Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

I. Opening Play

The hard frost came to the downs of Araethura early, and the rains at their cusp laced crusts of ice through the peat stacks under the sheds. Indoors, with no fire lit to fend off autumn's breezes, the invasive cold settled at will. Crouched on her knees on the packed earthen floor beside her darkened cottage hearthstone, the Koriani enchantress Elaira cast aside her flint striker. She cupped her chilled fingers, blew on the caught spark. Well versed in the contrary nature of wet peat, she launched into strings of ridiculous endearments, coaxing damp fodder to nourish its struggling wisp of caught flame.

The fateful knock at her door, which shattered her peace, interrupted her then.

Elaira damped back her annoyance. The spill in her fingers fluttered out as she arose, resigned to the usual request for a cough remedy or a tincture to dose a sick goat. For seven years, she had lived alone, plying her herbal wisdom on the moorlands. Time had eased the innate distrust the local herders held toward practice of her craft, and families now came to her freely when trouble visited their livestock and farmsteads. While the leaves turned, and the season's late foraging sent her deep into the hills, such supplicants knew she was best found at home after sundown.

The dark in the cottage weighed likefelt soaked in the sweet meadow scents of the herbs bundled to dry in the rafters. Elaira breathed in the oily must from her fleece jacket, just pulled from storage in her clothes chest. While she threaded between her sparse furnishings by touch, the pounding resumed, impatient.

"Daelion's bollocks, I hear you!" Elaira clawed under her collar, hooked out the silver chain that hung her spell crystal. The quartz as her focus, she invoked mage-sight to steer past the tumbledown stacks of herb hampers and clay jars, long since overcrowding the niche underneath the cluttered board of her work trestle. Barefoot and cold, she reached the door and fumbled with numbed hands for the latch.

Apprehension swept her, unbidden. For the crystallized span of a heartbeat, every fiber of her being clamored in primal, precognitive warning.

Then her roan gelding whinnied from the shed. His call was answered by a strange horse's whicker; a shod hoof chinked against rock, and a distinct chime of bit rings sliced the night. Innocuous sounds; yet their import snapped away the false calm she had wrested from whole years of disciplined solitude.

"Sithaer's begotten demons!" Elaira released her crystal, swept over by needling gooseflesh in the chill embrace of the dark. Those downsland herders who called needing help came on foot, or else they rode in astride scruffy moor ponies with hackamores braided from leather. Their mounts wore no tack with metal fittings. Nor did they ever fare shod.

Her left hand hovered, indecisive, while the knock resounded a third time. The rickety wood panel jounced in its frame and threatened the strapped leather hinges. Before the door gave way under punishment, Elaira tripped up the latch. Wind flung the panel against her braced shoulder and revealed what the fell night had brought her.

A Koriani enchantress stood on her threshold, ruffled into lofty disdain by the inclement Araethurian autumn.

She said, acerbic, "Were you asleep with your bumpkin head under a blanket?" Searing displeasure rolled off her in waves and jut: ted the chin beneath her hood. Whatever her status, the buffeting elements, had abused her like any other traveler. Her initiate's mantle was rumpled and splashed, the hemline snagged loose by a thorn brake. Bristled to yet more extreme irritation, the enchantress inspected the splinters stabbed through her expensive calf gloves. "Beastly boards! Why haven't you found some needy laborer to come here and faire them smooth?"

Elaira clapped down a flyaway tendril of her auburn hair and cracked the offending door wider. "Are you going to rail, or come in?" Her dread pulled awry by irrepressible devilment, she gestured toward the comfortless darkness inside, offering a shelter as rude in simplicity as any length of unsanded oak.

A purposeful rustle, as the woman outside raised her quality, layered silk above the muck-splashed ankles of her riding boots. "Dear woman, how quaint." Aristocratic accents packaged each word with precise and patronizing venom.

The rising winds sliced bitter and chill through that moment, as the unforgotten past encountered the present and irrefutably tangled. Elaira knew who had come. Her recognition raised sourceless panic, and then sharp rage, that the grasping demands of her order would destroy all the hard-won sanctuary she had found in the heart of these barren moorlands.

"First Senior," she greeted, the requisite formality of high office like ice chips between her locked teeth.

Lirenda unclasped her mantle, her air of reserve an acid rebuff. "No longer First Senior." As if upbraiding a junior initiate for an insubordinate attitude, she admitted, "The Prime Matriarch has rescinded my privileges."

That was news; a political break of shattering magnitude, which implied a long fall from position and favor.

All blank practicality, Elaira shouldered the door closed before the raw winds could strip her bundles of dried herbs from the rafters. Her back to barred wood, she endured a tense interval, while the unintimidated gusts continued to howl and batter over the thatch. By her cot in the comer, the one window's shutter shivered and worked on its pins. The drafts through the chinks made no allowance for smashed expectations or shamed pride; the floor gave off its humble scent of dank earth.

"You do keep a candle, I presume," Lirenda said at length.