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I. Fionn Areth
Winter 5647

Thirty-five thousand marched to war. Their weeping widows all died poor. Swords against Darkness, reap for Light Fell Shadow’s Prince and rend false night.

—verse of a marching song from the campaign of Dier Kenton Vale Third Age 5647

Strong arms closed and locked around Elaira’s slim shoulders. Fingers strengthened by the sword and sensitized to a masterbard’s arts tightened against her back. The dark-haired, driven man who cradled her surrendered at last to his blazing crest of passion. His lips softened against hers, the restraint, the control, the terrible doubts which bound him consumed all at once in a rush of tender need. She responded, melted. Her being exploded into sensation like fire and flight. At one with the prince who had captured her heart, her spirit knew again that single, suspended moment, with its promise of inexpressible joy.

Then the fulfillment of union snapped shy of release, doomed ever to fall short of consummation by the rough intervention of fate. This time, a harried, insistent pounding snapped the dream into fragmented memory.

The small-boned enchantress entangled in threadbare quilts jerked out of her fretful sleep. A muted cry escaped her. Chilled in the drafts which flowed over the sill of an unglazed croft window, she fought to regain full awareness. Once again, she grappled the irreversible reality: Merior’s mild sea winds and the Prince of Rathain lay two years removed in her past.

Elaira squeezed her eyes shut against the ache. Instead of the muffled boom of breakers creaming against stainless sands, the ferocious, clawing breath of winter whined over the white-mantled dales of Araethura.

Yesterday’s blizzard had delivered a biting, cold night.

Over the open glens, through stands of scrub oak and across the rustling flats of frozen marsh, the ice whipped in driven bursts, to rattle the ill-fitted shutters of her cottage at the fringe of the moor. Crystals found the cracks, tapped at the lintels, and fanned a frosted arc of silver across the leaked bit of moonlight admitted through the same chink. While the eddies moaned and clawed past the beams of the eaves, and the spent tang of ash commingled with the fragrance of cut cedar and frost-damp miasma of moldered thatch, Elaira exhaled a deep breath. Given time, the runaway pound of her heart would subside.

She untangled the fist still clenched through a coil of auburn hair. Too many times she awakened like this, struggling against the blind urge to weep, while the ripping, slow agony of Arithon’s memory threatened to stop her will to live. In desperation, against the vows of the Koriani Order which tied her lifelong to a celibate service, her refuge from despair became the fiercely guarded shelter of her solitude.

Tonight, even that grace was forfeit. The disturbance which had torn her from lacerating dreams came again, the insistent hammer of a fist on wood.

There would be some emergency, of course. Elaira grumbled a filthy phrase in the gutter vernacular of her childhood and kicked off her tatty layers of quilts. “Fatemaster’s two-eyed vigilance! Do they all think I’m deaf as a post?”

Whoever pounded for admittance, the abuse threatened to burst the tacked strips of leather that hung her rickety door.

Sped by awareness that she lacked any tools for small carpentry, Elaira heaved up from her hoarded nest of warmth amid the bedclothes. The shock of cold planks against her bare soles dissolved her invective to a gasp. She had retired unclothed, since yesterday’s storm had soaked through to her shift. Through forced delay as she fumbled past the clammy folds of her cloak to snatch the first suitable garment from its peg, the hammering gained a fresh urgency.

“Fiends plague!” The dank cloak would just have to serve. “Whoever you are, I don’t dispense remedies naked!”

Elaira bundled the soggy wool over her shoulders. She closed shivering fingers to secure the cloth under her chin, then shot the bar and stepped back as the door swung inward.

A dazzle of moonlight flooded through. The collapse of the drift left pocketed across her threshold doused her bare ankles in snow. Elaira yelped and leaped back. Her cloak caught in an eddy of wind, snagged the latch, and tugged itself free of her grasp.

The herder boy outside froze in startlement, saucer eyes pinned to the slide of the wool down the firm, naked swell of her breast.

Elaira managed the grace not to laugh at his expression. She caught the errant wool and snugged it back up to her collarbones. “Are you going to come in?” she asked with mild acerbity. “Or will you just stand ‘til you freeze with your mouth hanging open?”

The shepherd boy shut his baby-skinned jaw with a click. Too young for subterfuge, still innocent enough to flush to the roots of his tangled hair, he ventured a slurred apology behind the snagged hem of his sleeve.

“Of course there’s trouble,” Elaira said more gently. “You’ve a year yet to grow before you start calling on ladies for that sort of randy interest, yes?”

The boy shrank and turned redder. Since he was also frightened enough to bolt back into the night, the enchantress caught his arm in a grip like fixed shackles. She bundled him inside, wise enough to slam the door before she plonked him on the stool by the hearth and let him go.

