The Curse of the Mistwraith (Wars of Light and Shadow, #1)

by Janny Wurts

Not until very much later, when her brother the commander of the guard visited her chamber to ask what she had garnered, did she realize how thoroughly she had been beguiled. Throughout the evening spent with Lysaer she had done most of the talking. ‘His charm is tough to resist,’ her brother grumbled. He loosened the amethyst buttons of his collar with fingers much softer than the prince’s, and smoothly unmarred by scars. ‘Damned fair-haired conniver is a diplomat down to his shoes. Too bad he wasn’t born townsman. We could’ve used one with his touch to restore our relations with the farmers.’

Lysaer jerked awake in a tangle of sodden sheets. The nightmare that had ripped him from sleep still lingered, a sense of terror just beyond grasp of his consciousness. He slugged a heavy feather pillow out of his face in a choked-back fit of frustration. Guard-spells set by the Fellowship might avert those threats that were tangible, but not the formless ills that harrowed his dreams. This was not the first night since Desh-thiere’s defeat that he had awakened to a pounding heart and skin running with sweat.

‘Arithon!’ Dakar shoved up on one elbow. ‘What did I see in that trance?’ For a split second it seemed Rathain’s prince would not stem his frantic rush. But as the latch wrenched open under his hand, he threw back in anguished haste, ‘Dakar, as you love peace, if you care for my half-brother, keep him from me! For if we’re brought face to face the terms of your prophecy shall be met. The result will end in a bloodbath.’

Asandir returned a slight nod. ‘Go inside. Smooth tempers, avert uneasiness and above all, let nobody hear we have problems. Sethvir’s just now sent warning: Lysaer’s in serious trouble. The pattern that encompasses his Name has drifted. Worse: Luhaine reports that Dakar’s been alarmed by premonition. Both events indicate that our s’Ilessid heir may harbour one of Desh-thiere’s wraiths, picked up through the moment of confinement. If so, the crisis forecast by the strands is upon us. One mistimed judgement and we’ll have no crowned king, nor a restored Fellowship, just panic and bloodshed in the streets.’

Lysaer closed his eyes as a third, fierce tingle played across his flesh. A still part of him analysed this, and concluded that Fellowship sorcerers must be seeking him through spellcraft. Heated elation followed. In uncanny certainty, he realized he was no longer quite what he had been; the pattern sought out by the sorcerers’ probe had ceased to match his personality. Once he should have felt alarmed by an insight more appropriate to a mage-taught perspective. Obsessed now by compulsion to serve justice, he never questioned what caused the deviation, or his odd self-knowledge of its existence.

=(

Sorrow and grief the strands foretold, were the Fellowship to stand restored to Seven; but with a second, unanticipated forecast entangled on top of the first, the validity of Dakar’s Black Rose Prophecy stood threatened. Caught in the critical crux, the Fellowship raged with tied hands. They dared use no power to divert, but could only inadequately observe the blow as inevitably, it must fall.

Asandir gasped in sick shock. The inconceivable had happened: Desh-thiere’s wraith had delivered a banespell against the half-brother beyond reach of possession. Transferred by Lysaer’s bolt of light, the evil mesh of its geas entangled in Arithon’s aura. Thunder pealed. For a heartbeat the packed square was rinsed scarlet, a tableau borrowed from nightmare. As Desh-thiere’s curse claimed its foothold, Arithon’s expression shifted from resistance and pain to a hatred that abjured all redemption. In purest, bloody-hearted passion, he howled and wrought shadow in answer to Lysaer’s betrayal.

Clear-cut as a cameo, the prince’s profile reflected the inborn nobility of his lineage; no shadow showed of the evil that had blighted life and honour. Unwitting pawn of ill circumstance, Lysaer had yet to waken and feel the change that disbarred him from royal inheritance.

