Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

Weather conspired to foil her. In the dark, through driving rain, landmarks became invisible and the lane leading westward from Kelsing had fallen to decay since the Mistwraith. Only the ghostly trace of wheel ruts crossed the barren hilltops; the sheltered soil in the valleys encouraged brush and thickets, and oak groves choked the washes under obliterating drifts of rotted leaves. Since the mare collected from the last livery stable was her own beloved bay, Elaira could hardly drive at speed through scrublands riddled with gullies and badger setts that could snap a horse’s legs on a misstep.

Daybreak was well past when, skin wet and sore and made cross by storm and delay, she reined in the little mare before a disused postern that let into the ruined palace gardens.

A novice initiate awaited her. Miserable in the heavy fall of rain, she announced with clipped asperity that the incoming message rider was expected to report at once to the main hall.

Elaira dismounted with a dispirited sigh. If word of her doings concerned the Prime Council, she would have been met on arrival however inconvenient the hour. Rain hammered in sheets across the flags, rinsing rivulets through the arches overhead. Elaira draped her reins on the mare’s steaming neck and started to loosen girth buckles.

‘You should call a groom for that.’ The novice was shivering, as thoroughly drenched as Elaira, except that her vigil had been performed after breakfast and a warm night’s sleep. ‘The Prime Enchantress is displeased and delay will just worsen your case.’

Elaira felt the cold go through to her marrow. ‘ Morriel wants me?’ She tried and failed to hide distress. ‘But I thought—’

‘That today was the time appointed to review the orphan wards,’ the novice interrupted, prim to the point of cattiness. ‘It should be. Your doings in Erdane caused the roster to be rearranged.’

A tingle of blood suffused Elaira’s face. Already her disgrace had seeded gossip. Had she not been the daughter of a street thief before the Koriani claimed her for training, shame might have hampered the wits that allowed her to rally. ‘I’d best not wait for a page, then. If their evaluation has been put off, the boys will have time on their hands. You’ll only need a minute to find one to see my mount cooled and stabled.’

The pages were all eating dinner at this hour, and serve one junior novice right, Elaira thought as she fumbled with icy fingers to unbuckle the satchel of dispatches from the saddle rings. If the Prime herself was displeased that made for worries enough without every new snip in the order troubling to point up the fact. Before the flummoxed girl could utter protest, Elaira surrendered her reins, shouldered her burden of papers and pushed on through flowerbeds choked with bracken and hedgerows run together into moss-green tunnels snarled with creepers and thorn.

The wing to the ladies’ chambers nested amid the overgrowth like a pile of moss-rotten stone. The beams that roofed the porticos had caved, spilling slate like shattered pewter over what once had been marble mosaic. Elaira kicked down a daunting stand of weeds to reach the doorway. The original portal of cedar and filigree had long since rotted away. Bronze hinges cast in a tracery of rose leaves now hung on rough-hewn planks nailed together with a strip of boiled cowhide. Wet leaves jammed the sill. Elaira wasted minutes in prying the panel open; she persisted rather than go around the front way, would endure obstacles far worse before she traipsed in her dripping, draggled state past the eyes of her curious peers.

That prideful scruple cost her skinned knuckles and added sweat to her smell of wet horse. Militant despite Asandir’s counsel of temperance, Elaira hastened through a chain of mouldering bedchambers; if the Prime Enchantress saw fit to demand audience after an all night ride with no bath, she deserved to endure the result.

In better, idle moments, the carved wainscoting and decaying bas-reliefs that ornamented the cornices and ceilings invited daydreams of the original inhabitants. But on a morning made gloomy by cascades of falling rain, the rooms of dead earls’ ladies seemed musty with sorrowful memories. Elaira let herself out into a brick and flagstone inner corridor and proceeded through shadowed archways and around puddles let in by leaks to the anteroom where the enormous halfwit who served as Morriel’s doorguard granted her instant admittance.

The gentle man was not smiling, a distressing sign.

Left alone beneath the cavernous vaults of the great hall while the panels boomed shut on her heels, Elaira stopped short. The chairs before the friezework dais stood empty and no fire burned in the grate. The Prime Council’s review had not just been deferred, but cancelled for today altogether. No disdainful circle of seniors awaited; only two cowed-looking page-boys, scarcely twelve years of age and identically blond, bearing the paired standards and crested crane device that symbolized Morriel’s authority.

The Prime herself held audience. Aged and thin as a whip, she sat her seat of power looking faded in official purple robes and skin as translucent as antique porcelain. Yet her shoulders were not bowed; her hand on her order was unyielding as northfacing granite, hard as the diamonds that netted her bone-white hair and flashed on her blue-veined wrists. Couched amid calculating wrinkles, her eyes gleamed black as a carrion crow’s.

Clumsy at the worst of moments, Elaira tripped on the hem of her travelling cloak.

Morriel looked up at the sound, sharp cheekbones and hawk nose enhancing her bird-like rapacity. She waved her hand. The bundle of cloth by her elbow stirred upright and turned around with a feline grace. Elaira caught her breath in true fear as she identified First Enchantress Lirenda, present all the while, and whispering in the matriarch’s ear. Clad in judiciary black, veiled in muslin, she stood in attendance as Ceremonial Inquisitor.

For her late transgressions in Erdane, Elaira was not to suffer enquiry, but the formal, closed trial reserved for enchantresses who broke their vows of obedience.

Frowning, scared and chilled from more than damp clothing, Elaira reviewed her mistakes: she had spoken with a sorcerer, but not to betray her order’s secrets; she had gambled with a drunken prophet, but except for flouting an unwritten code of manners, she had committed no indecency. If Erdane’s officials had caught her at spell-craft, she might have burned, but no others in the sisterhood had shared her risk. Last and surely least, her talk with the s’Ffalenn heir in the hayloft had passed in absolute innocence.

Why should she be called in for judgement as if she had plotted a grand offence?

Rumpled and travel-stained before her seniors’ immaculate presence, Elaira lowered the message satchel. She slipped the strap from fingers gone nerveless and threw off her muddied cloak. Her knees shook through her curtsey, a detail made obvious by her riding leathers. Somehow she managed a level voice. ‘I stand before my betters to serve.’

Prime Enchantress Morriel inclined her head, the shimmer of her diamonds and lace netting pricked with light like new tears. She did not speak; since by custom the Prime addressed no outsiders, oath-breakers fell under the same stigma.

First Enchantress Lirenda spoke in Morriel’s stead, her enunciation as ominous as the cross of swords behind her veil. ‘Junior initiate Elaira, you were sent north with routine dispatches for the house matron outside of Erdane. Instructions did not mention taverns, or brothels, or card gambling with drunken prophets who consort with sorcerers of the Fellowship.’

Left light-headed by the pound of her fast-beating heart, Elaira returned the only excuse she could plead. ‘I was told to be observant, to bring back the news of the road.’ Dakar had told more in five minutes than lane watchers had gleaned through a month of tedious observation; yet that truth would but incense the Prime further. Elaira stared at the floor. ‘Mistakenly, I thought facts were of greater importance than the methods used to seek them.’