The hour before dawn, the brick guardhouse in Jaelot held a stew of relentless activity. The clangor of metal as men sorted arms reechoed through shouted orders, and the tangle of raised voices, arguing. Just arrived on the threshold, his old man’s quaver overwhelmed by the rush and commotion, the Lord Mayor of the city stood irate. Arms crossed on his chest, and both feet wrapped in flannel to cushion his limping gout, he howled at the browbeaten coachman who took the place of his usual, effete manservant. ‘I don’t care whistling blazes who you find to ask questions. Someone hereabouts will find me the guard captain, if I have to seal a writ for his arrest!’
Windburned and irritable from the buffeting storm, the coachman gave way with ill grace. The first boy he hailed failed to hear his bull bellow through the thundering rumble of supply barrels three lackeys rolled across the plank flooring. In the maelstrom of arrivals and frenetic activity, nobody paused to note livery colors, or spared proper time to grace the prerogatives due to servants of ruling rank.
The irritated coachman was forced to jump clear to avoid being milled down, an ungainly leap that slapped his wet coattails against the spindle shanks of his calves.
The next boy he collared spun around in his tracks, staggered under a double load of horse harness. ‘Let be, sir! I’ll catch a lashing if the last of these bridles aren’t cleaned. The riders have orders to leave at first light!’
‘Impertinent wretch!’ Run out of patience, the coachman grabbed rein leather and twisted, noosing the boy by the throat. ‘Do you see, over there? That’s his lordship, the mayor. He’s the one asking your service. Now find me somebody who can flag the guard captain’s attention, or I promise, you won’t live long enough to catch whippings, or carry anything, anywhere.’
The boy with some difficulty swiveled his head. His ruddy cheeks paled as he noticed the glittering personage, fuming red-faced on the fringes. ‘My lord, forgive.’ He unloaded the harness in a jangling heap and scampered, the coachman left cursing as he unlooped his feet from the mess of dropped headstalls and rein leather.
Through the subsequent wait, the mayor steamed, silent. The guardhouse reechoed to its hammer-beamed ceiling with the rushed noise of men under pressure. Their snappish talk came and went through the continuous dinning screel, as the armorer’s boy sharpened blades and pole weapons on a pumice wheel spun by a half-wit.
At due length, a breathless equerry dashed up. Shouting, he offered to escort his Lordship of Jaelot into the guard captain’s presence.
The mayor stamped a gout-ridden foot, then winced at the twinge of sharp pain. ‘Damn your impertinence, it’s himself should be coming to me.’
Since the harried equerry looked likely to bolt on the pretext of some other errand, the coachman entreated, ‘My lord! I beg you, please follow.’
The mayor shot back a rankled glare, then embraced better sense and gave way. He waved the equerry onward and gimped headlong into the tumult.
The disgruntled party tacked an erratic course through mounds of provisions, overseen by anxious clerks busy checking off lists on their tally slates. They sidestepped, and just missed getting skewered by a man bearing bundles of furled banners on poles with lethally sharpened steel finials. Men polished armor, fitted spurs with new straps, or checked stitching on targets and scabbards. By the snatched words of conversation and the bellowed instructions that surfaced through racketing mayhem, the mayor learned that a cavalcade of five hundred prepared to ride northward at daybreak.
‘I gave no such order!’ he huffed over the press, buffeted by fellows lugging a field tent who failed to look where they were going.
The lanky coachman shortened his stride, belatedly reminded that his lordship suffered from cruelly swollen feet. Worn to boredom by the incessant upset caused by the Master of Shadow, he expressed sympathy, then held the plank door in forbearance as the boy led into the candlelit closet that served as the bursar’s office.
The stuffy space already held two muscled sergeants armed with chain mail and swords. They faced off against an overstrung baker who shook fat, pink fists in brisk argument. ‘Damn your haste to the eighth fire of Sithaer! I can’t supply a half company of men on a mountain foray at short notice! You want loaves, and not bricks shaped of flour, you’ll wait. Bread dough takes time. Can’t hurry that. You want your provender delivered in three hours, we can make good on half what you’ve listed, provided you settle for soda biscuits.’
‘What foray!’ bellowed the Mayor of Jaelot, ignored where he stood at the threshold. ‘No such command was sealed by my hand! Who dares presume to send mounted men haring off into the Skyshiels?’