‘It understood that its bane was comprised of paired strength. What better protection than to sunder our princes through hatred and set their gifted talents against each other?’ ‘It cursed them to enmity, so.’ That implied long-range planning, a chilling fact. Asandir shared Sethvir’s unsettled wariness, that the wraiths left under ward at Skelseng’s Gate were far from secure as they stood.

‘Our protections were wrongly aligned,’ Asandir whispered, anguished. ‘We sought harm too soon and protected craft teachings too late.’ Woe to Lysaer, his integrity left ruthlessly forfeit to an enemy that took him defenceless. The irony wounded, that Arithon’s schooled protections might have deflected the attack; or at least sensed the presence of an invading wraith before it could move to possess. ‘Dharkaron damn us for fools, we threw the wrong prince into jeopardy.’

The Fellowship is a bunch of asshats.

‘Dharkaron, Angel of Vengeance!’ Sethvir all but wept. ‘No wonder the ill creature had him! It gained entry through the one avenue of conscience he was spell-charged never to question!’ The fault and the weakness were never Lysaer’s but the Fellowship’s own, for sorrowful lack of foresight.

The sorcerers braced at his side regarded each other, beaten and drained from their labours. Between them passed understanding: that cost had been set upon this unbinding. The s’Ilessid gift of true justice, bent to ill usage by the wraith, had suffered untold further damage. Asandir ventured hoarsely, ‘The curse that sets Lysaer against Arithon had sullied the s’Ilessid gift in any case.’

While Asandir in tart chastisement jabbed a toe in the ribs of his apprentice, who seemed inclined to drop off snoring. ‘Arithon dead, don’t forget, would doom your Black Rose Prophecy to failure.’ ‘You want Davien back?’ The Mad Prophet opened drink-glazed eyes in martyred affront. That’s fool rotten logic, when his betrayals were what dethroned your high kings in the first place!’

A frown marred Lysaer’s features as he wondered upon the memory that, he would once have spoken differently; that he had in some other time challenged his royal father to intercede for the pirate bastard’s comfort. That event seemed distant, as cut off as a stranger’s memory. Brave, Lysaer had seen himself then; honourable and just. Now, his past pity seemed the puling naivete of a fool, to have invited his own downfall and thrown away heirship in Amroth for adherence to one painful truth. A lie cost so little, in comparison; and by today’s outcome, his losses being permanent and Arithon having shown his true nature, the fib to Diegan might as well have been the plain truth.

Misgiving for their plights dispelled the disorientation that lingered since Lysaer’s reawakening. Desh-thiere’s realignment of his loyalties was irrevocably complete.

‘I’ve been bound and spell-cursed by Desh-thiere to fight my half-brother, Lysaer s’Ilessid. There is no sanity in the hatred that drives us both, only unbridled lust to kill. Lysaer has raised Etarra against me, and their garrison will march within days. Would you spend your lives for a stranger not even born in this world?’

‘I could ask,’ Halliron said in the Shandian drawl that seeped back occasionally from his boyhood, ‘why, when you first met me, did you react as if I were a threat to you?’ ‘Because,’ Arithon began, and on impulse, switched liquidly to the Paravian. ‘Cuel ean i murdain ei dath-tol na soaren’; which translated, ‘you are the enemy I never expected to meet’.

‘Lysaer is not fit to be judged by rational men. He has been cursed, as I have, and feuds or justice have no bearing on his actions. I would not see your clansmen become the tool that Etarra’s garrison has.’

It felt, Talith decided, as if somebody had entered her childhood home and maliciously rearranged all the furniture.

Elaira had caught him glancing up to see his illusion under way. His face held untrammelled peace. A laugh of delight and satisfaction lightened the corners of his mouth. His eyes were unshadowed and the sharp-angled features of s’Ffalenn inheritance had fleetingly softened to expose, in vivid clarity, the depths of generosity and caring that buttressed his musician’s sensitivity. The effect was spirit stripped naked. The accuracy of Elaira’s recreation gave the lie to every sharp edge, every cutting word, every difficult and cross-grained reaction that Arithon had ever employed to defend this, his vulnerable inner heart.

