Sorcerer's Legacy (19 page)

Within the triangle, the child stirred. Elienne knew a wild surge of hope. The small, translucent hands unclasped, and Minksa raised a face imprinted with misery. “Lady, I cannot.”

Cut to the quick by the need for haste, Elienne’s response was brisk to the point of brutality.
“You can try.”

Anguished, Minksa shook her head.

“Does our friendship mean nothing?” Elienne reached fiercely for the candle at the nearest corner of the triangle, as though to pinch of the greenish flame at the wick.

“No! Lady, I beg you!” Minska flung herself at the barrier. “You’ll come to great harm if you touch that.”

The enclosure flared red as Minksa struck its perimeter. She fell back with a cry of pain, and knelt, weeping, though no tears fell.

Elienne tried to balance urgency with gentleness. “Minksa, Darion could be killed if we don’t act quickly. Then all of Pendaire would suffer. Will you help?”

Minksa sat back on her heels, an expression beyond her years molding her thin face.

“Child, what in the Name of Ma’Diere troubles you?”

“Lady, I daren’t help your Prince, for my life’s sake.” Minksa turned her face away. “Darion of Pendaire would condemn me to the headsman should I leave my Lord Regent’s protection.”

Elienne felt sick. Was there no end to the intricacy of Pendaire’s court intrigue, that even children were involved?

“I am older than I seem,” said Minksa, startling Elienne with realization she had voiced her thought. Bound by the triangle, Minksa sprang suddenly to her feet, quietude shattered. “Lady, I was there when Faisix bound the Prince to his bane.
My own sister died, as sacrifice,
and I as witness committed high treason against the crown.”

Elienne forcibly restored herself to a semblance of calm. Minksa was close to panic. Logic alone would win the girl’s complicity in the struggle to aid Darion. Braced with patience she never knew she possessed, Elienne gently urged the child to elaborate her tale. “Darion is a just man, not a vindictive one,” she added. “I can’t believe you acted entirely of your own free will. Do you trust Faisix, who abuses you, more than me?”

Minksa sat, uncertainty evident even in her gesture of denial. In the oppressed, shadowed room, stale with ash and spent smoke, Elienne waited for the girl to sort her allegiance. The candles flickered and spat by her feet, winnowing sparks like the fireflies released each year at the summer festival in Trathmere.

Elienne sighed, and decided impulsively to gamble. “Minksa, listen well. There shall be an heir. I am with child.”

“But Darion is cursed.
I saw.
He can father no children.”

Elienne drew a steady breath. With the caution of a wolf stalking deer, she knotted lies with half-truths and tried not to examine the enormity of her risk. “That is exactly what Faisix wants you to believe. What if you’re wrong? You must have been very young. The Grand Justice cannot hold you, as a child, accountable for what you saw. You say your sister was murdered, at Faisix’s hand, and that fear of reprisal bound you to secrecy. You are innocent of treason, child, but if you fail to act now, you will not be innocent long. The blood of your Prince and his unborn heir will be upon your hands.”

Minksa shook her head, agonized. “Please. Would you have me act against my own father?”

Patience abandoned, Elienne struck with sharp and remorseless honesty. “Would a loving father ever exchange his own daughter’s life for a crown? Minksa,
if
the child I bear is not the Prince’s,
think why
. His Grace might choose not to claim his birthright through murder, though his own life were forfeit.
Don’t you realize that such a curse could be reversed in the same manner in which it was cast?”

Distressed by indecision, Minksa buried her face in her hands. Her bowed shoulders quivered, reminding Elienne how cruelly young the girl was for the burden of loyalty and betrayal thrust upon her. Yet lives depended upon her choice. Though pierced to the core with pity, Elienne dragged words past the wretched knot in her chest and weighted the conviction of her cause with all she had left to offer.

“Minksa, I am going to put out the candle.”

“Lady, no.” Hysteria threaded Minksa’s tone. “The wards will defend against interference.”

“I know.” Elienne tried to control the fear inspired by the warning, with poor success. Her resolve to disrupt the ward seemed the action of a fool too dim to comprehend defeat. The carved demon on the candlestand mocked her with an expression of poisonous despite. Should the Prince be condemned to the ax, the plight of a foreigner would rouse little comment at court.

“I beg you, Lady,” said Minksa. “You are my friend. I don’t want you injured.”

Yet Faisix’s mad intent to inflict vengeance was no more tolerable. Elienne clenched her fingers into a fist. “Minska, if you value that friendship, you will help me by setting your will against what confines you here.”

