Initiate’s Trial: First book of Sword of the Canon. Janny WurtsЧитать онлайн книгу.
his jaded eyes and acknowledge them.
The insistent demand: to be what they were, must crack, through a fiercely kept isolation and loose the agonized grief kept imprisoned by steel reservation. The music commanded, until stone itself could have wept in unbridled sympathy.
The musician dared further. Theme and playful embellishment flowed into refrain, and resounded, more haunting yet. The pervasive gloom of the sick-room air parted before the sweet scent of Aunt’s cherished roses.
Which lyrical impact raised Kerelie’s tears and winded Tarens like a punch in the chest. But Efflin’s response outstripped them both: quaking as though seared inside by hot iron, he bit his lip to the verge of drawn blood.
This time, Tarens unriddled the astonishment. ‘Light’s own grace,’ he whispered, appalled. ‘Efflin! Aunt Saff! For mercy, how deeply he must have loved her!’
As if his cry unleashed comprehension, the innocent melody that bespoke the two boys reached consummate pitch. All three of the musician’s laid lines became welded into a harmonic nexus. Imperative artistry cascaded, peaked, and stripped bare an indelible truth: that Efflin’s theme was the backbone that cradled the effervescence of both little boys.
‘The children were Efflin’s!’ gasped Kerelie, rocked by the bolt-strike of epiphany. ‘Paolin and Chan! Bone and breath, they were Efflin’s!’
Facts fit.
With a sting like the snap of a brittle stick, the flute’s call destroyed all reserve. On the bed, Efflin turned his head into the pillow and buried his ravaged face. He groaned, stricken through by stark anguish. Then his bent shoulders shook to a sob as though his very spirit had shattered. The sorrow never expressed leaped the breach, dredged up from his locked well of silence. He wept for a loss that no other but Saffie could have understood. His blessing, and his curse, that she had not lived long enough to share his distraught pain as he served the last rites for their two little sons.
Hammer to anvil, past memories reshaped: of Uncle’s seamed face, eased from years of pent strain in the delight brought by Paolin’s birth. Fiath could not have known. Saffie and Efflin had never been seen to touch hands, not within anyone’s presence. But the hours spent whistling in quiet content as he hauled the mulch and manure, built and bent the arched trellis, and dug the beds for Aunt’s roses: hindsight unveiled all of his secret regard, lavished onto her garden in tender devotion.
Tonight, shown the shocking depth of his wound, Tarens and Kerelie bestowed no blame. Aunt Saffie was not their blood relation, except through the kin ties of marriage. The indiscretion just bared to light could not provoke a betrayal. They knew Fiath’s contentment had hidden no falsehood. His presumed paternity never had been under question throughout the boys’ raising. No harm could befall the dead, after all. But for the benighted siblings left living, the course of bereavement changed shape. Shared grief emerged that broke like a squall and closed the familial circle. Sister and brother piled onto the bed. They held Efflin together, as if their clasped arms could bind up a fissure that, till this night, had been as the abyss, wide and deep and beyond insurmountable. The cankered sore that had tormented a bereft father no longer lay gagged under honour-bound silence.
Efflin wept, freed. Bonded once more into seamless fellowship, none noted the moment when the flute player ceased his infallible effort. Amid softened quiet, gently fire-lit and warm, the three siblings revisited their sorrows in depth, and together shored up the wreckage of a brother’s unconsoled spirit.
‘If my act was wrong-doing, no one took hurt,’ Efflin murmured at due length, replete. His exhausted defiance asked for no forgiveness. ‘Uncle never knew. Aunt Saff asked for nothing, nor begged a thing more beyond her sore need that pined beyond hope for the chance of conception. She had sensed my indecent feelings, I’m sure, although I never broached a word to her. When she realized her fertility might pass her by, she pleaded with me, and begged not to make use of a stranger. She was that desperate to give Fiath the children they both ached to rear. And for all our sakes, the croft demanded a secured future, besides.’
‘Efflin, hush,’ murmured Kerelie. ‘No need to explain. With Saff and Fiath both gone, it is meet that we share your burden.’
Tarens swallowed, unable to speak. Embarrassed at last for his kinsfolk’s breached privacy, he turned his head, first to notice the empty room at his back. The child’s wooden flute, that Efflin had carved for a son who called another man father, rested abandoned on the window-seat. The stops were silent. Smoothed wood gleamed in the etched spill of the moonlight, never to sound the like of those piercing measures again.
Only the partially re-tailored jacket had been removed from the arm of Aunt’s chair.
The night was the family’s to rejoice in relief for the gift of Efflin’s recovery.
The bleak hour before dawn brought the True Sect’s temple examiner, arrived in a ground-shaking thunder of hooves with a lathered entourage of mounted lancers. Elite dedicates, drilled lifelong to bear arms, they poured down the lane without warning, polished to a frost glitter of armour and headed by the pomp of their Sunwheel standards. They carried a warrant to shackle the guilty, verified by a vested diviner sworn to uphold the faith. A blessed talent who served divine Light, he claimed to have sensed the emanations raised by a minion’s dark practice.
Tarens wakened to the commotion. Still halfway clad in yesterday’s clothes, he grabbed his boots and charged downstairs, just as the double column of horsemen crammed into the cottage yard. Indoors, the candles were long since pinched out. Ghostly in her night-rail, Kerelie poised in blanched dread at the kitchen casement. Tarens crossed the rug and peered over her shoulder, then swore through his teeth as the arrogant brutes trampled their shod mounts over the rose-beds. He yanked on his footwear, further enraged as they commandeered Efflin’s trellis to snub the lance captain’s makeshift picket line.
‘You can’t stop them, Tarens,’ Kerelie said, frightened. Her alarmed grasp sought to restrain his tense wrist, shaken off in savage rejection.
Outside, the steamed horses jostled and stamped. Steel jingled to someone’s brusque demand to form up a cordon. ‘Quickly, mind! Strike to kill if anyone tries to escape.’
Efflin slept on through the upset. Dreamlessly convalescent, he never stirred as the flare of held torches speared through the front windows. Nor did he hear the marched scrape of boots on the frosted ground as temple guardsmen with ready weapons surrounded the house, then a smaller group detached under orders to move in for the shake-down.
‘What should we do, Tarens?’ Kerelie fretted.
A last-moment evasion was already futile, with Efflin too weak to stand upright. To move him at all would require a litter, and even unburdened, a hale man on foot would be ridden down as a marked target.
Tarens faced the bad call. His questionable traffic with the vagabond cornered them all, with barely seconds left to forestall the sure threat of disaster.
Flooded light through the panes juddered over the pots by the chimney as the dedicates’ advance crunched up the garden-path. As their tread boomed in step up the planked stair to the porch, Tarens grabbed Kerelie and forcefully dragged her into the downstairs bedchamber. ‘Stay with Efflin.’ A snatched view from the window-seat let him measure the strength of the temple’s invasion: eight sword-bearing heavies in gold-and-white surcoats flanked the entry, backed by two more bearing brands. At ground level, poised before the placed cordon, the talent diviner stood rapt as a ferret, his stainless white cowl and blazon lent a sulphurous tinge under the flame-light.
This was not a warrant for inspection but a company dispatched to seize custody.
The lance sergeant’s fist hammered into the door. ‘Open up! Or the Light’s protectors will claim their due right!’
‘Tarens!’ cried Kerelie from Efflin’s bedside, ‘Unfasten the bar straightaway, or they’ll break it.’
‘More like fire the thatch in their zeal to flush heretics,’ Tarens snapped, grim. He shoved from the window-seat and plunged back towards the darkened kitchen, still