Hobnails grated as the sergeants spun volte-face. The baker squeaked and fell silent. Beyond them, a sparkling, deliberate movement, the guard captain arose from the trestle. With the shutters latched closed, sullen light from the candle lamp chased his mail shirt with glitters of reflection. Bypassing rank, he spoke first to the baker. ‘Bring biscuit in casks. We’ll hold the supply train, and send them along when they’re loaded.’
The mayor flushed purple. Choking with outrage, he tugged at his pearl-stitched collar of state.
Before he could howl, the guard captain turned on him. Too large a man for the confines of walls, his no-nonsense manner seemed stripped away to a magma core of aggression. His weathered, flint face displayed chilling resolve, and his stare held a sharpened, fanatical intensity. ‘You do want the Spinner of Darkness destroyed?’
The mayor shut his gaping mouth like a trout. Set aback under scrutiny that bored like an auger, he sucked in a shaken breath. ‘We have patrols already in pursuit of the Master of Shadow.’ Wary as the man who handled hot coals when he had expected an ice cube, he added, ‘I’ve come to demand why my orders concerning the Koriani witches have failed to be carried out!’
‘The messengers you sent only got underfoot.’ No longer the stolid commander at arms who paid ruling rank proper deference, the guard captain’s mood took on a terrifying edge. ‘And the demons-accursed witches don’t signify.’ He kicked back his bench and stalked past the boards of the trestle. ‘The watch had your warrant to arrest them last night. Wasted effort, of course. The Koriathain had gone, though the hour before, my sentries reported the good sisters seemed to be everywhere. No search will contain them. Whether or not they’re inside town walls, no weapon I have can break through their wards of protection.
Since they’ll hide behind spellcraft and slink where they please, the larger concern should take precedence. We must turn every resource we have in pursuit of the Master of Shadow.’
The mayor advanced a gimping, short step. ‘How dare you!’ Flushed to his wattles, no small bit afraid, he let his shrill tirade gain force. ‘Those witches allowed our prized quarry to go free!
They have their own web of secretive politics, and I rue the hour we gave them our trust. We were without doubt betrayed by their senior. That small, bronze-haired healer broke her word as well, though she swore me a vow of life forfeit. I want her brought to justice for the bastard’s escape. Reassign your men here. I won’t sanction the authority to send our best company to break their fool necks in the mountains.’
The guard captain’s baleful stillness held threat. ‘I say again, do you want the shadow-bending felon taken down? Or are you not sworn to the Light, with Jaelot’s resources pledged to support the Divine Prince’s Alliance?’
‘We’re pledged, not possessed,’ the mayor hedged, his gloved fingers clasped in dismay for the change that made his captain a volatile stranger. ‘The s’Ffalenn pretender is criminal, and sorcerer, and likely by now, he’s made his escape to the seacoast.’
‘The coast is cut off. Bastard can’t slip by us that way.’ The guard captain advanced, the mailed fist on his sword tensed as though ready to kill. ‘By my tracker’s report, since the hour we flushed him, the criminal has turned northwest. He’s alone, and in flight toward the high ground. We’ll pin him against the ravines, or break his heart and spirit in the Skyshiels.’ At the mayor’s hissed protest, he flexed his hand, the sword inched from the sheath a glittering fraction. ‘I won’t argue further!
In this case, the Light of true justice must prevail, no matter the cost of our sacrifice. Stand aside, old man! Whether the slinking fiend of a sorcerer leads us a chase through Baiyen Gap, I’ll take our best lancers and hound him. No haunts, and no threat of old wives’ tales will stop me. Nor will your shrinking, faint heart.’
Overfaced, whitely shocked, the mayor backed down.
His guard captain shoved past with obstinate force, the spark in his eyes the blazing flame of a lethal dedication. ‘I’ll do what I’m trained for, to my last thought and breath. The men I select will bear arms until the Master of Shadow lies dead.’
Winter 5670
Four days after the solstice that brought the outbreak of dire portents, a wounded drover staggers into the gates of Karfael, within the crown territory of Tysan; brought before the posted Alliance officer, he delivers grim tidings from Westwood, of a caravan attacked and burned by a pack of free-flying Khadrim…
Several hundred leagues to the east, under the bruised colors of a cloudy dawn, the Prince of the Light and his picked cadre of field officers ride east, fired with resolve to achieve their sworn charge, and bring down the Spinner of Darkness…
While daylight brightens the peaks of the Skyshiels, and the blizzard disperses beneath the roaring winds of high altitude, a dark-haired royal fugitive on a stumbling horse sights a golden eagle perched on a branch; yet when he attempts a closer survey, he finds no trace of any winged being, but only the vague and lingering sense that uncanny eyes watch his back…
Winter 5670
III.