She raised her arm, and caught Minksa’s eyes with her own. “Fight back, and Darion’s supporters will act to defend us.”

Minksa shrank back in terror. “Lady, please!”

“No.” Elienne cursed the quaver in her voice. “If you choose, Taroith can reach through your desire and free you. I doubt very much whether Avelaine can continue to rule your body without your consent.
Act against Faisix, if only for your dead sister’s sake.”

“Lady, no!”

But the protest had no effect. Driven by loss, by betrayal, and by her own reckless anger, Elienne smashed the candle from its stand. An aureole of scarlet sparks rinsed the room of shadows. Her skin flamed agony. Someone screamed. The sound seemed to rend the very fabric of sanity, and darkness rushed through the gap. Elienne felt as though her fingers handled magma. The screams, she discovered, were her own. Time hesitated, seconds stretched to span the Eye of Eternity. Then a starburst of blue light shattered her vision.

* * *

A log settled, and an upsurge of flame tossed a flurry of sparks adrift in the dark. Darion shifted position, weary of the wait, and worn by the forest silence, which pressed his ears until they ached. At sundown, Taroith had sent word that the Regent’s counterstroke was imminent, and the trap to take him prisoner set in readiness. Yet the night was better than half-spent, and nothing had marred the stillness but wind. Darion avoided thoughts of Elienne. He was never a patient man, and a fortnight of concern had frayed his nerves until even the stamp of a restless horse made him start. The flames snapped and hissed at his back as he scanned the black, shadowed forms on their tethers.

A high, whistling snort cut the night, and maned necks lifted, tautly arched. Something had alarmed the horses. Darion caught the dew-soaked leather of his scabbard with sweaty fingers and rose quickly. His booted foot disturbed a bridle, and something struck a buckle with a clink. One of the men stirred and sighed in his sleep. But above the nearby sounds of the camp, Darion heard what the animals’ keener senses had detected ahead of him. A horse approached, driven through the wood at a hard gallop.

Certain the animal would have a rider, Darion called softly to his captain, “Waken your men.” And steel glanced blood red by the flamelight as he lifted his sword.

Around him, the men rose and armed themselves. A less experienced company might have protested that such measures were excessive against what obviously was nothing more than a single horseman—but where Black Sorcery was involved, one foe could easily be the match of twenty. Darion rode to the center of the shield wall that ringed the camp. He would not meet Faisix in the open, alone and vulnerable.

The captain paused at the Prince’s side. “I should think he has reached the League’s ward circle by now.” He folded his arms across his huge chest and scraped an itch on his jaw with a gloved knuckle.

Darion frowned. “Not yet.”

That moment, a horse screamed. The captain started violently. Darion’s hand froze on his sword hilt, as every animal on the picket line erupted into frenzied panic. A tree branch splintered, and dirt clods thrown up by shod hooves rattled among the bracken.

“Cut them loose!” shouted the Prince. “Quickly. They’ll injure themselves.”

A man put aside his pike and ran, dagger drawn. He slashed the halter ropes. One after another, the freed horses wheeled and plunged at a crazed gallop into the brush. The snap and crash of sticks soon obscured all sound of the approaching rider. Cold sweat threaded Darion’s temples. Faisix surely was aware of the net of sorcery that the League had set about the camp. He would come prepared, and probably in a form no right-thinking man would sanction.

Suddenly light flared. Shadows leaped, stark as spearshafts from the tree trunks, as with a gusty rush of sound a Sorcerer’s ward girdled the shield wall and camp it defended within a sheet of blue-white illumination.

“He’s crossed the League’s boundary!” shouted the captain, exultant. “We have him prisoner.”

“Only if we can subdue him.” Grimly Darion squinted, tried to see between silhouetted trees, convoluted and black as blown ink against the dazzle of the ward. His knuckles tightened on the swordgrip. The extraordinary brilliance of the League’s defense was itself a warning that Faisix’s sending was no trifle. By Taroith’s estimate, the man’s ambitious cunning had developed beyond reason into madness.
“The Regent has forgotten restraint,”
he had said, following his attempt to rescue Elienne.
“He is a killer whose actions hold no thought of morality. Any who intervene do so at great peril.”

Yet whatever he had told his colleagues had moved the entire League of Sorcerers to uncharacteristic aggression. Consumed with concern for Elienne, the Prince resisted the impulse to rub his aching eyes.

