Grand Conspiracy (9 page)

A white puff of steam plumed from the officer's mail gauntlet. He yelled, instantaneously scalded, and cast down his scarcely drawn weapon. Those mounted companions called to act on his order gasped in dismay as he ripped back burned fingers. The sharp jerk at the rein and the smell of singed flesh caused his horse to snatch the bit and kite sidewards. Loose clothing billowed. A seemingly stray breeze flipped the flapping surcoat over the disgruntled officer's head. The beleaguered man fought to untangle himself without tumbling out of his saddle.

Asandir looked on, guileless. ‘That attack was unwise. Your men would do well to avoid your mistake. I further suggest you disband this Alliance encampment. Pack up your gear and your tents, and let all the captives in your compound go free.'

Flushed with torment as his blistered fingers bore the weight of the rein to control his plunging horse, the captain threw back a murderous glower. ‘You hold no authority to revoke the direct command of Avenor's Prince of the Light!'

‘Perhaps not.' Asandir flicked the heavy, rich weight of his mantle back over nonchalant shoulders. The silk lining shone numinous silver against the forest's turned foliage. ‘But your s'Ilessid idol has overstepped prudent limits and threatened the green life of Caithwood.' Unwilling to grant any pause for rebuttal, the Sorcerer set foot in the mare's stirrup and mounted. ‘Such desecration will not be permitted. By terms of the compact
I will act
.'

‘How? By sending more archers to sleep?' the officer sneered in vain effort to bolster his men, who were fast losing the courage to stand firm. ‘Or will you just singe a few fingers?'

‘More than that. I am going to awaken the somnolent awareness of the trees.' Asandir closed his heels and stepped the horse forward, trusting the two clansmen would have the good sense to stay close and follow his lead. To the captain at arms, helpless to prevent him as he and his party spurred past, he delivered his mild ultimatum. ‘On that hour, woe betide any two-legged creature in this forest who unsheathes cold steel or kindles a fire for harm's sake. Remember my warning. The mind of quickened wood has no heart and no conscience, and no kinship at all with the needs of hot-blooded animals.'

Five days later, under pearl mists of drizzle, Asandir walked alone. His scout escort had departed, sent on as his emissaries to inform the scattered clan encampments of Prince Lysaer's intent to fire the timber in Caithwood. They would spread word of the Sorcerer's course of action to avert that looming catastrophe, and also deliver the list of necessary precautions to be observed by every man, woman, and child.

Asandir moved afoot on his long panther's stride, the reins of a different horse hooked in slack loops through his fingers. This mount was a scrub-bred bay with surly teeth and an unkempt autumn coat. By inclination it did not balk at thick brush; nor did it fear to tread through the mossy, rank mud of black mires and
the tumbled, round rocks of swift streamlets. In its cantankerous company, the Sorcerer ventured the deepest heartwood of the forest. His sifting search sought out the most ancient tree, the one he must win as his ally to configure and catalyze the awakening.

Such a patriarch tree embodied far more than the accumulated wisdom of advanced years. Its ancient being would span the four elements, the deep taproots twined with earth and water; its upthrust limbs of vigor and majesty would be anchored in the transformative fire of the sun and the windy, wild force of the air. A king tree was not given to reveal its true nature. By the elusive manner of its kind, it could only be found through the riddle of subtle communion with its fellows.

Asandir paused, as he had many times in the dull, gray chill of the morning. He touched the horse still, though it snapped at his wrist. ‘For shame,' he murmured into its laid-back ears; then he listened. Amid the splashed tapestry of sound caused by water drops kissing moist leaves, he measured the tap of their fall on the earth. The palm of the hand he held flattened against the trunk of a middle-sized oak became like an eavesdropping ear at a keyhole.

For there was language embedded in the dreaming awareness braided through these acres of live foliage. Word and syntax were tapped in the endless percussion of interlaced twigs. In the sticky, slow river of the sap flowing beneath his touch, the trained mind could read the imprinted secrets that passed from one tree to the next, their world of overlaid messages given amplified breath by the unending conduit of weather: of the wind and the free-falling water.

