I Read What?!

So last time, the Fellowship managed to screw over Arithon AGAIN (seriously, I feel like the dude would be safer if they just decided to be his enemy), we got a heartwarming reunion, and Lysaer had a weird psychosexual dominance thing with a boar.

...I guess you had to be there.



So we rejoin Arithon and company as the Talliarthe (his sloop) returns to Merior. The twins are ecstatic, of course, and after their visit to see him, they return with "an exquisite bowl of Falgaire crystal" and a bolt of silk, "sent with Arithon's compliments."

I'd like to think the card says something like "thanks for letting me kidnap you!"

Jinesse, of course, is somewhat dismayed by the gift. The boarding house mistress gives her some sage advice:

‘Keep his gifts or sell them for silver, but don’t be silly over nothing! Yon outsider’s a man who knows his own mind.’ The large woman thrust out the dripping end of a bedsheet. ‘Hold this.’ Her strong, collected hands wrung the cloth. ‘You’ll offend him, and deeply, if you slight him by sending them back.’

I appreciate the practicality here, but I also think Jinesse deserves the opportunity to throw things at Arithon for a while. There is a pretty amusing moment where she is "unsettled to note how the shimmery, pastel silk heightened her thin-skinned, fair colouring". Because of course Arithon understands fashion design.

A busybody customer fills Elaira in on all the gossip, but Elaira keeps her own counsel. She is grateful that she's "[s]pared the painful indignity of chasing his shirt tails to Innish", and "shook off the unreasonable desire to throw down everything as the twins had, and run with skirts flying to the beach."

Aww. I ship it.

So time moves forward. The Black Drake comes and goes. (Apparently and unsurprisingly, Feylind becomes very interested in Captain Dhirken.) The supplies for new ships and the workers arrive. The villagers are, rather understandably, a bit troubled by all of this. We're told that Arithon tells his plans to anyone who asks though: he's crafting ten brigantines, then he'll dismantle his craftyard and leave.

And as anti-social as Arithon is, the townsfolk do note that he's been careful not to cheat anyone, and does some basic repairs for folks for free to compensate for the noise and bother. And he makes it very clear early on that if any of the craftsmen or workers cause trouble (particularly for the local women), they'll get turned off without a hearing. It appears that he's able to keep them in line pretty well.

Meanwhile, Elaira continues with her malicious compliance to Morriel's orders. She's here, as ordered, but she stays at her shop and doesn't engage with Arithon at all:

If the mores of the Koriani Order commanded her to offer herself as bait, for stubborn pride she would do no less and no more than maintain an obligatory residence. The village was too small, too close. If Arithon s’Ffalenn could avoid her throughout the two years ordained to build his fleet, his effort of itself framed a statement.

That said, a hint of purple prose indicates this resolve is easier said than done:

Teased by awareness of Arithon’s presence, her thoughts stayed hooked to distraction, as though the boundaries of controlled quiet and trance were made unruly and permeable. The disciplined stillness required for her arts gave no surcease, but chafed and pressured her innermost nature to reclaim its desired alignment.

And well, leave it to Arithon to make things difficult:

Ruled by iron will and the Koriani creed to ease what she could of mortal suffering, she murmured the litany to focus her innermind, and stopped, mid-phrase, as the light changed. A mild chill crossed her spine. Subtle as a wisp of cirrus might dampen the fall of a sun mote, the cool sensation between her shoulderblades resolved to clear warning that a presence observed her from the doorway.

Thrilled through by a ridiculous rush of joy, she broke off, considered; then bit her lip, quelled her smile, and turned around.

Arithon s’Ffalenn leaned like a waif against her lintel.

And do we get some purple prose description this chapter?

Restrained by the nuance of mages, he would not cross her threshold without an express invitation, though in sun-faded breeches, laced at the calf, and no shoes, he looked common as a journeyman carpenter. His shirt was full-sleeved and open. Ringless, loose hands were tucked in folded arms, and hair straight and glossy as a crow’s spread primaries fanned the tanned wedge of his brow. His lips stayed chiselled and serious, an odd contradiction to the strung, wary poise behind his candour.

OF COURSE WE DO.

I am amazed that Wurts finds a reason to describe Arithon and Lysaer in every single chapter. Multiple times. And somehow it never gets old.

So they exchange a bit of banter before Arithon gets into why he's here. Now that the shipyard's master knows how Arithon likes things done, he has some spare time. And he's asking Elaira to teach him herbals and remedies.

Jarred by his unexpected request, Elaira dropped her knife with a clatter. The tip struck an earthenware crock and snicked off a chip of enamel. ‘Why?’ she said, then instantly regretted it as she sensed through his fractional recoil an answer too painfully obvious.

Arithon s’Ffalenn had been mage-trained. The strictures of his discipline would insist on fair balance: spell paired with counter-ward; any application of force, no matter how small, matched in its kind by restraint. Hounded by a curse that might demand bloodshed on a field of unbridled violence, straight principle would drive him to seek a surgeon’s knowledge to bind wounds and set bones and heal.

She apologizes and things get loaded:

‘Is that a refusal?’ His voice held a note she would have sold her crystal to decipher.

But the clamour of her feelings rang far too insistent to leave any space for intuition. Elaira dusted crumbled herbs from her fingers while the poultice pot steamed and spat at her elbow, its agitation as thick as her thoughts. Acutely attuned to just who this man was, of what he might come to mean to her, she balanced her own desperation against the spun thread of his control. Although he would leave without protest if she asked, Morriel had bidden her to solicit his interest, no matter the means or the cost.

So she hesitantly agrees.

He came to her immediate rescue. ‘I’m certainly aware some constraints must be set.’ How else to protect the arcane secrets she was sworn to keep within her order? But he left this unspoken in natural reticence, as any spirit must who had schooling in the subtleties of power; his background in all likelihood lent him access to such knowledge, since many of the plants used for medicines held magical properties as well.

He finished, ‘Even with the connections to ritual left out, your recipes would be better founded than any I could get from a hedge witch.’

The moment hung, while Elaira fought through a turmoil of indecision.

Arithon could not know what he laid in her hands: the one opening her heart could not deny, hand in glove with the opportune chance Morriel Prime desired to bind him. The sculptured grace of his fingers stayed vulnerable and stilled, while his eyes watched, the same suspended green of a tide pool poised between flood and ebb. Then, as the interval grew prolonged, a sharp, marring change pricked him into dismay. ‘Ath in his mercy, not you as well. You can’t be afraid of me also.’