By morning, true to Luhaine’s promise, the two horses Dakar had picked for hard journeying had exhausted the last of their stamina. Dismounted, as wearied himself from breasting the pocketed gullies and crossing ridges cloaked with stunted trees, Arithon paused to take stock. His night of brisk riding had carried him well into the Skyshiel uplands. Here, the forested foothills of the coast gave way to slab-sided ravines, notched with the gashed seams of past rockfalls and spindled thickets of fir. The relentless winds funneled through the high gaps, driving plumed streamers of snow. The steep vales yielded poor prospect of shelter, deserted except for the pine sparrows that chirped and fluttered in the branches, dauntlessly pecking for seeds.
Bone tired and chilled, with his boots sodden from crossing a fast-flowing stream, Arithon acknowledged his stark need for rest. He had descended from the scoured stone of the heights, driven by threat of exposure; the subtle inroads carved by exhaustion could creep up on a man unawares. Cold dulled the wits. Many a traveler perished in these wilds, lulled into the stupefied peace of fogged judgment. Every gut instinct for survival, and the seasoned experience of woods wisdom, urged Arithon to find a snug hollow and hunker down.
Yet the forbidding, flint spine of the Skyshiels balked preference. The terrain offered no secure cranny. He required dry ground, a windbreak, and a fire, and a fold in the hills where two horses could be tucked out of sight.
Arithon rested his forehead against the steaming crest of the gelding that had borne him through most of the night. ‘Onward, brother,’ he whispered. Wary, even here, since incautious sound might travel an untold distance, he addressed the back-turned ear of the packhorse lagging behind. ‘I promise we’ll stop at the first safe place. You’ll both get the grain and the rubdown you’ve earned.’
He tugged on the lead rein, heart torn as the wearied animals resisted his effort to urge them ahead. Yet now was no time to hang back out of pity. Jaelot’s patrols would be dogging his track. Should they overtake, the chase would be short. Exhaustion had claimed all his resources. His best chance to grant his horses reprieve lay in keeping the lead seized during the night.
With his bandaged hand cradled in the crook of his left elbow, Arithon firmed his tired grip on the reins. ‘Bear up, little brothers.’ He used voice to coax the recalcitrant horses and prayed he would not have to goad them. The buckskin released a long-suffering sigh, then yielded a molasses step forward. The packhorse complied out of ingrained habit, its flagging stride muffled amid pristine snowdrifts.
Arithon broke the ground before them on foot, prodded by bald-faced urgency. The wound in his hand languished in sore neglect. The angry, stinging pain of fresh injury had long since progressed to the pounding throb of edema. His stopgap field bandage was dirtied and blood-soaked, frayed the more ragged each time he bent to chip the balled ice packed in the horses’ shod hooves. No wound fared well under such constant usage. He had lost the immediate, opportune chance to flush the clean puncture with spirits. Warned by the onset of harsh, fevered heat, and swelling that strained at the dressing, he fretted. Inflammation would have already set in. Arithon fought the blind urge to curse fate. His hands shaped his Masterbard’s skill on the lyranthe. At the earliest moment, he must draw the infection with infusions of heat and strong poultices.
He cajoled the horses across the next ridge. Unfolded beyond lay the glacial scar of another rock-strewn valley. The space was too open, as evinced by the circling flight of a hawk, and the indignant chitters of a red squirrel startled to rage by his trespass. Overhead, the sky shone lucent turquoise, serrated by the snowcapped boughs of rank upon rank of tall fir trees. Game was not scarce. Arithon noted the lock-stitched tracks of hare. Later, he flushed an antlered stag. Beside the black current of another mountain freshet, he carved a parallel course with the pug marks left by a khetienn, the compact, northern leopard that hunted the deep wilds of Rathain.
The drifts on the bank lay piled waist deep. Forced to carve a tortured course back to the high ground, where the north gusts flayed off the snow cover, Arithon winced to the report of shod hooves clanging over bare granite. He cast a sharp glance down his back trail. Although he detected no sign of pursuit, he dared not bide in complacency. His narrow lead must be carefully hoarded, each hour snatched from the jaws of adversity his margin for rest and recovery.