“Who’s fallen sick?” she demanded, brisk enough to shock through his stunned silence. She groped meantime across darkness to sort through the pile of last night’s discarded clothing. The fire had done its usual and gone out. Gusts hissed down the cottage’s flue and scattered ash across the stone apron where her herbal still rested, a dismantled glint of burnished copper and glass reflecting a meticulous upkeep. Seized through by a shiver, Elaira drew on the icy linen layers of her underthings, then laced the stiffened leather of her leggings overtop.

The herdboy huddled under mufflers on her stool and could not seem to find his tongue.

“Don’t say no one’s sick,” Elaira murmured through chattering teeth as she turned her back, cast off the cloak, and wormed into the dank, frowsty cloth of her shift. The hem which had been dripping as she drifted off to sleep now crackled with thin, crusted ice.

“My aunt,” mumbled the boy. He stared at his toes, unaware of the stockyard pungency of goat carried inside on his clothing. “She’s in childbed. The midwife sent me to fetch you.”

Burrowed into her tunic and struggling with numbed hands to hook the looped leather fastenings, Elaira said, “How long since her labor pains started?”

“Since just after midday,” the boy replied, miserable. “I couldn’t run. Snow’s piled too deep.” He worried his chapped lip with small teeth. “Will she die, do you think?”

“I’ll try not to let her.” By reflex, Elaira stilled her thoughts and used the trained edge of her talents to sound the night for the time. Past midnight, she sensed. The tidal pull of the full moon just dipped past the arc of the zenith. She crouched to retrieve the fleece boots she had kicked off and left where they fell. One hid in deep shadow under the worktable, scattered still with oddments of tin stamped with the sigils for fiend bane. The mate perversely eluded her. “Do you know if her water had broken when you left?”

“Aye, so,” the boy affirmed in his broad-voweled grasslands dialect. “That’s why the midwife would have ye. The birthing’s gone hard, and the caul broke and let forth an unlucky color, so she said.”

Elaira caught a half breath in foreboding. “What color was the fluid, do you remember? Was there blood?”

“No blood.” The boy paused to trace a symbol across his left breast, to avert the eye of ill fortune. “The stream was thickened and greenish. That’s bad, yes? My aunt’s going to pass beneath the Wheel?”

“No. She’s unlikely to die.” Sure of that much, Elaira blew on her fingers, reached, found her other boot, the one she had dunked at the ford when she slipped on a stone and the ice broke. The fleeces were still clogged and soggy. “It’s the babe trying to come who’s in trouble.”

She gritted her teeth and thrust her toe in the cuff before her nerve snapped. No time could she spare to warm the wet out, even were the fire still alight. Every second counted, if in harsh fact the boy’s call for help had not already reached her too late. She scrambled up off her knees and snatched her satchel from the table. Another minute strayed as she struck light to a candle stub and gathered up the specialized herbs she might need, ones the midwife was least apt to carry. More minutes fled, as she groped amid the disassembled coils of her still to twist the curved segment of glass tubing from the cork which capped the collection flask. She could only pray it would be the right size as she stowed it amid her remedies, to chinking complaint from the crockery and small flasks that held her stock of alcohol and tinctures.

“Come on,” she urged the boy. “I’d make you some tea to warm up if I dared, but truly, your aunt’s babe can’t wait.”

No coals lingered in the hearth to be doused. That lapse in comfort became a twisted sort of blessing as she rammed out the door and plowed knee-high tracks through the dunescape of drifts to the shed. A rumbling nicker greeted her from inside. Then a white-blazed face peered out from the dimness, hopeful.

“You idiot butterball,” Elaira replied. “You won’t be begging more grain.”

The slab-sided roan gelding had come with the croft, no replacement in her heart for the spry little bay who had died of old age the past spring. Some frivolous initiate had named the beast Tassel, for reason outside of all logic. Elaira unhooked the rope hackamore that served as his bridle and looped his whiskered nose through the cavesson. He butted her, snuffling in quest of a carrot as she flicked his ears through the headstall, then blew a resigned sigh as she bent to raise his forehoof and treat the cleft with goose grease to keep snow from balling up against his soles.

“Wise one,” said the boy in whispered diffidence, “I don’t ride.”

“You will. If your aunt’s to have help, you must.” Elaira stepped to the gelding’s quarters and grasped a feathered fetlock, not without heart to spare sympathy. “I’ll see you don’t fall off.” In belated, breathless courtesy, she asked his name.

“Kaid, wise one.” From the corner of the eye, she caught the clumsy, mittened gesture he made with intent to ward off spells.

Her stifled smile of irony was lost as the wind flogged her hair against her cheek. “You’ll do fine, Kaid. Not to worry.” The odd contradictions of countryfolk, to summon her for the magics that refined the craft of healing, then to trace out a hedge witch’s symbols to avert the dread effects they feared from the selfsame mysteries.