It is funny that Arithon is a character who twice now has made friends through kidnapping, but I still believe in his conviction regarding boundaries.

I do like Arithon and Elaira's dynamic a lot:

Impelled from uncertainty by a response too self-honest to deny, Elaira waved him inside. ‘By all means, if you’re worried, come in and terrify me further. The upset is frankly quite welcome.’ The crease between her brows eased to pleasure. ‘Won’t grubbing for root stock spoil your hands?’

‘I can hope I’ll enjoy finding out.’ Irrevocably then, Arithon crossed over her threshold, and through the one vital moment she needed to read him, the light interfered and hazed his form from behind.

You know, Elaira, right now, you have permission from your order to bang. It'd be perfectly okay.

There's some very nice description of Elaira's two-room cottage here and Elaira herself:

Her cottage was small, two meagre rooms conjoined by a single doorway. Elaira felt each of his light, restless steps, while his busy mind surveyed her dwelling. She wondered what he saw, since meticulously little of her character lay exposed for prying eyes.

The rafters supported a storage loft, accessed by a narrow ladder. On pegs spiked into the beams, the roots she had foraged through the winter months hung in string bundles to dry. Glare through the salt-filmed dormers caught on the incised clay seals to fend off mould and stray iyats. Beyond her plank table, a mismatched rack of shed deer antlers hung her cloak. Straight boards in Merior became seats for dories, so her cottage boasted no shelves. Her jars of prepared remedies were stacked in willow hampers along the wall, sorted and labelled, and preserved by runes scribed in ink ground from minerals. A brick oven and the coiled glass tubes of an apothecary’s still jammed the hearth, the overburdened mantle above crammed with jars of wooden spoons and mismatched kitchen crockery.

As impersonal as the room were the clothes Elaira wore, of grey twill and cambric edged with flax ribbon dyed with mulberry.

She disdained earrings; kept no jewellery beyond a braided silver bracelet dulled from careless wear. The quartz pendant strung on light chain at her neck was no ornament, but the working badge of her order. Her feet and her hands were brown and bare, hatched at wrists and ankles in tiny scabs and white scars from briar scratches taken while foraging.

So anyway, she decides to start Arithon's lessons. And of course, the banter is charming:

Poised alongside the thin paper spread with flowers too delicate to preserve by hanging, Arithon spun in wide surprise. ‘You’d rather instruct a blunderer?’

‘I don’t know,’ Elaira said, truthful. Aware as Jinesse had never been of his capacity to perceive nuance in others, but to be misunderstood himself, she added, ‘You could say I’ve just undertaken to find out.’

I would read a whole book of Arithon's friends and loved ones gently dragging him.

So they have lessons. Of course, he's an amazing, attentive student who is very hands on. And they go off and gather herbs and ingredients together and it's kind of unbearably cute really. And it's during one of these trips that she figures out that his mage-sight is gone. She doesn't pressure him about it, and instead they sit down together and discuss a recent ruckus.

Dakar was the cause. Or part of it. There was a bet on whether or not he could fit into an empty tar cask. Dakar managed ("of course") as a point of sore pride. (And I love that Arithon had no doubt about this.) But he got jammed. The workers nailed him into the cask instead and set him adrift in the pond.

Fortunately, he was rescued before he drowned, but the rescuers filched his beer store.

The story restores them to "companionable ease" and they share a moment. And we're told that after that, he relaxes in her presence as Halliron must have known him, "freed for a brief space in time from the burdens inflicted by Desh-thiere's curse and royal bloodline."

Aw. I take that as confirmation of my theory about Medlir. He's NOT a masquerade. He's Arithon when the poor guy actually gets to relax!

So they get closer:

Foraging trips drew them further afield, into the deep, still bayous that fringed the shores of Sickle Bay, alive with cormorants that startled from their step with awkward cries, and the singing hum of summer insects. By noon, they found refuge in trackless glens of red cedar, alive with jewelled moths clinging wing-folded in the undergrowth. They carved footprints over the sand hills, amid the clacking, arrowed flit of dragonflies. In a silence removed from the shipyard’s brisk clamour, Arithon allowed the salve of Elaira’s companionship to ease his veneer of tight reserve. Time and again she resisted any foray into topics that leaned toward the personal. Unlike everyone else, she never once questioned his integrity. He began to laugh easily, and spoke more than once of the high mage who had raised him on the world beyond the West Gates.

And it's when talking about his grandfather and his advice ("To live for approval of others [is] a pitfall that [begs] a false turning" - which probably explains so much about Arithon's general attitude) that Elaira brings up the events in Strakewood:

Cued by a queer little hole in her gut, that now was the moment she had angled for, Elaira refused to look at him as she said, ‘And do you seek approval from others to know you did right in Etarra’s attack on Deshir forest?’

Her reference to the children killed with the clans in his defence made him surge to his feet in recoil. The oak branch thudded earthward with a dropped thrash of leaves and his eyes bored down at her, anguished, ‘Who else besides the clansmen who survived could be aware that the deaths of those children were beyond fate’s grasp to prevent? Daelion Fatemaster show his mercy in fair judgement for their murders. There is no absolution, no redress. For I can never be reconciled with what happened in my name that day on the banks of Tal Quorin.’

I think Elaira is the first person who's ever asked Arithon about what happened. Halliron and Jieret didn't need to, of course, as they were there. But I think this is the first time that Arithon's really had the chance to explain what happened and defend himself.

They share more of a moment:

‘You swore an oath as Rathain’s prince to protect your feal clans.’ Elaira looked up, her features traced with silver light. If he wanted to flee or strike out at her presumption, he was stopped by the tears that sheened her eyes.

‘What makes you take my troubles for your own?’ The veined silk of the oak leaves shivered as he began and checked a step forward. A moonbeam cast through the boughs overhead played like a wisp of dropped floss over the edge of his cheekbone, then grazed insubstantial as spirit light across his full sleeve and the attenuated knuckles of one hand.

‘I wasn’t, in fact,’ Elaira said in dry rebuke. ‘It’s an entrenched bad habit, like saving wing-broken birds and rescuing waterlogged spiders out of horse troughs.’ She threw back a damp smile, unwilling to draw unfair advantage from the birth-gifted empathy that ran in him deep enough to lacerate.