Noon found him atop a raked notch in the foothills. The frigid air knifed his laboring lungs, and the geldings, heads drooping, puffed beside him. The vista ahead showed no promise of surcease. Downslope, and northwest, the land sheared away into weathered ledges of rimrock. The disused Baiyen trail that the centaurs had built hugged the scarp, a narrow ribbon cut into forbidding, black granite. The firs clung in pruned patches, culled by ice and storms until their whipped trunks jabbed the slopes like stuck needles. Sun sheened the drifts to pearlescent silk. Defined by the altitude’s rarefied clarity, a deer could not move unseen by the eyes of a hunter.
Shivering against the cut of the breeze, Arithon searched to find a descent with some semblance of trustworthy footing. He could ill afford a turned ankle himself, far less risk laming the horses. Exhaustion had slowed his reflexes to poured lead. The smallest misstep might trip him. Unable to find a secure passage down, he veered westward, a moving target framed by clear sky, with the shod horses slipping and scrambling over the weather-stripped slabs of worn bedrock.
Two arduous hours later, he traversed a ravine bordered with lopsided hemlock. He picked his way, gasping with pain each time the horses jerked on the reins to snatch for a mouthful of forage. The needles were poison, and would induce colic. Yet the demand of their empty bellies overrode the precaution of instinct.
Beneath jutting rock, striped in the shadow of a spindly stand of birch, Arithon stopped. He broached the supply packs and scrounged out the nose bags, then measured a sparing ration of grain. The horses munched. He took stock, perils and assets, while the sun dipped in the sky to the west, and a quilting of shade crept across the timbered valley. Daylight waned strikingly fast in the high country. Already the wind gained an edge. Under darkness, the gusts turned unbearably bitter. Though to choose the sure route down the Baiyen trail would leave tracks for oncoming patrols, Arithon bowed to necessity. He had to find shelter before sundown. None would be found in this vista of steep cliffs and raked scree, which harbored no shred of ground cover.
A zigzagged descent down a snow-clad embankment disgorged horses and rider onto the ancient, shored causeway that traversed the Skyshiels to Daon Ramon. Here, the incessant blast of the wind had mercifully raked off the drifts. Arithon turned northwestward, the dry-packed snow squealing under his boot soles. The geldings followed, lackluster. Lathered sweat crusted their coats into whorls. Necks to hindquarters, they would have to be curried to free their thick guard hairs for warmth. Yet concern for that added burden of care must give way before the vast grandeur that opened ahead: the swept crown of rock held a mythic weight, instilled in all works wrought by Athera’s blessed races.
Despite the worn state of man and beast, the old Baiyen way stood as a monument to evoke awe.
The trail, with its slope in graceful incline, had been a life artery through two prior Ages of history. Each massive, fitted block underfoot had been laid by Ilitharis Paravians. Their artistry still withstood the battering elements, bulwarked by the awareness of stone wakened to perpetual service. Too narrow to bear the wagons and teams that were the province of man, the stepped ledge had provided First Age Paravian war bands swift passage when marauding packs of Khadrim had made their lairs in the Skyshiels. By fire and sword, drake spawn and Paravian had waged battles over the causeway. At solstice and equinox, when lane tides ran highest, the fallen still danced in perpetual combat. Their haunts could be seen by those born with talent, silent and silver under the frost flood of moonlight. Here and there, tumbled fissures of slagged rock showed where the balefires of Khadrim had melted glassine scars in sheer granite.
Man’s footsteps had never trodden here freely. When the Fellowship’s compact had been sworn to answer humanity’s plea to claim sanctuary, none walked where the old races forbade them, except by strict courtesy and permission. A man broke that law at risk of his sanity, Paravian presence being too bright to bear for those families whose heritage lay outside clan bloodlines. The needs of town trade had been negotiated by the long-past generations of clan chieftains, the old rights of way drawn by Paravian law into harmony with sky and earth. The sites which seated the mysteries stayed reserved in perpetuity.
Baiyen Gap was one of those crossings held sacrosanct, even after the uprising broke charter law, and the town trade guilds ran roughshod over the established tradition of way rights. The Fellowship of Seven still enforced the strict ban against road building, despite fierce opposition, and round upon round of hot argument. Nor was the old law forgotten in the deepest wilds, where the imprint of the mysteries still lingered and centaur guardians had not taken kindly to trespass.
