Grand Conspiracy

For Roderick MacDonald,
with profound thanks for
the opportunity to study
music under a master

T
he hard frost came to the downs of Araethura early, and the rains at their cusp laced crusts of ice through the peat stacks under the sheds. Indoors, with no fire lit to fend off autumn's breezes, the invasive cold settled at will. Crouched on her knees on the packed earthen floor beside her darkened cottage hearthstone, the Koriani enchantress Elaira cast aside her flint striker. She cupped her chilled fingers, blew on the caught spark. Well versed in the contrary nature of wet peat, she launched into strings of ridiculous endearments, coaxing damp fodder to nourish its struggling wisp of caught flame.

The fateful knock at her door, which shattered her peace, interrupted her then.

Elaira damped back her annoyance. The spill in her fingers fluttered out as she arose, resigned to the usual request for a cough remedy or a tincture to dose a sick goat. For seven years, she had lived alone, plying her herbal wisdom on the moorlands. Time had eased the innate distrust the local herders held toward practice of her craft, and families now came to her freely when trouble visited their livestock and farmsteads. While the leaves turned, and the season's late foraging sent her deep into the hills, such supplicants knew she was best found at home after sundown.

The dark in the cottage weighed like felt soaked in the sweet
meadow scents of the herbs bundled to dry in the rafters. Elaira breathed in the oily must from her fleece jacket, just pulled from storage in her clothes chest. While she threaded between her sparse furnishings by touch, the pounding resumed, impatient.

‘Daelion's bollocks, I hear you!' Elaira clawed under her collar, hooked out the silver chain that hung her spell crystal. The quartz as her focus, she invoked mage-sight to steer past the tumbledown stacks of herb hampers and clay jars, long since overcrowding the niche underneath the cluttered board of her work trestle. Barefoot and cold, she reached the door and fumbled with numbed hands for the latch.

Apprehension swept her, unbidden. For the crystallized span of a heartbeat, every fiber of her being clamored in primal, precognitive warning.

Then her roan gelding whinnied from the shed. His call was answered by a strange horse's whicker; a shod hoof chinked against rock, and a distinct chime of bit rings sliced the night. Innocuous sounds; yet their import snapped away the false calm she had wrested from whole years of disciplined solitude.

‘Sithaer's begotten demons!' Elaira released her crystal, swept over by needling gooseflesh in the chill embrace of the dark. Those downsland herders who called needing help came on foot, or else they rode in astride scruffy moor ponies with hackamores braided from leather. Their mounts wore no tack with metal fittings. Nor did they ever fare shod.

Her left hand hovered, indecisive, while the knock resounded a third time. The rickety wood panel jounced in its frame and threatened the strapped leather hinges. Before the door gave way under punishment, Elaira tripped up the latch. Wind flung the panel against her braced shoulder and revealed what the fell night had brought her.

A Koriani enchantress stood on her threshold, ruffled into lofty disdain by the inclement Araethurian autumn.

She said, acerbic, ‘Were you asleep with your bumpkin head under a blanket?' Searing displeasure rolled off her in waves and jutted the chin beneath her hood. Whatever her status, the buffeting elements had abused her like any other traveler. Her initiate's mantle was rumpled and splashed, the hemline snagged loose by a thorn brake. Bristled to yet more extreme irritation, the enchantress inspected the splinters stabbed through her expensive calf gloves. ‘Beastly boards! Why haven't you found some needy laborer to come here and faire them smooth?'

Elaira clapped down a flyaway tendril of her auburn hair and cracked the offending door wider. ‘Are you going to rail, or come in?' Her dread pulled awry by irrepressible devilment, she gestured toward the comfortless darkness inside, offering a shelter as rude in simplicity as any length of unsanded oak.

A purposeful rustle, as the woman outside raised her quality, layered silk above the muck-splashed ankles of her riding boots. ‘Dear woman, how quaint.' Aristocratic accents packaged each word with precise and patronizing venom.

The rising winds sliced bitter and chill through that moment, as the unforgotten past encountered the present and irrefutably tangled. Elaira knew who had come. Her recognition raised sourceless panic, and then sharp rage, that the grasping demands of her order would destroy all the hard-won sanctuary she had found in the heart of these barren moorlands.

‘First Senior,' she greeted, the requisite formality of high office like ice chips between her locked teeth.

Lirenda unclasped her mantle, her air of reserve an acid rebuff. ‘No longer First Senior.' As if upbraiding a junior initiate for an insubordinate attitude, she admitted, ‘The Prime Matriarch has rescinded my privileges.'

That was news; a political break of shattering magnitude, which implied a long fall from position and favor.

All blank practicality, Elaira shouldered the door closed before the raw winds could strip her bundles of dried herbs from the rafters. Her back to barred wood, she endured a tense interval, while the unintimidated gusts continued to howl and batter over the thatch. By her cot in the corner, the one window's shutter shivered and worked on its pins. The drafts through the chinks made no allowance for smashed expectations or shamed pride; the floor gave off its humble scent of dank earth.

‘You do keep a candle, I presume,' Lirenda said at length. She smoothed her shed mantle over her arm, unwilling to risk the silk lining to the hazards of unvarnished furnishings.

‘There's a tallow dip.' Beeswax was far too precious to burn in the barren isolation of the moorlands. Elaira crossed the cottage. Arrogance alone did not explain why a grand senior of the order should disdain simple use of trained mage-sight. While rummaging through a cupboard for a wick, Elaira could not strangle logic, or shake her sense of foreboding.

The implied disgrace of an eighth-rank enchantress defied all sane credibility. For over five decades, Lirenda had stood
second in line behind the Koriani Prime Matriarch. Morriel was weakened by vast age, even dying, rumor said. There seemed no imaginable intrigue or expediency that might drive her to disown her sole groomed successor against the hour when her faculties would finally fail her.