Elaira gets to share some of her backstory now, specifically how she ended up in Koriani fosterage. The mayor's son had been tormenting a mongrel dog. She'd been angry. She copied a symbol that she'd picked up from an herb witch in the poor quarter, and it just so happened, she'd stolen an amethyst pin earlier whose crystal had once belonged to a mage. It reacted and the mayor's son ended up stabbed through the wrist with his own knife, severing the nerves. She only escaped being burned at the stake because the Koriani agreed to heal the child in exchange for her fosterage.

She suggests that she understands, just a little, how wretched he must feel. And notes that her story still haunts her: because she never knew if the dog was spared.

It's weird to showcase the prose more than the dialogue, but it feels appropriate here:

Amid the rich, living fabric of the woodland, the man at her feet seemed a clamped knot of silence, turned in on himself in stark brooding. Alarmed, that perhaps she had dared too much, Elaira summoned full command of her art and looked at him; and what she read in every locked joint and in the raised tilt of his head was a longing of unbearable proportion. She ached to reach out, to test his emotion and see whether she could shape from one vulnerable moment a bond of immutable trust. She wished to touch him as she had never yearned for anything else in all of her proscribed life.

But instinct reared through desire and stopped her.

So she asks him what his grandfather would think of her: caring more about a dog than a child. And this is rather funny:

‘He would have said, of such a child, that the dog was the more blameless spirit. In my case, he warned on no uncertain terms. The powers of mages and the burdens of a ruler make an incompatible legacy.’ Arithon clasped his arms around drawn-up knees, his admission burred rough as he added, ‘Once, I could have listened and been free.’

It's fascinating, isn't it? That the High Mage of Rauven and the King of Amroth have the same advice. But it occurs to me. I've made constant jokes in Mistwraith about the s'Ahelas gift of foresight because of how both Talera and her father's blunders have made things worse. And well, the King of Amroth is a monster. Maybe they're wrong.

Anyway, Elaira has a belated realization as she thinks about Arithon's earlier words. She realizes that he had known the clans were going to be slaughtered even before the armies marched.

And it's really a shame that Dakar wasn't here for this conversation, because I think this is something that he might actually understand.

Steiven had known. He had the Sight. And Arithon had backed him up with his miserable drug trip. And he gets to tell Elaira a truth that almost no one knows, but someone needs to hear:

Elaira mapped the surge of trapped feelings in a man seldom given to shared confidence, her fingertips touched to her spell-crystal to enhance her clarity of sight. But nothing of pity could stiffen her for the blow as Arithon turned toward her, and disclosed, The clans of Deshir should have died to a man, had I not stayed and used sorcery in defence. That was all that held me to the letter of my sovereign oath. So you see,’ he ended in an agony he might never unburden, ‘it might not matter, to know if the puppy was saved. More than two hundred clansmen survived the fight at Tal Quorin. But there is no settlement to be found in such a victory. I can’t sort past the deaths and the bloodshed to say if their lives matched the cost.’

So Elaira gets to be vindicated in a way: Morriel's wrong. The Fellowship was right. There are mitigating circumstances "for the butchery of Etarra's army in Deshir". (Fuck those genocidal assholes.) But it's also bad, because she knows that she's actually here to spy on him, and that Lysaer's on his way.

Arithon does know how to leave a girl with style though:

Elaira had not even realized she wept until droplets splashed hot on her knuckles. She sensed a rustle of movement, and then Arithon was standing, a bleak silhouette against the boughs with their netted sparkle of spring stars. Two hands pressed briefly on her shoulders, warm and something less than steady. ‘I’m sorry, rare lady.’ He sighed with a sibilance like pearls rubbed in velvet. ‘I’ve done you no kindness tonight. If I grieve for any small thing, it is that.’

Then his touch melted back and left her desolate.

The subchapter ends with a great line: If the graceful brigantines mapped out in the sail-shed were not finished and launched by that hour, Arithon s’Ffalenn would never survive to be hounded by his conscience. He would instead become torn out of life, cornered like a rat on the beach.

--

So the next subchapter is Beacon:

Oh. Darnit. It's Althain Tower. Can we go back to the tragic romance please? I want more purple prose and despairing sighs. And Arithon finally getting to confide in someone who doesn't actually want anything from him.

No?

Okay.

So we've got Sethvir and Asandir, doing their "solstice convocation". We get to know what year it is: Third Age 5645.

Tangent for a moment. I need to point something out. Arithon is apparently, per the expository information in each book, the 1504th prince in succession. Lysaer is the 1467th prince in his line.

The lines started at the beginning of the Third Age. I really hope that this list also counts siblings and heirs that died before taking the throne, because otherwise, these are kings whose reigns lasted about five years each.

I wouldn't put it past Ms. Wurts to have an explanation of this. But really? This seems like a terrible set up.

Anyway back to the boring wizards. The others are all busy: Traithe is helping settle a dispute between clans and merchants in King Eldir's court. (...which makes me wonder again why NONE of them were in Strakewood!) Luhaine is helping at Meth Isle against a "resurgence of karth-eels". And Kharadmon is still god knows where.

Asandir's here though, smelling of brimstone. He'd been doing something involving the fire breathing Khadrim confined to the Sorcerer's Preserve. I don't really care.

But actually, I spoke too soon. Because while the sorcerers are boring, the news Sethvir has is not, and we get it in clear flashback vision.

Lysaer's army is going through the Path of Orlan.

Maenalle herself appears to challenge them:

The cavalcade crawled on through the defiles. The challenge appeared first as a shadow sketched against darker grey: the caithdein herself, clad in no finery at all. Lady Maenalle’s leathers had never been dyed, a significant slight, though perhaps only Lysaer understood. This time their meeting did not signify even the dignified colour of her office, the black traditionally worn in the presence of sovereign blood.

The badge of Tysan’s regency was sewn at her breast, indigo and gold: the hues of sun and sky that shone through and framed her between precipice and vertical rock.

I love that she challenges him in wardrobe and etiquette. Lysaer's forces are townsfolk and merchants. They don't see what she's doing. But he does.

They exchange some confrontational words, but there's no ambush this time. Instead, Maenalle has something to say.