Arithon s’Ffalenn had little to fear, whatever the road’s haunted status. By right of blood, his granted sanction as Rathain’s crown prince set him as spokesman for mankind’s chartered rights on the land. Wherever he walked, if he honored the old ways, the past centaur guardians would have granted him passage. He could but hope, as he set foot on the path of his ancestors, that in his hour of need the enemies riding with Jaelot’s town guard would not be shown the same license.
The level footing allowed faster progress. No strange lights or haunts revisited to trouble him, or startle his flagging horses. The sheer wall of the cliff eased gradually into a milder grade crossing the broken scree slopes between mountains. Arithon traversed a succession of corries, each one thicketed in fir, and slotted with deer tracks where passing herds had paused to browse on the greenery.
Lowering sunlight burnished the high peaks. As eventide shadow tinged the snow-clad hills to a ruckle of lavender silk, he entered a vale and broke the paned ice over a tumbling streamlet. Upland silence wrapped him in the spiced scent of balsam, while the horses sucked down bracing water. Prompted by the punched spoor of a mountain hare, Arithon hitched their reins to a deadfall. A foray into the underbrush led him through the tumbled scar of a rockslide to a spring hidden within a dense copse of aspen. Fir saplings and dead briar cloaked the mouth of an oblate, scraped fissure that had once served Khadrim, and later, untold generations of wolves as a snug summer lair to raise young.
‘Blessed Ath,’ Arithon gasped on a breath of sheer gratitude.
He returned for the horses, then used the last hour before the light faded to sweep down the snow where his tracks left the Baiyen causeway. Twilight saw both geldings curried and fed, and a dead aspen limb chopped for fuel. The fire Arithon laid was economically small, hot enough to boil the water for remedies, but too scant to shed warmth for his body. He dared not risk the least presence of smoke to draw the attention of enemies. By the fragrant, low light of the embers, he shouldered the unpleasant task of attending his injured right hand.
The puncture had bled and scabbed many times, until the dressing tied on in the field had to be soaked away. The wound underneath wept amid angry swelling, stuck with dirt and frayed threads. Sweating in discomfort, wrung from exhaustion and hunger, Arithon was trained healer enough to persist until the raw tissue was clean. As well, he realized he had been lucky. Fionn Areth’s blade had grazed between the long bones. No tendons were severed, but the steel point had entered at an oblique angle and emerged above the heel of his hand. There, the leather-wrapped tang of Alithiel had stopped the thrust and prevented the blade from slicing disastrously home.
Arithon heated the tip of his dagger red-hot, and made his best effort at cautery. The remedy came much too late, he well knew. Already the scarlet streaks of infection ran past his wrist, drawn by the veins in his forearm. The sepsis he dreaded had already set in. Dakar’s forethought had provisioned the saddle packs with a stock of healer’s simples. Arithon sorted the tied packets of herbs, haunted by memory of happier hours, when Elaira had taught him the art of their use in her cottage at Merior by the Sea. The pain in his heart surpassed without contest every hurt to his outraged flesh. He wondered where the next Koriani assignment would send her; then ached for the unendurable fact of her absence through the left-handed clumsiness of fashioning a poultice of drawing astringents. To goldenrod and black betony, he added wild thyme and tansy, whose virtues would help clear the sickness from traumatized tissues.
The aftermath of the bandaging left him weakened and dizzy, the pain running through him in sucking waves that pressed him to the rim of unconsciousness. The call of that blissful, seductive darkness became all too powerfully inviting. There lay rest and peace, and the sublime balm of forgetfulness. In that hour of cold night, with the wind off the summits a whining hag’s chorus, and body and mind half-unstrung, death almost wore the mask of a friend. The crossing promised oblivious freedom, and compassionate severance from care.
‘I have to refuse you,’ Arithon said aloud, his words forced through gritted, locked teeth. Bone weary, driven close to delirium from hunger and lack of sleep, nonetheless he clung to commitment. A blood oath sworn to a Fellowship Sorcerer yet bound him this side of Fate’s Wheel.
That directive prodded him onto his feet, to paw through the packs for provender. He found black beans, which he set soaking in water. Dakar had also packed jerked beef, hard waybread, and a frozen rind of cheese. Although stress had undone inclination and appetite, Arithon wrapped himself in the damp folds of his cloak and pursued the chore of addressing survival and sustenance.