Despite the moiled waters of Koriani high policy, Lirenda's arrival would not be chance, but tied like forged chain to the name that haunted every facet of Elaira's existence.

‘What will you ask to know of Prince Arithon this time?' Her resentment sang through the gloom as she straightened, the tallow dip cradled between sweating palms, while the cupboard gaped open behind her.

For, of course, the Koriani Order would not have stopped meddling in the feud between the royal half brothers who had banished the Mistwraith. Their strengths and their sacrifice had restored Athera to clear sunlight, but that victory had been bought in tragedy. The possessed fogs of Desh-thiere had been battled to a standstill and trapped. Last stroke in defeat, its poisonous curse had left Lysaer s'Ilessid and Arithon s'Ffalenn entangled in unbreakable enmity. Their gifted talents of light and shadow had been turned one against the other, the violence extended to bloody war and cutthroat politics for a span of sixteen years.

Morriel's entrenched conviction that Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn was a threat and a danger to society would scarcely have changed since the spring's breeding intrigues had relieved Lysaer s'Ilessid of his proudly launched fleet of sail.

Silence; the descending wail of a gust overlaid by the secretive whisper of costly, town-loomed silk.

‘Why else would you come?' Elaira accused outright. Steady as iron, and guarded in ways she wished she could trade for the cleaner oblivion of death, she crossed the cramped cottage and stooped to retrieve her dropped flint and striker from the hearthstone. ‘At least, I should think dirt floors and rabbit stew could be found in more interesting company than mine.'

‘You know the Shadow Master's whereabouts.' Lirenda tried a step, groped at the edge of the trestle, and stopped to the chink of bumped flasks. Her restraint spoke volumes, since her highbrow nature invariably met baiting with a show of superior authority.

Elaira snapped the striker. Against felted darkness, a spat tangle of sparks; their reflections touched her eyes, the unyielding, flat tone of wet slate in that moment when illicit love and compassion collided with inflexible duty. She must answer when
questioned. Her initiate's vow demanded obedience; nor could she feign ignorance. The uncanny cord of awareness she shared with Rathain's prince had not faded one whit through seven long years of separation.

She wrung what stabbing satisfaction she could from the level force of her honesty. ‘My reply won't be news.' Her shrug was blurred by the tenuous flicker as the new flame died on the wick. ‘Your scryers could have spoken without the rank bother of spending a cold night under thatch that's infested with silverfish.'

Lirenda returned an expectant silence.

Compelled to elaborate, Elaira gave the striker another fierce effort. ‘What would any thief do with jacked brigs, except sail them? His Grace of Rathain's been at sea for three months.'

The tallow dip caught. Marigold light flared over crude edges of wood, then the chipped rims of her hard-used Araethurian crockery, and lastly, in a wavering, unkind disclosure, the tatty, patched quilts and old fleeces tumbled over her cot in the corner. Elaira refused the embarrassment of an apology. Life here on the moor gave her all that she needed. Her roof did not leak, a comfort never to be taken for granted after her impoverished childhood. This tiny cottage had been her home since she had forsaken Arithon's company at Merior. Its unvarnished planks gleamed oiled yellow, walls and pegged furnishings left unadorned in their natural dappling of knots. The steam-bent wooden canisters, the iron pot, the stone knives, and the brazier which served her herbalist's vocation scattered their familiar melange across the trestle.

Yet, as if such cozy, workaday clutter had subtly slipped into chaos, the haven Elaira had claimed for herself no longer seemed safe or friendly.

An enchantress who held her in utmost contempt commandeered the stool which still wore the nicks of its origin in a cobbler's shop. All citybred elegance, Lirenda perched like a displeased cat, a slipped coil of hair unreeled down the white-marble skin of her temple. But for the marred elegance of travel-creased skirts, her composure was flawless, each limb arranged with the serenity of a sculptor's sketch for a masterpiece.

Which complacency struck a false chord in a fireless cottage with the change in the season howling through the chinks; Elaira suppressed a raking, fresh pang of unease. Lirenda had always deplored life's rough edges. For a sleek, cultured woman who
demanded her bathwater scalding and her personal servants brisk and silent, a cottage in these moorlands on the biting edge of autumn posed an inconvenience akin to punishment. Without Morriel Prime's direct order, Lirenda would have foisted this sorry errand on one of her least-favored underlings. The fact that her misery kept no company bespoke an ominous secrecy.

Elaira shed the tallow dip on the table before her trembling drew unwanted notice. Rather than grapple with her building dread, she crouched and resumed the easier task of coaxing wet fuel to take fire. ‘You can't really believe I could hold sway over Prince Arithon's movements.'

Lirenda insisted, ‘You have a part to play, even so.'

Elaira recoiled. Her pile of birch shavings scattered as if by an arrow's aimed force, and the spark snuffed, spindled into a sullen ribbon of smoke. Jaw hard, her friable emotions buttressed behind a façade as determined as stormed granite, Elaira recouped her scattered kindling. She ground the flint against her worn lump of ore, distressed enough to start a conflagration on the sheer impetus of resentment.

Her Koriani oath constrained her, until the achievement of each inhaled breath taxed her separately to complete. The instant the blaze caught under her hands, she stood erect and faced her tormentor. ‘Say what you mean.'

Lirenda fussed with the muddied silk draped across her braced calf. ‘Why protect Rathain's prince? He stands accused of monstrous crimes. Avenor has gathered hard evidence. Lysaer's magistrates claim he used black arts and blood sorcery to fracture the cliff face above Dier Kenton Vale. You can't pretend not to know Lysaer's great war host was milled down and slaughtered wholesale under a shale slide.'