Maenalle met his arrogance as she might treat with an importunate child. ‘You’ve dared to claim Avenor and stand to arms by right of your bloodline, although you’re unsanctioned for ruling power. As a man who would wrest advantage from this realm in pursuit of a personal feud, I make my formal protest. For the good of this kingdom, I demand you abandon your campaign to kill the last Prince of Rathain. Arithon s’Ffalenn is no threat to Tysan. The Fellowship of Seven has named your cause false, and my duty lies first to the land.’

Lysaer accuses her of forswearing her loyalty already, since she sent support to Arithon. Maenalle has a response for that too:

Maenalle’s hawk-yellow eyes never wavered. ‘Coin and goods levied in Rathain were sent back to their sovereign prince, through the sorcerers’ auspices. To what end the Teir’s’Ffalenn disposes of what’s his is no affair of mine, nor yours either, get of s’Ilessid. This I will say, before witnesses. If you are still the man you were born to become, a prince true to your heritage with Tysan’s given charter as your law, you will turn about. Command your captains to retire your troops and leave Rathain’s affairs in peace.’

But of course, Lysaer isn't that man anymore. And when she asks if he'll be the first to spill the blood of a caithdein of the realm, he says no. He'll invoke town law and execute a thief who plunders caravans. He orders her taken.

Maenalle, like Halliron, can't be protected by traditional office when the people in power refuse to acknowledge them.

Though when Maenalle points out that appointing her death would forswear the guest oath he'd given, even his own men have some pause.

But Lysaer's gift of Justice has been twisted to Justification instead:

Over the heads of his hesitant officers, Lysaer snapped a rebuttal. ‘Better I be forsworn as a man than the justice of this realm become debased. No affectation of courtesy will mitigate the punishment due for your act.’ Implacable in regret, he added, ‘Who am I, to uphold my personal honour before the protection of my townsfolk? They are untrained in magecraft, reliant upon my gift for their defence. Are Rathain’s people any less helpless than they, to be abandoned to a sorcerer turned criminal?’

Unbending, Maenalle gave him back her freezing silence.

And still her captors vacillated. A sharp word from their sovereign was required to jolt them to resume their given duty.

The dynamics here are interesting. Most of the time, the conflict we perceive is between the clansfolk and the townsmen. Tradition, hatred, genocide. It's a very complicated history. But in the end, it's a shared history. A shared culture. The townspeople may have rejected a lot of the old ways, but they're still aware of them. And maybe some mores are deeper than that.

Lysaer isn't Atheran. He's from another world entirely. He might share some trappings of culture with the urbane townsfolk, but he doesn't share their history. And this may be the first time we really see that tension come out.

That said, they do take Maenalle into custody. And she and Lysaer share some last words:

Only when they finished and cast her trussed on her knees before the hooves of the royal charger did the caithdein deliver her last word. ‘Beware, oathbreaker. The authority of my office shall pass through the Fellowship sorcerers to my grandson. Tysan’s clans remain loyal to your line, false prince, but for you, our goodwill is forfeit. From this day forward, expect an arrow from the shadows, poison in your cup, and a knife at your throat, among my people. My life is offered, that they will know you for what you have become: no saviour, but the slave of the Mistwraith’s design.’

Lysaer regarded the woman he had ordered broken through a moment of pitying quiet. Then he said, ‘To your sorrow, brave lady, and to the waste of your life, you are misled. I ride to war as defender of peace against a man who was born with no conscience. The great of this land, of which you were one, diminish us all when they fall sway to endangering influence. If the crown of this kingdom was once under Fellowship province to bestow, for the good of all people, I claim it back.’ He gathered his reins without triumph. ‘Where lies the virtue in tradition and what good is law, when its use has been turned to threaten innocents? I give you my hope, that when the Master of Shadow has been thwarted, your clans may one day come to welcome me.’

‘They may live to swear fealty to your sons,’ Maenalle said. ‘If my life should fall to the sword of Isaer’s headsman, on my heart’s blood, I promise, never you.’

The vision ends here. Sethvir says, "in haggard grief" that Lysaer was "prince enough to keep his men in hand". She wasn't mishandled beyond the indignity of shackles.

And I'm suddenly reminded of Arithon keeping HIS men in hand at the beginning of this chapter. The parallels are so striking.

Anyway, Asandir and Sethvir are very upset. So...do you think you guys could DO something here?

True sight must not be undone before emotion. Root and cause for Maenalle’s downfall lay in the Mist-wraith’s curse. Even if the means lay at hand to sunder its hold upon the princes, for the lady who was the dedicated caithdein of Tysan, salvation must come too late.

Fifteen days would see her dead on a scaffold in Isaer, by town law and s’Ilessid command.

...I guess not.

God, the Fellowship is fucking useless.

Anyway, they lament Maenalle's fate some more, like they don't have the power to go in there and fucking mind-wipe her captors or anything.

We get some really ill-timed Fellowship self-aggrandizement here:

Huddled by the casement, Sethvir turned his old man’s profile toward the first, scattered stars, his beard like hooked yarn in the pestering play of the wind. Better than any, he knew Maenalle’s mind. His sighted talent had tracked the bitter hour as she had weighed her course of action, then made her choice to dispatch her messenger to Althain Tower. As if his train of thought had been spoken, the Warden of Althain concluded, ‘She saw in the Teir’s’Ffalenn a hope of protection for her clans, should the worst befall and Desh-thiere’s curse lead to more cruel persecution. I could do no less then, but match her steel courage and see her missive passed on to Arithon.’

Given the burdens inherent in his post, Sethvir’s pragmatic wisdom displayed daunting toughness. Pained to humility by the decisions borne alone by Althain’s longsuffering warden, Asandir forced a change of subject.

...yes, I can absolutely see how tough you guys are to pass a message along and then let an old woman get executed for supporting the dude you want to see ascend a throne.

Anyway, the topic shifts to Kharadmon, and despite the fact that Kharadmon annoys me less than most of the Fellowship, I still don't care.

But Sethvir's news is different. He shows a vision of the Koriani cottage and explains that Lysaer now knows that Arithon's in Merior. They don't know what the price was. Because then they'd have to possibly acknowledge that they've fucked up. Again.

NOW we get to Kharadmon. Sethvir can't find a trace of him. This news causes more angst than anything else in the subchapter of course:

If Kharadmon had suffered mishap, their hope to defeat the Mistwraith’s curse was rendered a lost cause at a stroke. The Black Rose Prophecy, which linked the Fellowship’s return back to seven with the event of Arithon’s willing kingship, became fully undone before time and fate could let it flower. Too fierce to believe the future had been lost on the day that set prince against prince in spelled enmity; too raw now to endure another grief in vanquished stillness, Asandir pushed erect and glared at his colleague’s turned back.

