LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER FIVE

      Arkoniel left Ero not knowing when he would see Ariani or her child again. He met up with Iya at an inn in Sylara and together they set off to begin the next long stage of their mission.

      Despite Arkoniel’s strong misgivings, Iya decided that it would be safest for everyone if they kept their distance from the child. When Arkoniel told her of his strange conversation with Niryn, it only strengthened her resolve. Nari and the Duke could send word to them by sending messages to several inns that Iya frequented in her travels. For emergencies, she’d left Nari with a few small tokens; painted rods that released a simple seeking spell when broken. No matter how far away Iya might be, she would feel the magic and return as quickly as she could.

      ‘But what if we’re too far away to reach them in time?’ Arkoniel fretted, unhappy with the situation. ‘And how can we leave them like that? It all went wrong in the end, Iya. You didn’t see the demon in the dead child’s eyes. What if the tree can’t hold it down?’

      But she remained adamant. ‘They are safest with us away.’

      And so they began their long wandering quest, seeking out anyone who had a spark of magic in them, sounding out loyalties, listening to fears, and – with a select few – cautiously sharing a glimpse of Iya’s vision: a new confederation of Orëska wizards. She was patient, and careful in her choices, winnowing out the mad and the greedy and those too loyal to the King. Even with those she deemed trustworthy she did not reveal her true purpose, but left them a small token – a pebble picked up on the road – and the promise that she would call on them again.

      Over the next few years Niryn’s words would come back to haunt them, for it seemed that they were not the only ones spreading the idea of unity. They learned from others they met on the road that the King’s wizard was gathering a following of his own at court. Arkoniel wondered what answer these wizards had given to Niryn’s oblique question, and what their dreams had been.

      The drought that had heralded Tobin’s birth broke, only to be followed by another the following summer. The further south they went, the more often they heard stories of empty granaries and sickly livestock. Disease walked the land in hunger’s wake, striking down the weak like a wolf culling a flock. The worst was a fever brought in by traders. The first sign was bloody sweat, often followed by black swellings in the armpits and groin. Few who showed both symptoms survived. The Red and Black Death, as it came to be called, struck whole villages overnight, leaving too few living to bury the dead.

      A plague of a different sort struck the eastern coast: Plenimaran raiders. Towns were looted and burned, the old women killed, the younger ones and the children carried off as slaves in the raider’s black ships. The men who survived the battle often met a crueller fate.

      Iya and Arkoniel entered on such village just after an attack and found half a dozen young men nailed by the hands to the side of a byre; all had been disemboweled. One boy was still alive, begging for water with one breath and death with the next. Iya gently gave him both.

      Iya continued Arkoniel’s education as they travelled, and was pleased to see how his powers flourished. He was the finest student she’d ever had, and the most curious; for Arkoniel there were always new vistas ahead, new spells to master. Iya practiced what she jokingly referred to as ‘portable magics’, those spells which relied more on wand and word than weighty components and instruments. Arkoniel had a natural talent for these, and was already beginning to create spells of his own, an unusual accomplishment for one so young. Driven by his concern for Rhius and Ariani, he experimented endlessly with seeking spells, trying to extend their short range, but with no success.

      Iya explained repeatedly that even Orëska magic had its limits, but he would not be put off.

      In the houses of the richer, more sedentary wizards, particularly those with noble patrons, she saw him linger longingly in well-equipped workrooms, examining the strange instruments and alchemists’ bowls he found there. Sometimes they guested long enough for him to learn something from these wizards and Iya was delighted to see him so willingly adding to what she could teach him.

      Content as always to wander, Iya could almost at times forget the responsibility that hung over them.

      Almost.

      Living on the road, they heard a great deal of news but were little touched by most of it. When the first rumours of the King’s Harriers reached them, Iya dismissed them as wild tales. This became harder to do, however, when they met with a priest of Illior who claimed to have seen them with his own eyes.

      ‘The King has sanctioned them,’ he told Iya, nervously fingering the amulet on his breast, so similar to the ones they wore. ‘The Harriers are a special guard, soldiers and wizards both, charged with hunting down traitors to the throne. They’ve burned a wizard at Ero, and there are Illioran priests in the prison.’

      ‘Wizards and priests?’ Arkoniel scoffed. ‘No Skalan wizard has ever been executed, not since the necromantic purges of the Great War! And wizards hunting down their own kind?’

      But Iya was shaken. ‘Remember who we are dealing with,’ she warned when they were safely alone in their rented chamber. ‘Mad Agnalain’s son has already killed his own kin to preserve his line. Perhaps there’s more of his mother in him than we feared.’

      ‘But it’s Niryn leading them,’ Arkoniel reminded her, thinking again of the way the wizard had watched him the night of Tobin’s birth. Had he been seeking out followers even then? And what had he found in his Harriers, that he hadn’t seen in Arkoniel?

       PART TWO

      From the private journal of Queen Tamír II, recently discovered in the Palace Archives (Archivist’s note: passage undated)

       My father moved us to that lonely keep in the mountains not long after my birth. He put it about that my mother’s health required it, but I’m sure by then all Ero knew she’d gone mad, just as her mother had. When I think of her at all now, I remember a pale wraith of a woman with nervous hands and a stranger’s eyes the same colour as my own.

       My father’s ancestors built the keep in the days when hill folk still came through the passes to raid the lowlands. It had thick stone walls and narrow windows covered by splintery red and white painted shutters – I remember amusing myself by picking off the scaling flakes outside my bedchamber window as I stood there, watching for my father’s return.

       A tall, square watchtower jutted from the back of the keep, next to the river. I used to believe the demon lurked there, and watched me from its windows whenever Nari or the men took me outside to play in the courtyards or the meadow below the barracks house. I was kept inside most of the time, though. I knew every dusty, shadowed room of the lower floors by the time I could walk. That crumbling old pile was all the world I knew, my first seven years – my nurse and a handful of servants my only companions when Father and his men were gone, which was all too often.

       And the demon, of course. Only years later did I have any inkling that all households were not like my own – that it was unusual for invisible hands to pinch and push, or for furniture to move about the room by

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