Nor was the questing touch of this Fellowship Sorcerer any stranger to Caithwood's vast silence. Asandir himself had once bespoken the world's trees to anchor a spell of homing. The signal had been sent to recall Kharadmon from the far-distant world of Marak, from which Desh-thiere had launched its first invasion. The ghost signature of that conjury still lingered, imprinted yet in the live congress of the greenwood. Welcomed by a surge of recognition, Asandir returned tacit greeting. Guardian that he was, and for all that the drake's binding had made him, his listening presence was admitted with forbearing tolerance.

North
, he sensed. The whispered flow of information meandered that way, from saplings to stands of mature growth trees in full prime, to the twisted, skeletal ruins of the eldest, with their scraping crowns of stripped branches.

The Sorcerer shifted his grip on the reins. He urged the horse onward, then strode like a wraith in his soaked, dark leathers and ducked under a leaning stand of conifers. The loamy forest floor cushioned the sound from his footfalls. Green needles hoarded the insipid wet, each laden branch strung with clutched hoards of diamonds. Asandir bent, picked up the tattered, black shells of last season's cast-off fir cones.
North
, was repeated in the winding energy of spiraled petals from which fragile, winged seeds had departed.

He moved on. The horse at his heels snatched an opportunistic nip at his sleeve, but collided with the elbow he moved to intercept the tender flesh of its muzzle. It subsided, sullen, ears flopping. The squelch of each hoof into saturated moss stamped a pockmark of noise in the liquid symphony of runoff. The rain fell, dimming the light to dull mercury. Asandir's hair held the wet like dewed cobweb, and the shadowy density of the trees wore the gloom like a scene viewed through a smoked mirror.

Set into the layered weave of the wood, a cameo cut from milk porcelain, an ancient beech flagged Asandir's attention. The roots grasped the earth in an embrace that felt boundless and mighty as time, and the limbs framed a vaulted arch for the pearlescent sky. Asandir paused. He gave the old tree his intent, sweeping survey, as if the unveiling powers of his mage-sight would decode the manifest of its destiny in Ath's primal language of sound and light.

This beech he knew from all other beeches, and it was not the one tree that he probed for: the giant that guarded the heart strength of Caithwood, whose prodigious endowment would be masked and cherished, kept hidden like a cached treasure. Ties of loyalty would reside in this tree as well, and for the ingrained pride of its kind, it would not lightly unveil the trust of its sovereign's identity.

Asandir untied the tether rope knotted to his mount's neck and secured the animal to a deadfall. The horse had long since grown accustomed. Too shrewd to expend restless energy, it tipped one shaggy hoof, slanted a hip, and shut its eyes, relaxed to the point where its lower lip dangled. The Sorcerer was not fooled. He was careful to stay well clear of its heels as he settled himself in damp moss. There, he reclined, with his head cradled amid the branching divide where the trunk of the beech engaged its splayed grip on the earth. He, too, shut his eyes, but not to subside into sleep.

Instead, he embraced the dream of the tree, stately, slow, a step in four attenuated beats that marched to the change in the seasons. He drifted there, an immersion into a peace so beguiling, danger lurked for the unwary. The thick crawl of sap lay far removed from the pulse of a red-blooded heartbeat; recast to the dance of a rooted perception, the endurance of a winter's freezing winds became as poisonously gentle as a soundless, caressing fall of snow. All threads of human personality could unravel, lulled into forgetful slumber, and then drawn into deep coma that would spiral beyond the threshold that marked life from death. A mind trained to power embraced at its peril the engulfing, staid majesty of the greenwood.

The Fellowship Sorcerer took precautions and wove a small spell as an anchoring link to the sun. Should he lose his purpose and drift into languor, too much at one with the sugared tides of sap that subsided below ground for winter, the advent of nightfall would recall him. Earth's shadow would snap that frail linkage. A jarring cry of dissonance would run through his nerves as that binding gave way into chaos.

Should he fail to harken, his bones might be found, clutched at length in the ingrown embrace of the beech. His mind would be absorbed, welded into the current of dreaming that made up the leafed weaving of Caithwood.

Asandir let go of awareness without hesitation, without fear, with no marring note of unease. He immersed his whole being into the slipstream of life that was the joined multitude, root, trunk, and bough, that comprised the forest of south Tysan. In fullest command of all that he was, unencumbered by barriers that would cloud true perception, he
became
at one with the gnarled old beech.