...

Copperfyre made me a beautiful gift that I forgot to show off a while back:



It's a thing of fucking beauty.

(She made a few more for me that will go up in their own post after this one.)

So anyway, they plan to do some fancy magic shit to try to draw Kharadmon back. They have some banter that I don't care about regarding Sethvir's lack of tea and Asandir having brought him some. If I cared about them, I'd wonder if they were banging.

And oh god, this subchapter just keeps going.

I DON'T CARE about this ritual! Sorry. But Arithon and Elaira are having a moment. Maenalle's getting fucking executed. Either of those things are more interesting and important!

So we get magic technobabble. Most of which is meaningless but cool sounding. This bit makes me fucking laugh though:

Mountains were asked to lend solidity, and the dark heart of stone gave back its sure self, to bell subvocal vibrations and waken the somnolent earth. The third lane shrilled now to a higher-pitched current. Waves of summoned energy dashed in succession into the construct formed amid the focus pattern. The Paravian nines glittered, then lashed to spitting life like the splash of molten metal over coals.

The Fellowship HAS to ask the stone and mountains to help, because they care about consent. Unless of course you're a traumatized arrival from another world, an apprentice with a gift of psychic visions, or a family that re-invented gunpowder.

There's some interesting contrast with the Koriani rituals:

Unlike a Koriani binding, amplified through crystal and fettered in raw domination, the layered weave of spells conjoined through Althain Tower held no constraint of forced mastery. Asandir and Sethvir worked in strict balance with the signature chord of the earth, reaffirmed in all its grand mystery, then exalted and wrapped through by the untamed exuberance that sourced the light-dance of life.

There's probably some interesting symbolism there. But anyway, they succeed in setting up their beacon. THe stone tower sings like a tuning fork. Sethvir goes back to his tea. Asandir takes a nap. And they finally remember Maenalle.

In the shadow by the stairwell, poised between steps, Sethvir made a small, shocked sound. Asandir spun around, locked eyes with the Warden, and deduced the sure source of his distress. ‘Don’t speak. It’s the Lady Maenalle, is it not?’

Sethvir said no word, but an image bled through, of a packed square in Isaer, where townsmen thronged before a scaffold hooted and called jibes at the condemned, lashed in cruel isolation to a post.

Neither sorcerer moved while a handful of seconds shredded themselves in suspension.

Then Asandir loosed a terrible cry that rocked echoes off close marble walls. ‘Shall we not let her die unremarked?’

I hate you so fucking much.

A hammered glint of temper simmered through the mist of Sethvir’s tears. ‘Indeed, let us not.’

He and Asandir whirled in unison. In flawless accord, they locked step, advanced to the heart of the pattern and joined hands. To the last, unfinished thread of their construct, they laced the signature of Kharadmon’s signal Name.

Sethvir bowed his head. His consciousness divided into distance and held through his body’s fine trembling; while on that far scaffold, a hooded executioner drew back a silvered blade of steel.

On the cusp of its fall, the Warden of Althain said, ‘Now.’

Asandir severed the spell’s ground ties to the trees.

Power unfurled and howled. Light blossomed until the very air seemed to melt and burn and rage airborne. The beacon spell fashioned to summon back Kharadmon roared aloft toward the stars embedded in its homing. Its grand departure stabbed light across the sky like a portent of Ath’s fury unleashed.

Imagine if you used one hint of that power to RESCUE HER.

But instead:

In Isaer, the scorching banner of its passage was the last sight Lady Maenalle beheld as the sword slammed home through her heart.

FUCK YOU.

--

The last subchapter is Healing.

As much as I like Arithon and Elaira, I'm annoyed that Maenalle doesn't even get a last subchapter death for dramatic impact.

But no, we're back in Merior.

Elaira doesn't know if Arithon is keeping up to date with things in the north. But they are still having their lessons:

He spent his days in gruelling, sweaty labour alongside the joiners who steamed the planks to bend over the trued frames of his brigantine. If a night’s deep talk by the bay shore had caused him to forgo their past hours of foraging, he came every eventide, his hair tousled wet from his bath, and his temper still brisk as sheared granite from managing his disparate teams of shipwrights. While darkness fell, and the gulls over Merior’s fish-market screamed and settled to roost, Elaira instructed him in the healing arts. He learned every nuance she knew to stop bleeding, to splint broken bones and tie sutures. She brewed tisanes and explained their banes and virtues, mixed poultice pastes to ease arthritic joints, and treated the myriad lacerations and small injuries that arose amid the fleet and at the shipyard.

Wherever possible, she gave him space and distance. If no caring contact could ease his unreconciled agony of conscience, her dry barbs of wit could make him laugh.

She is very deliberately not prying into the issue about his mage abilities, mostly because she doesn't want her order to know what she suspects. I'd thought it was pretty much confirmed, but I guess not.

They banter. He asks her about her life as a novice. Arithon gets a little alarmed when she tells him that his visits to her are the juiciest gossip of the village. He asks what she tells them:

Elaira returned a glare of owlish propriety. ‘That with Dakar in tow, your new ships were going to need extremely potent talismans to avert incompetence, misfortune, and iyats.’

Rathain’s prince grinned through the flame-rippled air off the brazier. ‘Plain truth.’

My OT3 lives!

There is, of course, some lavender tinged angst:

The sorrow struck Elaira at sudden, odd moments, that such joy must become the first thing to wither when Arithon’s cursed fate overtook him, and the contradictory ironies embedded in his nature came to exert their-inevitable pressures. Bound to a course of inescapable violence as he was, she could not shake her dread that Morriel’s belief would prevail, and his very strengths of character become the catalysts to drive his mind to destruction.

Whether the compassionate intelligence that sourced Elaira’s fascination had engaged his deeper feelings in return, he lent her no chance to find out. To Jinesse, who maintained a tenuous, dutiful friendship, he seemed as he always had: willing enough to speak when addressed, but disinclined to volunteer his confidence.

There's an interesting bit where we're told that Arithon plays for a wedding of a cobbler's daughter to the abalone cutter's son. Elaira is seated by Jinesse and quite enjoys the performance.