The water was the only jewel on him: for once, his clothing held no artifice. Even his hair lay unbrushed. Although in public Lysaer maintained the flawless manners of diplomacy, here, alone, his lordly fine looks lay hagridden by doubt as he wrestled some inward dilemma his conscience could not resolve. The pain on his face, in the bearing of his shoulders and the lamp-gilded knuckles of clenched hands, was unanswerably intense. Elaira’s observance had peeled back all poise to expose him in a moment of soul-rending self-distaste. ‘Oh, Elaira, well done!’ murmured Morriel. At her side, honed to heightened sensitivity by the fumes that trailed from the pipe bowl, Lirenda felt her being struck and jangled by that chord of conflicted emotions. She not only saw, but felt how s’Ilessid justice warred with the s’Ahelas farsight inherited from the distaff side of Lysaer’s pedigree. His mouth in this captured instant held none of the tenderness that adoring women back in Amroth had experienced while plying him for kisses. Unyielding as tempered wire lay calculation threaded through by royal upbringing, and the machinations of Desh-thiere’s latent wraith. The result charged the nerves to disquiet; as if for one heartbeat pity were absent, and mercy an omitted concept.

‘We know where Lysaer will turn, and what will be the result. What can be anticipated can also be controlled or prevented. Arithon owns no such stability.’ Frustrated by narcotically enhanced perceptions, Elaira cried protest. ‘But Arithon is a man devoted to harmony, a musician with a seer’s perception. He’s conscious of his actions as Lysaer can never be!’ ‘Which is precisely what makes him dangerous, Elaira,’ Morriel corrected sadly. ‘For Lysaer’s sense of justice and farsight will answer to logic, and therefore be reconciled by compromise. But since when can compassion ever be made to condone pain?

The endangerment to Rathain’s feal vassals must be shouldered, while every minute the temptation to take and twist clan trust into a weapon to bring down Lysaer ate like a darkness at his heart. Only a mage’s sensitivity allowed Arithon to separate that poisoned urge from active will; and the passage of days wore him down with the draining, constant effort such distinction took to maintain. Until he won free of royal obligation, and could dissociate himself from any claim to sovereignty, the double-edged burden would continue to chafe at his control.

‘You’re thinking your master has misused you?’ ‘Not me,’ Dakar snapped. ‘I said so before: Prince Lysaer.’ Cautious not to try Kharadmon’s impatience, he heaved to his feet, and with a martyred roll of his eyes, resettled his pack on sore shoulders. ‘Sithaer take your Fellowship’s grand plans, you used a good man and then broke him.’

‘Where opening did not already exist, the creature could not have gained foothold,’ said Kharadmon. Squatted now on his hams and blowing harder, Dakar squirmed to shift the bite of the packstraps. Already blistered on his heels, his temper had abraded to match. ‘But Sethvir as much as admitted the s’Ilessid inborn gift was at fault. Had Lysaer not been driven to seek perfect justice, the wraith would have found nothing to exploit.’

Morriel might command her to Koriani loyalty and obedience; but where Elaira chose to give her heart was a choice reclaimed for her own.

‘The prince!’ he cracked out in white anger. ‘I said, you escort his Grace, Lysaer.’ The men continued to seem deaf. Lord Diegan spun in his saddle, suspicion in his eyes as bright as the glint on his jewels. And Lysaer met him, harder still. ‘Go! This was my error. My fight. Let me save what I can. For I fear the worst still awaits us.’ Enraged and far from willing to desert his post of command, Lord Diegan hauled to wheel his horse. Between his hands, the reins recoiled into slack: his own men had cut the leather at the bit-ring and were traitorously goading his mount to trot away from the river and his troops. ‘Damn your royal effrontery to Sithaer!’ cried Lord Diegan. Lysaer gave him back an insouciant wave, while he directed cracking strings of directions that effected a miracle of smooth deployment among the troops.

