arithon spoke to him, soothingly gentle, a constant barrage of reassurance. Whether his voice spun fine magic, or cruel pain claimed its due, when the ankle and knee were strapped immobile, the child lay quiet, unconscious.

‘Pity them both,’ Dakar whispered as he ripped linen to strap Jilieth’s gaping lacerations. ‘She must be half-empty of blood.’ He need not belabour his certainty that the wounds beneath his hands were surely mortal. The grief in the Shadow Master’s expression matched him in stricken understanding.

‘There’s hope. We might save her,’ Arithon insisted as he tucked the shepherd boy into the folds of his cloak.

Dakar pushed back upright and trailed through the climb up the cliff path, the girl cradled limp in his arms. ‘Are you mad? Five bones in her rib cage are separated from the cartilage, and one lung is filled up with blood!’

‘I know.’ Arithon draped the boy over his shoulders, clasped the small, unmarked wrist and one ankle, then set his weight to scale the last rise of rock. ‘Just keep her alive until we find a spring. If she’s still breathing then, try and find the forbearance to trust me.’

Dakar clamped his teeth. The Prince of Rathain had never asked his help; never before now bent his stiff royal pride to admit that other company was better than a burden to be managed in blistering tolerance. If Asandir’s geas hounded Dakar to sheer misery, for Arithon, the bonding was a nuisance.

Tempted into a sympathy that felt like self-betrayal, Dakar ground out the first rude word to cross his mind. Then, stubborn in prosaic disbelief, he passed the doomed girl into Arithon’s waiting grip and dragged his plump carcass back up the rim wall to the slope.

Two hours later, on a sandy bank beside a rock pool, Arithon prepared a heated poultice to treat the punctures and slashes on Ghedair’s mauled forearm. His concentration seemed unaffected by the oppressive gloom of the site. Damp and streamered in green shags of moss, the gorge reared up sheer on two sides, the sky a hemmed ribbon between. Light seeped through the clouds, dim as the gleam off a miser’s silver, while the breeze fluted mournfully through the defiles. Far off, the braided whistles of a wyvern pair screeled in bone-chilling dissonance.

Tired of feeling useless, set on edge by the spring’s erratic plink of seeped droplets, Dakar gave rein to spite and prodded Arithon to elaborate on his earlier, misguided cause for hope.

‘Jilieth’s already failing.’ The clogged drag of her chest seemed to worsen with each tortured breath that she drew. To distance the unaccustomed sting of pity, the Mad Prophet lashed out. ‘You know full well there’s nothing left to do but keep her warm and sheltered until she dies.’

Her face by then had been cleansed and swathed in the torn strips from Arithon’s spare shirt. Outside the bandaging, the lashes of her undamaged eye remained, fanned like cut ends of silk against a cheek so colourless the freckles shone dull grey. To look at her at all, to see her child’s hands so far removed from life they never twitched, was to suffer a sorrow past endurance.

Small comfort could be gained, watching Arithon’s fine fingers wind and tuck smooth the ends of the dressing over the boy’s poultice. That task completed, he settled Ghedair back in his cloak and plied him with herb possets until he slept.

Dakar could no longer hold out. The child in his arms gasped on the edge of suffocation; she was going to pass the Wheel within the hour. Her plight most ruthlessly tore away pride until no grudge was enough to maintain his sceptical rancour.

To Arithon, he ground out, ‘If you think we can save her, say how.’

‘Easily spoken, in theory. Not so simply carried out.’ A wind-tousled figure stripped down to hose and shirtsleeves, Arithon rinsed his hands. Water spattered off his reddened fingertips, shattered the pool into ring ripples that burst his reflection into a maze of jagged lines.

Dakar found himself pinned by a measuring stare that assessed him wholly without judgment.

‘You’ve had longevity training,’ Arithon said at blunt length. ‘I’ve got a masterbard’s ear for true sound. If you build the spell seals to initiate healing, I can link them through music to the signature vibration that defines Jilieth’s life Name.’

If not for the hurt creature that burdened his arms, Dakar would have shot to his feet. ‘Dharkaron’s fell Chariot and Spear! You have no idea what you’re asking.’

‘You’re most wrong.’ Arithon looked away. ‘I’ve a fair enough indication.’ In unadorned phrasing, he described the time he had joined talents with the enchantress Elaira to reconstruct the mangled arm of a fisher lad. The result of that experience, coupled with the mage’s schooling he had received from his grandfather, lent him full awareness of the implications. The aftermath had hurled his heart beyond peace; the woman had been driven to leave Merior.

Dakar shrank from revulsion that pealed like an ache through his bones. ‘I might know your whole mind! ’ The unspoken corollary freighted his tension, that the shared course of such bindings could expose every facet of Arithon’s warped character to the intermeshed weave of the link. No secret would stand between them; no subterfuge. If Dakar once lost his grip, he would find his awareness submersed in the quagmire of the other man’s criminal nature, to the everlasting upset of his conscience.