But for the widow who recalled Arithon’s performance on Talliarthe’s deck and again, more forcefully, at Innish, the measures described by the bard’s skilled fingers seemed as mere surface ripples thrown out to mask the grand depths. Where Elaira was drawn by curiosity to inquire, Jinesse chewed her lip and admitted, ‘His mind is elsewhere, tonight. His heart is not in his music’

The twins chose that moment to badger their mother for taffy. Through their engaging, boisterous noise, Elaira found no graceful way to reopen the lapsed conversation.

...it doesn't pass the Bechdel test, sadly. But I'm intrigued by the idea that Elaira and Jinesse talk. I'd like to see more of that, please.

However, about a week later, things get quite exciting. There's a storm! And we get some lovely evocative description as Elaira comes to find Arithon for some reason:

Tinselled with falling rain that hissed through her firebrand, Elaira struggled up the exposed spit toward the shipyard. The night was a roaring black maelstrom around her. Freak winds battered wet skirts against her shins and shredded spindrift in bursting, white sheets off the breakers. Exposed to the storm’s raw brunt, the pole sheds shook to the blasts, while a loosened plank banged a madman’s tattoo, and dilute flares of lightning lit the anvilled clouds to stirred sulphur. Elaira picked an uncertain path between obsidian puddles and dune grass streamered like frayed ribbon. Against the heave of roiled surf, the looming frame of the half-complete brigantine combed the gusts to shrill vehemence. Nearer to hand bulked the mass of the chart loft, needles of candleflame pricked through its ill-fitted shakes. Inside the sole building to be graced with four walls, the yard’s roisterous labourers gathered over trestles to eat supper, compare conquests and shoot dice.

I do love that imagery.

This is followed by a fairly amusing bit of irritation from Elaira as she notes that the restless workers are going to pick fights, she's going to have to tend every black eye and skinned knuckle, and Arithon won't be able to visit for a while as the wrongfully battered "sued for their rights to restitution".

...and it occurs to me, in a way. Arithon has created a tiny little kingdom with his workers, hasn't he? He's issued decrees (don't fuck with people or make trouble). He arbitrates disputes. That's actually pretty funny to me.

But anyway, Elaira's here for a reason. There's been an accident with a fisherman. The boy who'd just gotten married got his arm caught in a fishing line. Without magic, he'll be crippled for life, and the marriage will be dissolved per local custom.

Arithon is shocked, but Elaira points out that his masterbard training couldn't cover every regional backwater's politics.  Some places keep "stubborn traditions", such as the shepherds of Vastmark shunning infertile women, and settlements in Lithmere requiring a tax to be paid before marriage.  In Merior's case, a bride's father can nullify a contract any time before the first childbirth if the match is "unfavorable".  Elaira tells us that it was originally meant to discourage wife-beating, but now extends to any time a husband loses his livelihood.  

One of those regional facts will be relevant in a later book.

Anyway, Arithon's a romantic, of course, and he agrees to come, bringing the lyranthe. Well, he death-magicked a city after all, he can probably music up some healing mojo.

And that's where Elaira gets the information that she suspected but really didn't want to know:

‘Can’t? Or won’t?’ Distraught and furious to believe he might obstruct her through some tangle of guilt-induced conscience, Elaira raised the flittering torch and let the light fall full on his face.

His contact with her hand jerked away as he twisted, muscle meshed to bone in an anger not quite savage enough to mask a grief of immeasurable proportion. Through the thrash of storm wind and water, amid harried black puddles that seemed utterly to swallow the tormented flame above her fist, Elaira felt Koriani talent and intuitive instinct noose disparate memories into painful focus: Dakar, haranguing a man he believed to be vulnerable; then like hammered echo, the unnerving study Arithon had once subjected to a growing stalk of wild nightshade.

More than blood had been sacrificed to Desh-thiere’s curse in the massacre at Tal Quorin, Elaira perceived in horrified discovery. Arithon s’Ffalenn had lost touch with his mage-bom talent. Transfixed by shared pity, she wrenched to a stop in her tracks.

Arithon paused also, aggrieved enough to have laid flat all his defences. ‘Ei ciard’huinn,’ he said in lyric Paravian, which translated, I am exposed. ‘I could wish that Morriel shouldn’t know.’

But of course, she has to, and she's pretty devastated. He offers her some comfort, claiming his grief is hardly worth the boy's happiness.

‘The gift of s’Ffalenn compassion will kill you,’ she snapped. ‘That’s not worth any lad’s happiness!’

Aw. I do like that Arithon has someone unequivocally in his corner. It's just a shame that it's the person under magic oaths to someone who would prefer him dead.

They shift to practical topics. This is going to be a tricky healing, not one Elaira would attempt alone. She asks how good is he?

Unfortunately, he doesn't know. Though he points out that after Jaelot, they can at least expect "true strengths to draw upon." Heh, that's one way to put it. Elaira seems to agree.

So we get a magic healing! Yay!

And for some reason Arithon strips:

His lyranthe set aside, Arithon crossed to steady the woman as she stumbled, weeping, toward the threshold. He saw her safely out, latched the door, then peeled off his shirt in a flicked scatter of droplets.

‘Use the towel on the hook by the basin.’ Elaira clasped the boy’s sound wrist to measure his pulse. Her clinical study took in his face, pallid as ambergris, then timed the thin rasp of his breathing.

A half-second later, Arithon arrived, the towel slung over his bare shoulder.

Maybe it's for a morale boost?

So they discuss the situation in Paravian. And thankfully, Wurts just gives us the English translation instead of paragraphs of pseudo-celtic nonsense. The big issue is that the boy's in shock, and using soporifics would be too dangerous.

Arithon takes the moment to make things a little more inappropriately sexy:

Despite her involvement she could not escape the awareness of Arithon’s presence; of the warmth that radiated off his skin and his rock-steady calm. He moved after a moment. Warm hands gathered up her wet hair and blotted its drenched coils in the towel. Then, collected and firm, his fingers raked through and divided the wet strands, then plaited the rich mass into her usual neat braid.

‘You’ll need to see what you’re doing,’ he murmured in a musical, deep tone that stroked over wrought nerves like a tonic. He fished out a tie string from his cast-off cuff and knotted his work, then tossed the soaked towel on the stool.

Dude, there's an injured kid here. Indulge your inner service sub later.

So he asks the kid's name. The kid points out that Arithon played at the wedding. Yes, but it's important to hear how the kid says the name himself, apparently. Maybe it's a harmonic thing. Mysticism.