‘I was wrong,’ Lysaer said with the same, self-damning clarity. ‘Daelion’s pity upon me, every man who has died in this place has been ruined for a misplaced belief and my idealistic folly.’

‘To Sithaer with your honour. I would ask, rather, how you got any pedigreed scion of Etarra to agree to take orders from anybody.’ Now Lysaer’s expression turned arch. ‘Simply put, there are certain advantages to being born and raised a king’s heir.’ A heartbeat later, he smiled. ‘The nasty minded sort of arrogance that stops a man being gainsaid is one of them.’

At the forefront of the strike-force, Lysaer thrust his sword inside the guard of youngsters’ daggers with no more hesitation than a man might feel who stabbed rats. This was not war, but execution, the lives he destroyed of tainted stock. Royal requisites inured a man to cruel decisions; if they sickened him, it must not show, and if they softened him, he was no fit vessel to rule. If Arithon s’Ffalenn used children for his battles, the scar upon the conscience must be his.

The deed was done: the sons of Deshir dead. All hacked and disfigured, were the little ones Caolle had insisted be sent to dispatch the enemy wounded because men for that task could ill be spared; amid whose company Jieret would have been, if not for a bloodpact of friendship. ‘Jieret, they’re gone,’ Arithon gasped out in defeat. ‘We’re too late.’

In this, his second encounter with Lysaer by scrying, only his sword’s arcane defences had arrested his reaction to Desh-thiere’s curse. For the moment he commanded his wits. As long as he kept his distance and strictly eschewed the use of mage-sense, he could hold against the urge that coursed through him, driving, needling, hounding him to rise and to run: to find his half-brother and call challenge and fight until one or both of them lay dead.

Sweated and chafed under the quilted gambeson rucked in wet wads beneath his mail, Lysaer gritted his teeth and refrained from comment. Revulsion did not excuse responsibility. Toward his sworn purpose of destroying Arithon s’Ffalenn, he had sanctioned Pesquil’s foray against the clansfolk. No matter how unpleasant, duty demanded that he see the action through.

Lysaer, who in distant lands and exile had not failed, looked upon his dead with flat eyes and tried not to fret whether any of the corpses had been pregnant.

More laughter erupted, and sobbing cries that seemed barely more than a child’s. Lysaer never flicked a muscle. ‘Call your men back.’ He took a fast breath. ‘Or I will.’ ‘Such scruple!’ Pesquil crooned. Then, as Lysaer broke from stillness, the captain’s mockery fled and his manner abruptly went stony. ‘Man, man, you’re serious.’ He reached out in swift purpose and snatched back the shoulder tightly strapped under wrappings the exact instant Lysaer called out.

The s’Ilessid prince laid no hand on his sword in dispute. He weighed his case and made judgement in the solitary arrogance of a king. Then he turned his back on the silver crescent blade and called upon his birthborn gift of light. His bolt sheared the grotto like bladed lightning and slammed in bursting brilliance through the charred and blackened leather of the tents.

‘You can’t let them go,’ Pesquil protested. A tremor threaded his voice, and all his sour mockery had vanished. Lysaer looked at him. ‘No.’ As devoid of contempt as Dharkaron Avenger, he added, ‘But I will end them cleanly.’

The clansmen Arithon recognized were Steiven’s division and they battled to a purpose that was anything other than haphazard. For their wives, their children, for their sons sadly slaughtered by the riverside, they were vengeance-bent on killing headhunters. Though it cost them their last breathing clansmen, Pesquil’s league would not live to leave Strakewood to cash in their loved ones’ scalps for bounties. Waste upon waste, Arithon thought, brought to sharp focus by anger. As Rathain’s sworn sovereign, he would stop them, separate them, ensure that Jieret had a legacy left to grow for.

