Wurts, Janny - Wars of Light and Shadow 09 - Initiate's Trial by Wurts Janny

Author:Wurts, Janny [Janny, Wurts,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-01-08T03:22:10+00:00

Late Winter 5923

Caper

Since High Earl Cosach s’Valerient could not barge his armed war band headlong into Tysan’s sovereign territory, the explosive risks to salvage a crown prince left at hazard hung up in thorny debate for a fortnight. Still, Rathain’s closed council thrashed at sharp odds, even after the need for cool wits summoned Laithen s’Idir south from Deshir. By then, the chafed tempers and unresolved argument tensioned all of the Halwythwood settlement.

Not only adults aired their snappish frustration over the threatened fate of Rathain’s royal blood-line.

Forbidden outright to sit with his father, and indignant to be shut out of the affray as the caithdein’s heir designate, Esfand seized the resourceful initiative. Currently, he shivered in the outside cold, belly down on the lodge hall’s roof. Vivaciously quick to share any prank, his cousin Khadrien stretched at his side, a knobby assemblage of elbows and knees flopped into a lanky sprawl. The pair had been eavesdropping on their rankled elders on and off for a week. Both were old enough to start shaving. Shamelessly brash at fifteen years of age, they possessed enough discipline to endure the misery of hours spent in motionless silence. Stealthy as scouts on enemy turf, they pressed their attentive ears against the shagged moss that crusted the weathered shingles.

The tempest beneath them showed no such restraint. Another thunderous bang on the map trestle pocked the clamour, as Cosach roared in retort, ‘You’d have our best talent mince in there, unarmed and under strength, across borders defended by two entrenched war hosts? Just suppose your tiptoeing foray stalks through without getting slaughtered! What then?’

A cool bath of water, Laithen’s logical calm supported her High Earl’s ferocity. ‘Taerlin is crawling with temple diviners!’ Which obstacle was unlikely to change, with the True Sect stirred into an uproar by the Koriathain, and the outbreak of the first true use of Shadow witnessed in living memory. ‘Worse, the word of Caithwood’s haunted glens is hell-bound to spike town-born nerves. The mayors need no other excuse to be frightened to rife paranoia.’ Any talent not clothed in a Sunwheel robe would be suspect, if not hounded and marked for death by the zealot examiners. ‘Tell me,’ Laithen snapped, ‘how would you mask our true-seer’s aura, thrown into that seething school of sharks to search for our crown prince? May as well drop an oil-primed torch in a drought, just to spot the chance gleam of a needle!’

None could refute the risk. Isolated for two hundred years by relentless persecution, until graced with the haven of Lysaer’s justice, Rathain’s clan blood bred a concentration of gifted talent. Outside the free wilds, their kind would shine like lit beacons, obvious to the Matriarch’s scryers, or the temple-trained Sight of the True Sect’s diviners.

‘Ath wept!’ Cosach snorted. ‘With Tysan at the boil to capture rogue talent, any experienced band we might send would find themselves hunted for bounty. They’d be chained on the scaffold and burned for religion before our scout trackers could blink!’

Shouts erupted.

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