Elaira and Arithon discuss what she's going to do. Normal surgery won't be enough, she's got to magically force regeneration. And Arithon helps, using bardic magic to draw up his own power and strengthen her weaving. It's all lovely magic technobabble that is mostly incomprehensible but sounds very mystical and important.

There is a point where Elaira's concentration breaks, but Arithon uses his magic to reinforce her before she loses control of everything.

Things start getting a little sexy again:

The gale outside seemed faded to insignificance, the drumroll of wind-driven downpour made deadened as if swathed under a caul. Lapped in thick shadow, the musician bent over his lyranthe, arched fingers a flying, deft dance over frets nicked gold in tepid flame light. Drawn on by his knife-edged harmonics, teased by rolling roulades of bright chords, the forces that gouged the wild limits of chaos were coaxed stable, then teased into balance.

Then the bard raised his head and locked eyes with the enchantress whose gifts interleaved with his music.

The contact set off a small shock, a prick like a needle through fire. Elaira sensed in advance the precise instant when Arithon flattened his hand and silenced the ringing call of his strings; melded in wordless awareness, she felt every barrier and bulwark of the mind shred between them.

No wall remained.

And of course, we need to hear how great he is again:

The measures woven now shaped a clear affirmation, notes layered into patterns that invoked Name. Compounded through remembered strictures from his mage training, and the deepest gift of bardic empathy, Arithon recaptured in song the essence of the boy’s self-perception.

This he framed into a mirror turned inward against itself.

To theme, he added slow, tolling chords to lull the mind. Coaxed past reach of worldly pain, the injured boy on the table eased into sleep. The lyranthe cajoled, then beckoned, each progression of chords netted into beguiling illusion that lured the tranced spirit and enfolded it in a clarion blanket of ecstasy.

Led to stunned awe by the sensitivity of Arithon’s perception, shown wonders through the vision of trance state, Elaira saw tight-laced bundles of notes strike and winnow the uncertain air. The forged lines of power called forth from bare elements unreeled into ribbons of refined light. Blind to his own gifts, the bard perceived none of the form wrought by his genius. He played on by instinct to fashion a spell as unerring as any construct brought to focus by a master of magecraft.

And this too:

‘Merciful Ath,’ Elaira cried on a scraped whisper.

She had witnessed spells cast by senior enchantresses, through crystal resonance and amplified alignment; she had studied under healers in the greatest hospice in Athera, but nothing in her grasp of the mysteries prepared her for the frightful turn of mastery Arithon had shaped and then strung to binding ties through an intuitive rendition of pure melody.

‘Rare lady,’ he answered in response to shocked thought. ‘Have you not guessed? Your vision itself was my sounding board.’

So they end up in full on empathic bond after a bit:

She understood unequivocally and finally, that the conduit forming the bridge to the man was emotion: affection of equal depth and breadth to the regard she already held for him. She saw the love he had systematically, even ruthlessly stifled before the damning assumption that her interest was no more than a ploy arranged by Morriel Prime to track his personal affairs.

Elaira had no chance to savour the exultation of their mutual rapport.

All wonderment became reft from the moment by need: the injured boy’s condition was too critical to suffer even the smallest delay.

I mean, I just read through like three pages of how awesome Arithon is. But yes, I'm glad you remember the injured kid.

Now it's Elaira's turn to be awesome though. Because this requires prompt precise work. And I kind of love how the narration changes tone here:

Elaira bludgeoned stunned wits back to sharpness. With her spell crystal cupped between her damp palms, she bent once again to her invalid. The damage looked all the more daunting for the boy’s scarce-breathing flesh. From Arithon she borrowed the courage to ignore the clamour of better sense, that for prudence and safety, such a mass of mangled tissue should be dressed out for a clean amputation.

Nothing if not stubborn, whipped on by the cry of her heart for the waste of a life at the threshold of uselessness, Elaira hurled her will through the core of her crystal’s white focus. For whatever end, she shouldered the supreme risk and began the arduous course to align sigils with seals, then pair their arcane forces with the properties of herbs to rebuild the boy’s mangled wrist.

Bone, blood, muscle and cartilage, each required separate sets of spells. The delicate flux of forces brought to bear must align to match the body’s own magnetism..

Matter of fact, not flowery. Arithon got the boy out of his body, so to speak, but this is her show now. (He does accompany her, but mostly to strengthen and support). I particularly like this bit:

The miracle shimmered through air and through flesh. As slivered bits of bone were slotted one into another like puzzle pieces, then stapled in place with fine magic, perfection ruled every move. Like a construct of engineered geometry, Elaira held her grasp on the multi-layered balance of spells. The bard’s gift sustained her hands and her mind as she reconstructed ripped cartilage and restored the ligaments to rebind each disarranged wrist bone. Her sight did not blur through meticulous removal of flayed bits of rope fibre, any one of which might seed a lethal infection.

Then each vein and capillary had to be refigured; riven sinew repaved in light-tracks to reconnect the ends of sheared nerves. Tendons must be sewn whole, and frayed muscles drawn together in painstaking rows of gut stitches. Elaira toiled on in agonized concentration. Sweat dewed her temples and rolled down her jaw. Yet the needle in her fingers did not slip that a dancing, merry measure did not shepherd her back to dexterity.

Of course, she ends up succeeding. After the fancy work is done, Elaira collapses in exhaustion and Arithon takes over again, basically keeping the kid alive/stabilized.

When Elaira wakes up, she hears silence, and feels the loss of that sexy sexy spellcraft. But hey:

The grinding, dull throb of taxed nerves released her one limb at a time. She noticed she lay half-supine on her pallet. A warmth beneath her cheek held a scent of clean skin and the muffled rhythm of another heartbeat. Snapped back on a breath to full consciousness, Elaira came aware that she rested in the circle of Arithon’s arms.

He had not taken time to retrieve his damp shirt. The same hands that had commanded the lyranthe to high art cradled her cheek and her waist. The disfiguring scars on his wrists were left unabashed in plain view. His hips were twisted underneath her, his bare feet still braced on the floorboards; as if he had sat, her weight borne in his arms, with intent to settle her to rest.

Shirtless cuddling. Nice.

They may or may not have a lingering empathic link. He notices that she woke up and fills her in: the kid's asleep. He stuck around to watch over her, to make sure she recovered. And he calls her by name when he does. It's the first time, both she and I realize, that he's actually said her name while alone with her.