The approaching hoofbeats stopped. The forest was eerily still. Expectancy gripped the entire company. A pikeman shifted his weight, outlined in light, and the man next to him swore aloud.

“Maintain your guard, soldier!” snapped the captain. But a scream of rending foliage made his reprimand unnecessary. The attack was upon them, from behind.

Darion spun around, saw two men hurled bodily into the air. The watery gleam of a scaled beast reared beyond, equine, deadly, and straight out of legend. Hooves raked the shield wall like hammers. A man screamed, horribly, drowning the thump as his comrades struck earth, limp as rags.

“Close ranks!”

In dreamlike disbelief, Darion stepped forward, sword held lifted in frozen hands, and eyes fixed upon the apparition that reared above the heads of the men. “Ma’Diere, he’s raised the Demon of Hellsgap.”

A pike struck a scaled shoulder and glanced, rattling, aside. Its owner fell, but Darion had eyes only for the rider. The familiar, light hand on the rein caught in his memory like a barb.

The captain caught his arm roughly and jerked him back. “Let the men handle it, your Grace!”

Something struck a shield with a belling clamor, overlaid by the brighter chime of swordplay. Darion whirled, half-lit features stamped with denial. “By Eternity’s Law, they cannot!” He tried to fling off the restraining hand. “The rider of that fiend from Hell is my dead sister, Avelaine!”

Steadfast and experienced, the captain tightened his grip. He spoke calmly over the clang of arms. “Then leave her to the men. What can you do, except throw your life away, as Faisix intends?”

Iron struck steel with a screech, countered by a choked-off human cry. Darion flinched and tore free. “I can stop her killing.” And he saw the captain’s face slacken with fear as he turned to meet his nemesis.

A ragged shout arose as another man went down. The shield wall crumpled like a burst dam. The demon horse surged through the gap, its rider’s hair a spray of ebony against the glare of the ward. Shod hooves chewed gouts of soil from the earth, and slitted eyes glimmered, hooded by horny sockets.

The Prince braced himself, sword upraised. The stag blazon on his surcoat leaped in the ward’s light as his chest heaved with each labored breath. Close up, he saw memory had not tricked him. The face beneath that wind-tossed net of hair was his royal sibling’s, but the gaze she fixed on him was inhuman as a cat’s.

“Avelaine!”

Darion’s voice came hoarse from his throat. The demon steed reared over him, fetlocks spurred like a fighting cock’s. He parried, jarred to the shoulder as steel cracked against a taloned hoof. Air buffeted his ear, plowed up by the other hoof, and the spur caught his sleeve like a razor. Cloth fluttered, opened to expose the fine mesh of mail beneath.

Darion stepped back, recovered, and saw the thin, hard edge of Avelaine’s sword thrust at his throat. He twisted, ducked, vision filled by the bullion tassels of the beast’s saddlecloth, and an armored boot driving at his face.

“Sister!” The word was a gasp as he dodged. He slashed at the horse’s hamstring, but it sidled, serpent tail smashing downward. He took the blow with his sword edge. Steel quivered, and stung his palms, but the blade opened a line of scarlet between closely lapped scales.

Darion recoiled, his sword poised. The horse snorted, breath like streaked smoke on the night air. Muscles bunched under scaled hide, and both forelegs lifted to deliver a second barrage. Darion back-stepped. He thrust upward, hoping to catch the softer heel of the hoof, or the exposed ridges of tendon above the spurred fetlock. But Avelaine yanked the reins hard left, driving her steed off balance, and into safety. She parried Darion’s lunge and riposted, her slim body utterly at home in the saddle as the beast recovered equilibrium, sidestepping.

Steel struck steel. Darion feinted and retreated to recover himself. His heel mired in the folds of an abandoned blanket. He blocked a thrust at his neck and sprang clear before his footing could be spoiled. Sweat burned his eyes, transforming the reflections of scales, weapons, and caparisons into starred points of light. Dazzled, he blinked, and almost missed his parry.

“Avelaine!”

The plea caught between breaths. Dimly, he heard shouting. The horse reared. One or the other forehoof would smash him before he could impale it. The sword dragged at his wrists. Yet he lifted the blade, and noticed that he had somehow bloodied his knuckles. The demon loomed over him, black as the shadow of Eternity. Its evil head seemed to rake the sky, neck muscles rippling against tasseled reins. Darion angled the sword’s point for the belly just behind the dark line of the girth, oblivious to the flash of Avelaine’s steel, which swung at him from the side.