Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

But young Jieret, who had Sight, cried aloud, ‘Ath, Ath, it’s Teynie!’ He threw down his bow and tugged Arithon’s shoulder in dawning, agonized horror. ‘Hurry! She’s going to betray them all.’

Dazed and burdened with his interleaved mesh of maze-woven shadows and defence wards, Arithon neither heard the words, nor felt the boy’s urgent touch. He roused anyway. The oath lately sworn with Steiven’s son had been a blood-ritual, and for the mage-trained such things became binding beyond a mere promise; his life and the boy’s were subtly twined. Like a man slapped out of a coma he mustered back full awareness and moved; but not in time.

Lost to panic and raw grief, Jieret shoved past the archers and vaulted the palings that served as cover.

No chance existed for second remedy. Arithon dropped hold on the spells, let them collapse in a tangling cascade of frayed energies. The shadow-barriers being easiest to stabilize, he locked a lightless pall across the valley that would partially hamper Etarra’s troops. ‘You’re on your own,’ he informed in clipped apology to the archers. ‘Stand or retreat as you will, but at least send a runner to warn your fellows.’

Then he was over the breastworks and after Jieret with his sword sliding clear in mid-air.

Of the scouts posted with him, half remained. The rest grabbed up weapons and bows and jumped after, hailing companions as they went. ‘Jieret’s run off, the prince after him. Divide your numbers and come, they’ll need support.’

Dodging through elders and thin brush, Arithon spared no thought for regret. Had Jieret’s spurious talent recaptured the vision that led to the slaughter of Deshir’s innocents, any futures traced through his tienelle scrying would now carry unknown outcomes.

If Deshir’s clans were beyond saving, he had vowed that Steiven’s son be spared.

He poured all his heart into running, slammed through a last stand of birch, and at last overtook the fleeing boy. Once abreast, he made no effort to stop, but matched stride and gently guided, bending the child’s flight toward the thicker stands of forest on high ground. ‘Easy. Up here. That’s better. Fewer pikemen, and don’t forget the swamp.’

Jieret choked back a sob and plunged through a gully in a furious rush that tripped him up.

Arithon caught him as he stumbled, steadied him through the moss-slicked rocks up the bank. Between heaving breaths he kept talking. ‘Explain. What about Teynie? We’re bloodsworn. It’s my oath to help.’

‘The tents!’ Jieret pushed through a stand of witch hazel, whose downy spines powdered his jerkin. ‘She’s going to lead headhunters to the tents!’

Slammed by a wave of foreboding, and fending off branches that raked his face, Arithon squeezed the boy’s hand. ‘Don’t talk,’ he gasped. ‘Just think in your mind what you dreamed and imagine that I can see it too.’

But panic had already impelled the vision to the forefront of Jieret’s awareness. The instant Arithon opened a channel to test the boy’s distress, the ties of the bloodpact took over. Jieret’s terror became his own. The prescient vision that tienelle scrying had snatched back in fragments unfolded now in entirety. The scrub-grown hillside seamed with weather-stripped gullies blurred out of vision as mage-sight unveiled another place…

…of torn earthworks and slaughtered bodies, where Pesquil’s advance troop of headhunters tracked prints across blood-rinsed earth. In swift, efficient silence they exchanged swords for daggers and cut scalps to claim bounty for their kills.

The corpses raised by the hair for the knife-cut were small, the faces smudged in leaf mould and gore unlined by life and years…

Boys, Arithon realized with a choke that all but stopped his heart. He tripped hard on a stone, felt the tug of Jieret’s grip save his balance. Present awareness slapped back, along with anguished recognition of total helplessness. The deed was done: the sons of Deshir dead. All hacked and disfigured, were the little ones Caolle had insisted be sent to dispatch the enemy wounded because men for that task could ill be spared; amid whose company Jieret would have been, if not for a bloodpact of friendship.

‘Jieret, they’re gone,’ Arithon gasped out in defeat. ‘We’re too late.’

But Jieret’s mute and furious headshake forced back unwanted recollection that the appalling scene by the riverside had failed to include the fated girl. At what point does the strong mind falter, Arithon wondered in a cascade of renewed despair. The feud between Karthan and Amroth had inspired atrocities enough to wring from him all tolerance for suffering. Between town born and clan, the hate ran more poisonous still.

Ground creepers tore at his footfalls as he fought toward the crest of the ridge. At his side, Jieret was labouring, his eyes stretched sightless and wide, as if he viewed vistas of horrors, but lacked any breath to cry protest.

At what point should the strong heart shy off, and preserve itself from wanton self-destruction? To go on was to risk every shred of integrity to the mad drives of Desh-thiere’s curse. Arithon swore in fierce anguish. He tightened grip on his sword, braced tired nerves, and cast off the protective barriers that confined his sight to Jieret’s dream. Every prudent precaution he had taken was tossed away as he reached out direct with his mage-sight.

Disciplined, efficient, too well-versed in the ways of forest clansmen to suffer delay or needless noise, Pesquil rattled off orders. His men crammed dripping trophies in their gamebags. Nearby, wiping a sword whose blade bore chased patterns of reversed runes, a strong, straight man in a ruined surcoat clenched his jaw against the hurt of cracked bones.

Framed in that place, over the bodies of slain children, that man’s lone figure imprinted stark as flame against a scorchmark, and wakened the pattern of Desh-thiere’s curse. Backlit by a slanted shaft of sunlight, the soft, feathered greenery of pine boughs knit a backdrop for disordered blond hair and a regal profile grazed and scratched, but unmarred in expression by any furrow of remorse…

Arithon gasped as if hit. His stride faltered, despite Jieret’s efforts, shouting and tugging, to urge him on. He heard nothing, felt nothing beyond nerves pitched and twisted to a geas-driven impulse to attack.

Vision and reflex merged. Alithiel’s blade sang through air. The sour, belling whine as swordsteel sheared through sticks and green bracken jolted turned senses back to reason.

Arithon stood, breathing hard, the sweat drenched over him in runnels. He caught one breath, two, the hand gripped white to his sword hilt trembling in waves of reaction. Fingers could be relaxed into stillness. The mind could be forced to shake off madness. Eyes closed, quivering as if racked by a fever, Arithon called every shred of his training to repress the screaming urge to fling aside Jieret and bolt, not to rescue, but to kill. Through him and through ran the sick recognition that he had tasted worse than his fears. He had fatally near underestimated the havoc that even indirect scrying on his half-brother could unleash through the core of his being.

Half-undone by despair, for there existed no escape from this quandary, he gathered self-command and looked up.

Attending him in staunch readiness were Jieret and eleven clansmen who had without questions left their defenceworks to support him. Enmeshed as he was in sorry fears and the unmistakable throes of wrecked dignity, their kindness offered temptations a curse-marked spirit could ill afford.

Enraged as a scalded cat by the flaw that twisted through his character, Arithon’s first impulse was to let fly with words and send them packing, away from his reach lest he wantonly compromise their safety.