Elaira had never known the reverent respect once offered to initiates of the Koriani sisterhood. The arts of her order had been viewed with trepidation for as long as she could remember. The ignorant intolerance arisen since the uprising that upset the rule of the old high kings had not lessened with defeat of the Mistwraith’s fell fogs, which had masked Athera’s skies for five centuries. Quite the contrary, the entrenched distrust the townborn folk held for sorceries had been inflamed to root deeper since the hour the vanished sunlight had been restored.

The Koriani Prime Enchantress held adamant opinion on the reason: the new strife arisen through the Mistwraith’s curse of enmity, laid upon the two princes whose gifts had brought its captivity, just provoked such misguided beliefs. Blame was not shared equally upon the shoulders of Lysaer s’Ilessid, birth-born to wield the powers of light. Only the Master of Shadow, Arithon s’Ffalenn, was raised mage-wise. The Prime and her Senior Circle were swift to point out his shortcomings. Unlike the royal half brother set against him, he had spurned the strictures of his training and invoked the high arts without scruple.

Few would deny that across four kingdoms, Arithon’s name was now linked to destruction and unconscionable acts of bloodshed.

Elaira stamped back that distressed line of thought. The Shadow Master’s part in the ruin of Lysaer’s war host on the field at Dier Kenton Vale must never become her concern. She knew his heart; had once shared his deepest fears, and knew of the visceral horror of killing that tormented him, mind and spirit. As sharply as she longed to know whether the affray had unstrung his grip on integrity, the unruly emotions burned into her heart lent iron to her resolve. Her order must never be offered a second opening to use the attraction shared between them. Shamed to rage that her love had ever come to be tested as a tool to set Koriani ties on Arithon’s destiny, the enchantress applied herself to the crisis of the moment. She slapped grease in the roan’s last hoof, straightened up, and wiped her hands on a scrap of old burlap.

“Out, you.” She gave a suggestive tug at the roan’s headstall, too pressed to delay for the saddle. “We’ve a hard night ahead. You’re going to have to do a generous bit more than shamble.”

Another gust screamed past the corner of the shed. Gossamer veils of snow unraveled from the lip of the drifts. The eddy streamed Elaira’s hair across her eyes. She clawed back the tangles, impatient. “Come, boy.” A swift touch adjusted the hang of her satchel. “You’ll need to show me where to go.” She raised her wet boot in quest of a foothold in the buried logs of the woodpile, vaulted astride the roan’s back, then extended her arm to haul the herder child up before her.

He was shaking through his furs, mostly from fear since he shrank as her arms clasped around him.

Elaira sucked in a breath musked with wool and the rancid tang of goat. “Which way?”

The tilt of Kaid’s chin said north. Elaira faced the gelding around into the teeth of the wind. Its cold pierced her clothes like honed steel. The stars overhead were like flecks of chipped ice, and moonlight sheared the hillcrests in razor-cut brilliance against the streaming, knotted shadows sliced by trees.

“Hup!” Elaira cried. She gathered the roan’s reins and thumped him with her heels. The gelding shook his mane, grunted back as she drummed another thud against his ribs. His steaming warmth penetrated the damp layers of her leggings, and a breathy snort smoked from his nostrils. Too lazy to show displeasure beyond a flick of his tail, he roused into a short-strided walk.

Elaira shook her cuffs down to muffle her exposed hands. “How long did it take you to reach me?”

“I left our steading before nightfall. Snow fell too thick to know the time.” The boy clenched his jaw to still chattering teeth.

Questions remained, over details the midwife might have shared that would tell how far the aunt’s labor had progressed. Yet as the gelding breasted through chest-high drifts, or plowed a crumpled trail across the pristine vales carved trackless by the scouring winds, Elaira held her silence. Nothing but hurry could improve the babe’s threatened chances. If she failed to arrive at the steading before the moment of birth, the infant might already be lost. Rather than pass her distress to the boy, she reined alongside a thin stand of alder and picked off a branch for use as a switch to force the placid gelding to trot.

The night engulfed her in its landscape of silver and black. Amid the wind-tortured swirls of dry snow, the horse underneath her seemed all that moved in the world. If hare ventured out to gnaw bark and dry grasses, or if owls flew hunting mice, she saw no sign of anything alive. The tattered plumes of the gelding’s breath embroidered hoarfrost on her patched leggings. His hooves stitched the hillcrests to avoid the soft drifts, and the boy sent as guide lolled against her shoulder and slept. Where the ground was swept bare, she flicked the gelding to a canter, the glassy chink of snapped ice compacted under the thud of his passage. The gentle, rolling downlands stretched ahead and behind, sere under unrumpled snow, the rippled ink of oak copse and the grayed trunks of alders snagged through by tinseled skeins of moonlight. Over marshes herringboned in storm-trampled cattails, and past the treacherous, inky wells of sinkpools, Elaira forged ahead in relentless urgency.