He did not intend to fall short of that goal. But sleep stole in and captured him unaware. He drifted the dark spiral into oblivion with the jerked beef and bread scarcely touched between slackened hands.
Arithon wakened, untold hours later. His mouth and throat felt packed with dry cotton; his head whirled, on fire with fever. The coals he had used to heat water for poultice were long spent. Drafts sent by the moaning gusts off the peaks had swirled through and scattered the deadened ashes. Nor had the frail links of reason withstood the onslaught as wound sickness claimed him. He did not know who he was; only where. Rock and snow framed the prison where his mind ranged, propelled into dreadful nightmare. The dark and the cold themselves seemed unreal, a fretful presence at war with the forge flame that raked through his shivering limbs. If he raved, none heard but two horses whose forms the shadows remade into creatures outside the familiar.
For hours, he saw faces, adrift in congealed blood: the dead cut down by his strategies at Tal Quorin, Vastmark and the Havens. Hands plucked at him, and whispers lamented the cut threads of lost lives. The haunts shed ghost tears, and multiplied into their legions of sad widows and fatherless children. Dead sailhands came, weed clad, out of the silted deeps of Minderl Bay. They sat at his side, weeping glittering brine and pointing bone fingers in eyeless remonstrance. Arithon addressed their silent condemnation, crying aloud for their pain. He left none of their questions unanswered, though his heart held no power to console them, nor had he the coin to purchase his own absolution. Unlike his half brother Lysaer, he claimed no grand principle; no moral truth; no lofty reason to account for the slaughter spun by Desh-thiere’s curse. His apologies rang flat, and the tides of remorse ran in scouring agony straight through him.
His voice cracked. His throat was too parched for the gift of his music, and the right hand that Halliron had trained to high art throbbed and burned, and jetted rank pus through soaked bandages.
The darkness was ink and scalding misery, and finally, in a fevered, terror-filled hour, the night velvet of Dharkaron’s cloak of judgment fell over him. Propped on one elbow, eyes wild and wide, Arithon faced down the ebony shaft of the Avenging Angel’s Spear of Destiny.
‘You’ve come for me,’ he scratched in a desperate whisper. ‘I cannot go freely, bound as I am by blood oath to a Fellowship Sorcerer. I swore to live until all resource fails me.’ He wheezed through the rags of a laugh, edged in metallic irony. ‘If you would claim your due vengeance of me, you must fight. Since I have no sword and no knife at hand, for my part, the contest will end at one parry. Cast your great spear against my bare fists, and be done with this life’s useless posturing.’
But Dharkaron’s image faded away with the unused spear still in hand. Arithon drifted in half-conscious solitude, while the winds whipped and screamed over the rock fists of the Skyshiels. Once, he opened crusted eyes and saw that the horses had broken their tethers. By sound distorted and magnified by illness, he realized they now wandered at large, browsing among the stripped trees. Thirst drove him to weak-kneed, staggering movement. He rekindled a fire with shaking fingers that could scarcely hold flint and striker. The flames melted fresh snow, which he drank. Runnels slopped down his stubbled chin, rinsing the soured salt of the sweat unwashed since his duel with Fionn Areth. Strength spent, Arithon collapsed in his cloak. In due time, sleep claimed him, ripping him open all over again as the ferocity of suppressed memories served up vengeful dreams.
He wakened to sunshine that cut into vision like the steel blade of a knife. Facedown in cold snow, his limbs sweat-drenched and half-paralyzed, he found Elaira’s name on his cracked lips. Behind closed eyes, he could see her, bronze hair unreeled in combed waves down her back, and her eyes the silvered, clear gray of wild sage as the leaves shed their dew of spring rainfall.
‘Beloved, don’t weep,’ he gasped. But her tears did not cease, falling and falling in empathic pain for his suffering.
Her caring lent him the will to flounder back into the cave. He searched out the ruckled cloth of his cloak, sought refuge under its sheltering warmth, and fell unconscious before he stopped shivering.
Lucidity returned, sealed in that ominous stillness that presaged severe winter weather. Arithon opened clogged eyes to awareness the fever had broken and left him weak as a baby. The storm scent in the air hackled his instincts to warning. Still alive through the gift of his body’s resilience, he understood he had exhausted every last margin for error. Sapped as he was, he must strike a fire. Whatever the state of his sword-wounded hand, the re-dressing must wait for the more pressing priorities of bodily warmth and nourishment.