The dream claimed him wholly. He was knotted root, tasting the mineral-rich darkness of earth. He was leaves, speaking the summer's endless, whispered promise of tranquillity. In the grasp of winter's gales, he was bare branch and twig, drumming the untamed tempo of the elements. He was pollen, sifted under spring sunlight, and the spanging snap of bitter frosts. The old beech's memory extended like fog past the dawn of Athera's Third Age.

Beneath the layering of the tree's individuality ran the currents that interlinked its being with its neighbors; and theirs, to their neighbors, until the forest's webbed consciousness extended its reach to encompass the far borders of the wood. Asandir rode that
tranquil sea of soft whispers, loomed from the speech of blown leaves in the wind, and braided amid the gossamer filaments of root hairs. He sensed flowing water, and the tidal pull of the moon; the warm, flooding canopy of sunlight. He knew the blind, reaching growth of the acorn, and the ground-shaking fall of the elder trunk, claimed by rampaging tempest. The lives of the trees entangled in dream like the trackless silence of owl flight.

Deeper, the flow of arboreal awareness lost its seamless, broad fabric of communion. A directional tide stirred the fathomless depths, spiraling outward in tacit connection with the mystery that encompassed Ath's creation. Within that singing band of unity, Asandir found the signature he sought, encoded in language of sound and light, and steeped in the gentle nurture that was the wise province of trees.

He knew the wood's heart, the given Name for the patriarch tree whose great presence could be called to awaken the dream of the forest, and make its form manifest in the minds of animate beings. Granted the key he required to arrange for the defense of Caithwood, the Sorcerer withdrew his consciousness. A whispered act of will freed him back into separation. Such was his care, he left no disturbed ripple to mar the transmission of spirit language. Within the core wisdom of everlasting silence, that ageless current passed yet on the unquiet air, leaf to leaf, tree to tree; and sky to earth at the behest of sun's fire and cloud's rain.

Autumn 5653

Seventy-five leagues northward, far removed from the chill of woodland nightfall in Taerlin, candlelight rinsed the carpeted chamber where the oldest daughter of the Lord Elect of Erdane perched on a brocade stool. Her lush skirts spilled a lake of pale rose silk and gilt trim around her primly crossed ankles. Walnut hair fanned over her shoulders, combed into a shining cascade of warmth by the lady's maid who attended her.

‘Oh, Ellaine, to be so fortunate!' From a nearby stuffed chair, with a pert, dimpled chin perched on cupped palms, her younger sister mused on, ‘Having a prince ask for your hand in marriage! I could burst from the excitement.'

The tortoiseshell comb slid, streaking sparks of static in the dry air, while the candle's rinsed glow raised Ellaine's skin to a flush and glinted off lips like ripe peaches.

The sister's spun fantasy gushed on through bright hopes and girlish dreams. ‘You'll go to Avenor and wear diamonds and ermine, and we will all die of envy.'

‘The contract's just signed,' Ellaine contradicted in her sweet, retiring alto. While the maid tipped her head to run the comb at Ellaine's nape, her muffled voice showed apprehension. ‘A thousand things could go wrong.'

Her thoughts skittered and fled like dropped pearls. She tried not to think of the horse with the blue-and-gold trappings just arrived, with a train of liveried attendants. The turmoil of their stabling still upset the evening calm of the yard. Dogs barked in
the streets. Every hall in the mayor's mansion reechoed with the fast-paced dialect of strangers. Ellaine's damp fingers clamped in her swathed lap. Belowstairs, her mother and father stood to receive the royal suit and exchange courtly courtesies until the moment of her formal presentation.

‘You could worry yourself silly!' A moue on her cupid lips, the younger sister masked a giggle as the maid crossed her line of view. ‘The trade guilds would scarcely see you lose such a prize! Father's done nothing but count the coin for your dowry for at least the past six weeks. Believe it. You're going to stop hearts.' The maid gathered up the smoothed waves of hair and deftly separated the shining mass into neat strands for braiding. ‘You're not
thinking
of shaming us all by throwing a scene as he meets you?'