Arithon searched but never found who had shouted. His gaze caught instead on a clustered squad of headhunters led by a pockscarred man in muddy mail; then another, tall, straight, of elegant carriage in a ripped blue surcoat, gold-blazoned and bright as his hair. Lysaer. They saw each other the same instant. Arithon felt the breath leave his chest as if impelled by a blow. Then Desh-thiere’s curse eclipsed reason. He was running, the air at his neck prickling his raised hair like the charge of an incoming storm. Sword upheld, lips peeled back in atavistic hatred, he closed to take his half-brother without heed for what lay between. A baleful flash brightened the trees. Lysaer, as curse-bound as he, had called on his given gift of light.

‘Will you fight?’ he called to Lysaer, derisive. ‘Or will you stand out of reach and play at fireworks just to waste time and show off?’ ‘Defiler!’ Lysaer screamed back. His handsome face twisted. Cuts and bruises made his expression seem deranged. ‘Weaver of darkness and despoiler of children, your crimes have renounced claim to honour!’ Unsmiling, Arithon took a step. As the distance narrowed and panicked headhunters scrambled from his path, he noted that Lysaer looked peaked. The left arm beneath its muddied velvets was bandaged and strapped as though injured. A wolfish thrill shot through him, that the enemy before him was disadvantaged. Arithon said, ‘That’s your blade? Did you really think reverse runes could charm my death?’ He flourished Alithiel, inviting, ‘Find out. Come fight.’ ‘Why cross blades with a bastard?’ Contempt in his bearing, a mirrored obsession in his eyes, Lysaer shot his hand aloft again.

If such justice was wholly subverted by the workings of Desh-thiere’s curse, Lysaer endorsed usage with consent. He screamed and surrendered to his passion, and something inside him snapped. That instant he hurled his bolt. Arithon surged to meet the attack. Gripped by queer exultation, still wakened to mage-sight, he perceived with a lucidity that damned that the curse had overmastered his half-brother. Lysaer’s offensive had erased the bounds of sanity and self-preservation.

Arithon howled at the irony. Swept to madness by the wraiths’ savage triumph, he flung wide his arms, taunting the light to come take him, to lock with his shadows and let his enemy be destroyed in one fiery burst of self sacrifice.

Anguished between personal care and the lure of the curse’s directive, tainted by the seductive truth, that to forswear s’Ffalenn conscience and leave Jieret betrayed would buy Lysaer’s death and final freedom, Arithon wrenched his will into alignment against Desh-thiere’s geas. For ill or for folly, the paradox would be permitted to renew itself; Lysaer had no training to understand or control how Desh-thiere’s meddling had twisted him. Assured of his righteousness, avowed to bring justice, he would use his survival to labour until this day’s atrocities were repeated. That colossal futility made a mockery of will, that perhaps reprieve came too late. One victim’s lamed effort at compassion might buy only failure at the end.

Arithon lacked voice for his bitterness, that what lives had been saved must be few, with none of them a woman or a child. For a long time he could do nothing except shut his eyes and silently, fiercely weep.

Arithon gave back their deaths, redeemed from the horror of murder. One by one he cherished their memories. In an unconditional mercy that disallowed grief, they were fully and finally freed to the peace of Ath’s deepest mystery.

No one who had tangled with Arithon’s sorceries in Strakewood would ever again view darkness as friendly.

‘Your Grace, my father’s life was never wasted in your service. He made me understand as much, when he told me he knew he was going to die. One day, perhaps before I come of age, you will need me again.’

Arithon’s mouth bent, a softening just short of warmth. ‘We’ve been adversaries. I’m not sorry. If I had my choice, your sword would go rusty for want of use. Hate me for that all you wish.’

‘Guilt is no use to anybody. The only thing a man gains from his past is the power to ensure his future. You can see the same circumstances are not permitted to happen again.’

In the lightless shaft of Rockfell, sealed behind triple rings of wards, the Mistwraith that once blocked sunlight from Athera languishes in confinement; and if it knows that its grand curse to destroy two half-brothers has once been tested and thwarted, it endures in unquiet hatred…