Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

Men-at-arms wailed and fell prone, their weapons discarded as they locked shaking arms to shield their heads. Trees tossed and rattled, wrenched into splinters by snaking trails of wildfire. Still trapped in mage-sight, Arithon heard the shriek of natural energies battered and tortured out of true. He felt the frosts of his own conjury flash freeze living greens to glassine hardness that shattered in the pound of the winds. Intermixed were cries that were human. He groaned, wept, plundered intuition and training to force his reserves without mercy for the power he required to compensate. With his fists pressed to Jieret’s back, his eyes blind and his senses spinning, Arithon widened his defences.

And as he had once done at Etarra, his conjury cloaked Strakewood in darkness.

He could not see to know fate’s joke was actualized; that Lysaer had collapsed from blood-loss and stress and that Pesquil and a dedicated lieutenant now laboured to draw him clear of the conflict. Arithon could not breathe the air for the smells of dead earth and burning. He could barely stand upright, for the voracious demands of weaving shadow.

Jieret said something. The words faded in and out unintelligibly. Then hands caught at Arithon’s arms and shoulders, lifting, cajoling, supporting his legs that would not any longer bear weight.

A touch that had to be Jieret’s peeled his fingers away from his sword, then clasped his hand in steady warmth.

‘Ath,’ said a scout, appalled. ‘You sure he isn’t hurt?’

‘Leave him be,’ snapped another, maybe Caolle. ‘If he loses his hold on these shadows, every clansman in these woods will be doomed.’

Arithon held on. He clung to consciousness and craft with a determination that bled and then racked him. Spinning impressions whirled through him, of burning trees, and falls of water, and bodies blacked and crisped on sere ground. That made him cry out.

Such visions must be lent him by mage-sight; he prayed and he begged this was so. When he could sort out no distinction, he punished drowned senses for reassurance, that a dark deep as felt, starless, lightless, battened Strakewood in defences that could smother any outburst of reiving flame.

An indeterminate time later, he shivered and snatched a breath of air. ‘Are they safe yet?’

‘Soon,’ answered Jieret, or maybe Caolle. The word flurried without echo through the wails of eight thousand dead.

At some point after that, the last shred of awareness slid away from Arithon’s control. The dark and the shadows he conjured seeped through his frayed concentration, and then he knew nothing more.

Arithon reawakened on his back, to stars set like jewels between a black lattice of oak leaves. A soft cry burst from him as nightmare and reason collided, and he thought at first that he looked upon a dead landscape formed of carbon and char.

Then his nostrils filled with the sweet scent of sap, the resins of pine not far off. At his side, someone said kindly, ‘Strakewood is green, still. Your shadows preserved. There are clanborn survivors.’

Arithon lacked voice for his bitterness, that what lives had been saved must be few, with none of them a woman or a child. For a long time he could do nothing except shut his eyes and silently, fiercely weep.

The tears cleared his mind; no mercy. Raw as he was and helplessly unable to barrier himself in detachment, he was forced to take full stock.

‘Jieret?’ he asked first, the word a bare rasp of breath.

‘At your side,’ came the answer, reassuring. ‘He sleeps. Except for singed hair, he’s unharmed.’

Arithon released a pent sigh. ‘Steiven fell. Where?’

‘Does that matter?’ The voice held an edge now, and a movement in darkness marked out the form of a clan scout, seated crosslegged a short distance off.

Stubborn and silent, Arithon waited.

‘All right,’ the scout relented. ‘Caolle said make you rest, but if you’re going to be difficult, I’ll tell you.’

A sceptical quirk turned Arithon’s lips. ‘Caolle said nothing of the sort.’

The stillness grew expansive with surprise. ‘All right.’ The scout sighed. ‘Caolle cursed you. Jieret insisted you needed rest.’

The boy, now earl of Deshir, caithdein of a kingdom, thrust into inheritance of Rathain’s stewardship an orphan scarcely twelve years of age. The facts were given quickly after that, starting with Steiven’s response to Arithon’s first warning of disaster; orders that his war captain had begged on his knees to be released from: to gather and withdraw from the fighting by force if need be three hundred hand-picked young men. Steiven s’Valerient had then led the rest into ill-fated vengeance at the grottos.

‘He was among the first to fall,’ the scout said, his tone flat and tired, and his hands wrung with tension around his knees. ‘A crossbow quarrel caught him before we cleared the marshes, which was well. He never saw the scars of the burning, or what happened to his lady in the dell.’

‘I know how she died,’ Arithon grated. ‘Caolle broke orders, didn’t he?’

Snapped past the memory of the brutalities beside the Tal Quorin, the scout shrugged a shoulder and resumed. ‘The three hundred circled wide and approached the mêlée from upstream. As well they did. Jieret and two wounded scouts could hardly have pulled you out alone.’

Quiet, Arithon absorbed this. If he had done nothing else, his final intervention with shadows had spared most of those clansmen Steiven had selected to survive. After an interval, he prodded, ‘And now?’

‘The headhunters’ league are mostly destroyed and Lysaer’s Etarrans in retreat. We expect they’ll regroup outside Strakewood. The ones not nerve-broken or wounded will probably stay on and poison springs to destroy the game and starve us out.’ A breeze wafted through the trees, edged with the acrid tang of ash. The scout drew a dagger and tested the edge with a thumb, over and over seeking flaws. ‘Caolle won’t give them satisfaction. His plan is to abandon Strakewood and join up with earl Marl’s band in Fallowmere.’

Somewhere a wakeful mockingbird loosed a melodic spill of notes. A hunting owl cried mournfully. Jieret stirred in the depths of some dream, and the scout cut a stick in thick silence and nicked off a rattling fall of chips.

Arithon lay still and noticed other things: that his body was clothed still in blood-tainted leathers, though somebody thoughtful had bound his cuts. In fits and starts of mage-sight he recognized the neat work as Caolle’s. By the odd flares of light that scoured the edge of his vision, and by his current inability to keep focused on the physical aspects of reality, he knew he still suffered the effects of overplayed nerves. His twisted misuse of spellcraft had caused damage beyond distress to the body. His thoughts had an odd start and hitch to them, as if pulled to the border of delirium. The curse of itself had left ravages. His opposition by shadows had plundered also, when he had wrenched that thundering torrent of enslavement aside to reclaim his free will.

He dared not guess how much time must elapse before he could sleep without nightmares. A nagging ache in his bones warned how greatly his resources were depleted. Pain and plain restlessness drove him finally to stop circling thoughts by getting up.

The scout abruptly stopped whittling. Knife poised, chin raised in query, he said, ‘Where in Sithaer are you off to?’

Over his shoulder as he departed, Arithon flipped back an insouciant quote from a ballad. ‘ “To free the dazed spirits, and reclothe cold flesh in fair flowers.”’ Whether his line was delivered in Paravian words did not matter; his mood was too shattered to translate.

As if nature held light as anathema, no moon shone over Strakewood in the aftermath of Etarra’s assault. Traced by faint starlight or by the fluttering, uncertain flames of small torches, Caolle and Deshir’s clan survivors moved through the fields of the dead. They went armed. The body that groaned in extremity might not be a kinsman’s but an enemy’s; the hand that stirred in trampled mud might not reach in acceptance of succour but instead hold a dagger thrust to maim. Scouts too tired for sound judgement searched logs that looked like fallen clansmen and gullies that conspired to conceal them. Through swamp and on hillside there came decisions no repetition could ease; of whether to send for a healer or to deal a mercy-stroke and finish an untenable suffering.