She asks him to stay, and he reacts defensively, promising to send Jinesse. And then things get romantic:

The desperate force of will in his effort to pull free shuddered through the contact between them. An awful, uglier truth arched across their tuned empathy: that what feeling he had would be denied out of self-preservation. He still believed her interest was false, created on command by Koriani aim to manipulate him.

And anger shocked through Elaira like white fire, that her attraction had been genuine long and long before Morriel’s hideous plotting had seized on her love as a gambit. This she determined to let him see, before the consequences ruined them both.

Strong, sun-browned from her long days of foraging, Elaira stirred against his move to rise. She pressed him back and looked up, and locked his gaze with her own. ‘Before Ath, before life, I love you. That’s been true, I think, since a rash escapade led to a hayloft in an inn yard.’

Aw.

And now things get a bit sexy again:

She had just one moment to realize how weary he was himself, and how ill-prepared. No defence did he have, no ready barrier, as she moved in his arms, then closed the embrace and laid her lips against his in surrender.

An immediate quiver lanced through him. The hands at her back closed hard and locked. His kiss met hers in a riptide of unleashed passion. Scalded, consumed, uplifted, exalted, for the unforgettable space of a heartbeat they were one flesh and one mind. The harmony between them stopped thought and waived every limiting fear for the future.

Then Arithon s’Ffalenn made a sound like a man lashed to torture.

His head turned, broke her hold and snapped aside. He jerked upright in a wildcat recoil, as a creature roped down for the knife might escape its deathblow in a slaughter pen.

I almost stopped a line sooner, so I could make a joke about how Arithon likes that kind of thing. But I also really love the imagery here.

But see, Arithon can't possibly get busy right now. He's too busy with ANGST:

Her own pain re-echoed in devastated imprint, she saw his eyes, stretched wide and bleak in the candlelight as he forced his breath back into stopped lungs. ‘What have I done? Dharkaron show us both mercy, your feelings are as mine, and I thought Morriel had sent you!’

...um. Awkward?

There's lots of dramatic gesturing here:

Pinned on the prongs of that ugly, dual truth, Elaira lost words. She had spirit in her only to endorse the more truthful obligation. Spurred by the overriding cry of her heart, she raised a hand in comfort to cup the side of his face.

Her touch never connected.

A whirlwind of motion heaved her up, flung her back. Arithon’s hands turned wholly ruthless as he twisted out from underneath her. Discarded in a shivering heap upon the bed, Elaira clawed back tumbled hair and blinked to clear her vision from a ruinous, blinding fall of tears.

She never heard his step cross the room. But his pose said all his speech could not: back turned, head bent, his expressive fingers fanned in white outline against the board wall, while his shirtless body was raked and raked over in wretched, quivering spasms.

So he's kind of full on freaking out. Telling her not to come closer. But Elaira has intentions.

The slithering fall of the blanket turned informer, or maybe the shift of air across his skin: she would disregard his plea. This time, he would be pressured too far. Integrity, joy, the bright, tragic fabric of the miracle shared between them would unstring all of his control. ‘Don’t come. I beg you, for your life’s sake, don’t.’

Yess. Deflower him. But that bit about her life gives her pause. She asks him: ‘Beloved, what is there of me that is not yours before anything?’

He sucked an agonized breath, then in scalpel sharp diction, launched into flat recitation: ‘All states of fleshly desire to renounce, this I vow. All ties of the heart, of family, of husband and lover to put aside, this I vow.’

Elaira stopped, stunned, between steps.

What he's reciting is the Koriani oath. You know. The one that means an initiate has to be celibate or they die or get psychically lobotomized...something like that.

The phrases continued, implacable. ‘And should I weaken or falter and come to forswear my commitment, all that I am shall be forfeit, body and mind. This I vow, no witness beyond the Prime Circle, no arbiter beyond the crystal matrix into which I surrender my Name and my imprint as surety through all my living days.’

And here's the fucking ridiculous comedy of errors.

He loves her. She loves him. They want to have sex, desperately. They CAN actually have sex. Elaira's got special permission because Morriel wants her to seduce Arithon.

...And of course, that means she can't.

Elaira masked her face and muffled her ears, helpless. She could not escape fate. No move forward was possible, now, even to unman him, even to defeat the unassailable integrity that acted in sacrifice to spare her: not without admitting that her Prime Matriarch had a hand in this design. To say that leave had been granted to break her order’s primary vow was to gut an inviolable trust.

What Elaira felt for this man was real, untarnished. Yet she could not wrench hope back into her hands, nor cross the gulf, nor complete the desire between them. Not without sullying forever the shining truth of her love, that Morriel’s manipulation had no part of.

...or you know, you could tell the truth. Like the next part says:

No word existed under earth or sky to explain that her presence here was less due to Koriani intrigue than to the burden of Sethvir’s warning prophecy.

...those are words. You could say those words. You could say literally exactly those words. And then you could bang.

But then we wouldn't get this kind of heartrendingly, eyeroll-inspiring declaration:

For Arithon gathered himself again and forced speech. ‘Lady, for the love that I bear you, let me leave. Your order’s vows cannot tolerate my claim. Give me torture and loss, give me death, before I become the instrument that seals your utter destruction. Of all the atrocities I have done in the past, or may commit in the future, that one I could never survive.’

There was nothing to do, nothing at all, but stand aside, mute, and let him pass.

Fuck, shipping is hard when your ship targets are idiots.

--

The sneak peek section is Convergence:

1. Arithon FINALLY gets news from the Black Drake that Rathain's mustering in Etarra, and he's sent a request to rendezvous with a clan lord who dwells in Selkwood.

(It's worth noting that Selkwood, like Merior is in the country of Shand. So this will not be a subject of his.)

2. Apparently the city of Isaer is in a panic after the portent that slashed the night sky when Maenalle was executed. Asandir though is riding out to go give her grandson sanction to inherit her office.

God I hate you.

3. Morriel and Lirenda discuss Elaira's failure to seduce Arithon, with Morriel defending Elaira, confirming she DID gain his trust, but "her prince has outmanoeuvred us, and through flaws in our own design …".

Yeah, funny how the guy doesn't want the girl he fell in love with to DIE.

Random note, there are two chapter sets left of this book. I'm a reviewing machine, baby!