Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

The raven chose that moment to try a furtive sidle toward the butter. Traithe batted it aside without ceremony. Through its outraged croak and the breeze fanned up by its wing beats, he said, ‘Has no one ever thought to school you to understand your birth-given gift of light?’

Touched on a life-long source of bitterness, Lysaer spoke fast to keep from hitting something. ‘No one considered it necessary.’

The raven retreated to the top of the door jamb and alit on a gargoyle crownpiece.

‘Ah.’ Traithe set his chin on his fist. ‘For a prince in direct line for a crown, such judgement was probably sound. But you’ve been brought here to battle a Mistwraith. That alters the outlook somewhat.’

But Lysaer worried at his hurt with the persistence of an embedded thorn. ‘Why did Asandir not suggest it?’

Traithe chuckled. ‘Did you think any one of us is omnipotent? Asandir has Dakar for an apprentice. Teaching that scatterbrain anything would frustrate the patience of bedrock.’ The sorcerer pushed out of the windowseat. ‘I’ve an errand to complete in the storerooms. Perhaps you’d care to come along?’

Lysaer brightened and stood. ‘I’d welcome the chance.’

He trailed Traithe through the pantry, while at their backs, the raven swooped to the tabletop, folded wings like a furtive scholar, and hopped on the plates to scavenge crumbs.

‘Sethvir lets the butter go rancid in the larder, anyway,’ Traithe confided as he let himself into the stairwell. ‘He thinks eating a bother, but run out of tea and he’s desolate.’

Not eased to learn that mages seemed heir to human foibles, Lysaer followed his host into the tower’s lower levels. Even without arcane perception, Althain’s starkly plain construction and rough-cut granite bespoke haste and stop-gap desperation.

The air smelled of books, wet firewood and an indefinable tang left over from spellcraft. Somewhere high above the wind jostled a shutter against its pins. Lysaer found himself wondering whose feet had rubbed the edges from these stairs, and the hands of which crowned rulers had polished the axe-hewn oak rail. He had heard Asandir’s reverence for the old races; yet in this place, under low, vaulted roofbeams blackened by centuries of torch-smoke, there lingered only a forlorn sense of ending. Any past enshrined within Althain seemed faded to desolation and a haunting resonance of perished hope.

The mist beyond the arrowslits concealed the view that might indicate the storey of the threshold where Traithe finally stopped. He unlatched a crude door and disappeared into total darkness. ‘Use your gift to light your way,’ he suggested to the prince who hesitated at his heels. ‘Sethvir is haphazard about candles, always. I might need a moment to find one.’

Self-conscious as he had not been while rising from bed stark naked, Lysaer engaged his powers. Not easily, and not without trepidation, he summoned a silvery spark; but if the sorcerer thought his method crude, no comment was given on the matter.

The chamber revealed by the witch-light was larger than its doorway suggested. Timber racks lined walls that curved into shadow, crates piled in tiers picked out by the glint of hobnail studded leather or brass hasps. The stores reeked of oil and old dust, yet when the sorcerer touched flame to the torch in the wall sconce, the pitch-soaked rags caught and unveiled a clean-swept stone floor and shelving kept clear of cobwebs. The stores had been tended unstintingly, except for labels. Those bales and boxes that were catalogued bore crumbling tags marked in antique script that time had faded illegible.

Traithe paused in the centre of the chamber, rapt in manner as his raven. ‘I doubt much has changed since the Paravians left.’

Intrigued beyond awkwardness, Lysaer said, ‘What are we looking for?’

‘Sethvir could have described which of the twenty odd coffers on the third shelf by the north wall, at least.’ Stirred from vexation, Traithe gave a rueful smile. ‘We’re looking for rubies, and the circlet worn by the princes of Havish in ceremonial affirmation of their rights of succession.’

‘You have a surviving heir?’ Lysaer inquired, starved for information on Athera’s royal lines.

‘Tucked away in the hut of a hermit who dyes wool, yes.’ Traithe sighed. ‘The boy’s just twelve, and about to learn there’s more to life than bartering for alum to colour fleeces.’

Lysaer fingered an intricate pattern of vine leaves tooled into what looked like a high-born lady’s dower chest. ‘Where do we start?’

‘Here, I think.’ The sorcerer singled out two boxes and a crate stamped with a hawk sigil that might in years past have been red. ‘I would at least expect to find the regalia of the kings of Havish in a chest with the royal seal.’

Lysaer offered his assistance and found himself handed the smaller crate. As his hands closed over ancient wood, he shivered in anticipation. His forebears had ruled a high kingdom: piqued by the thought that relics of his own heritage might be cached here with the antiquities, Lysaer unlatched heavy bronze catches that slid easily despite heavy dents from rough usage. The Warden of Althain had not been lax in his care, for the hinges also turned without a creak.

The odour of leather and parchment immediately identified the contents: document scrolls looped in musty ribbons, and books with illuminated bindings and titles inscribed in the old tongue. The covers were not jewelled or clasped with gold, but darkened and scuffed with age. Regretful the words between lay beyond his schooling, Lysaer fingered the pages in fascination.

‘The packages we’re looking for won’t seem very interesting,’ Traithe said, his features eclipsed by the dome of the adjacent trunk. ‘You’d best check beneath those journals before you go any further.’

Lysaer closed a rust flocked cover. ‘What are these?’

‘Ancestral records that trace the line of the kings of Havish back to the founder, Bwin Evoc s’Lommein.’ Yet if the sorcerer meant to elucidate, a shuffling step and a carping voice interrupted from outside the doorway.

‘Did you have to set that raven loose to rampage through the butter?’ Green-faced and suffering what looked to be a punishing hangover, the Mad Prophet traipsed into the storeroom.

Traithe barely spared him a glance. ‘I’m encouraged to see you’ve recovered enough to have an appetite.’

‘I woke up because I was starving.’ Dakar fumbled with the strap of his belt, which was buckled but not tucked in its keepers, and immediately resumed accusations. ‘Sethvir’s too lazy to stock much beyond plain tea.’ The Mad Prophet winced, abandoned the particulars of his clothing and cradled his brow as the echoes of his own vehemence played havoc with his sore head. ‘And olives preserved in oil sit poorly on a queasy stomach.’

Busy unfurling an object swathed in linen, Traithe was cheerfully unsympathetic. ‘That didn’t keep you from eating them, I see.’

Dakar clammed up rather than admit culpability. Neither did the misery of his bellyache stop him from quartering the chamber, randomly fingering the varied contents of the shelves. ‘Sethvir chose like a ragpicker, when he decided what should be salvaged.’ A bored gesture encompassed a lumpish bundle wrapped in leather tied with twine.

‘I wouldn’t handle that,’ Traithe warned, already too late.

The Mad Prophet’s meddlesome fingers triggered a burst of blue-violet light. A crack shocked the air, capped by Dakar’s yell of pain. He recoiled, still howling, while the bundle he had disarranged rolled precipitately off the shelf.

It struck the floor with a note like sheared glass and another blinding flash seared away the leather wrappings. Blinking through a veil of afterimage and an acrid puff of ash, Lysaer saw a melon-sized violet jewel bounce and roll across the flags. The facets blazed and fountained sparks at each contact with the stone.