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Ivain had betrayed him at the height of their contest against the Mharg-spawn.
The Stormwarden survived and con-tinued alone until he achieved the demons'
confinement, but the scarring left by Ivain's malice never healed.
Now Taen beheld the implications of the frostwargs' release; shackled by
shared understanding, she saw that Anskiere's life was fully dependent on a
Firelord's skills. Tuned to the Storm-warden's aspirations, her dream-sense
replicated the decision to release the geas to call the heir of Ivain into
service. The choice rebounded with echoes of tragedy. Anskiere fully
under-stood that the boy who answered his summons must someday suffer the fate
of the father. No man who attempted the Cycle of Fire escaped its mark of
madness. For that reason, Ivain's name was remembered with hatred, though the
young man who first accepted his training from the Vaere had been loved for
his generosity of spirit.
Burdened by Anskiere's past and by his agonized surrender to the only choice
left available to him, Taen tuned her aware-ness to the spell which shaped his
final hope. And since that hope also encompassed the fate of her only brother,
she plotted the path of the geas the Stormwarden had shaped to summon the son
of Ivain Firelord. The line of force struck out to the northwest, spanning the
open sea with the directional clarity of a light beacon. Suspended by the
dream link, the girl followed the geas.
Her search began without effort. Guided by the precision of Anskiere's
handiwork, Taen sped over the wave crests with the ease of a skipper bird's
flight. She traveled unaccountable distance within a matter of seconds,
tracking without landmark beneath the flat overcast of the winter sky.
Suddenly the spell wavered. Taen faltered. Wrenched by the resonance of
vio-lence, she tried to brake her speed. But the geas suddenly exploded around
her, its linear progression jagged like crum-pled wire into eddies of spent
strength.
Overturned by confusion, Taen lost its track. Through a horrid, stunned
moment, she tumbled on the edge of the void, struggling to sustain her contact
with the place where the geas disrupted into chaos. Her control gradually
prevailed. The dream link stabilized. Oriented once more, Taen drifted
exhausted. Below her, the snow-covered roofs of a fishing village nestled
closely against the slopes of a mountain coastline. Smoke curled from the
chimneys, and through perceptions strangely altered by her dream-sense, she
smelled the fragrance of birch logs. A crude road led out of the settlement,
its switched-back curves rising tier upon tier up the slope until it lost
itself into ranks of stunted evergreens.
Taen scanned the village inhabitants with a dream-reader's awareness. But she
found nothing more than the simple thoughts of fisher folk, concerned with the
mending of nets and baking bread and fretting over the thickness of the ice
which choked the harbor; Taen felt it improbable that the subject of
Anskiere's hopes would be concealed among such workaday folk. More likely the
heir of Ivain lived farther distant, well beyond the break in the geas created
by Tathagres' transfer. Confident of her hunch, Taen abandoned the village,
turned her focus north-westward in a direct line from Cliffhaven. Her search
carried her across the high drift-bound passes of the Furlains and on through
the hill country on the far side, where the trees of Seitforest thrust matted
boughs against the winter sky.
There above the bare crowns of the beeches, Taen encoun-tered traces of
Anskiere's geas. The pattern was hesitant, visible to her dream-sense as
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snarled trails of light. It steadied as she progressed, gradually becoming
structurally intact. No power coursed across the spell. Like a conduit
shattered in midspan, the break beyond the Furlains had disrupted the
continuity of the geas Anskiere had designed to summon Ivain's heir to
Cliffhaven. But Taen easily read the spell's orientation from the segment
which remained. Its path resumed, straight as a draftsman's line across the
rolling dells of Seitforest, to end at last in the dooryard of a forester's
hut.
There Taen discovered a fair-haired boy about Emien's age, bundled to the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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