by Melanie Rawn
Cailet choked on horror. It hadn’t happened that way, it never could have happened that way—
But St. Dantian’s Wheels within Wheels were not through spinning.
The old woman lay murdered on the dais. The girl with the new-blooded sword stepped around the corpse to take her rightful place—as an Ambrai, as a Mageborn, as new First Lord of Malerris—and waited.
They came, as she knew they would. A beautiful young woman with long golden hair; a tall, handsome man with intensely blue eyes. They approached, mingled fear and defiance and pain in their faces. The girl lifted one hand. A blood-red Mage Globe appeared, called up from the vast store of arcane knowledge taken from the dead woman who had dared to stand where none but Ambrais ever stood. The golden-haired woman cried out softly, crumpled to the floor, and died. As for the man—he mounted the first step at her spell-bound insistence and knelt at her feet.
“No,” she whimpered. “No—”
“Cailet!”
Her sister’s voice was very far away, and the Wheels had turned again.
The girl was older now, her hair longer and streaked with white. Long years of easy power showed in the thickened body, the complacent eyes. Expensive clothing of Malerrisi white and a selection of rare jewels glowed in the sunlit hall as she acknowledged with pleasure the accolades due the First Lord. The sword at her side was more of an ornament now than a weapon; she let others take charge of the difficult physical training, while she spent her days discoursing on matters political and philosophical to adoring students who lived for her every word. As they should; as they certainly should.
All at once a sword lean with purpose sliced toward her, and the First Lord fell bleeding to the white tiled floor, murdered by one of her own.
And again the Wheels circled, tightening the possibilities and the probabilities around her heart.
She was the youngest, so she was the last. One by one the others had died, leaving only her. There might have been others to follow after, to continue the long tradition, but the time to plan and prepare for it had passed many years ago. She wondered sometimes why the First Lord had let them live. Of a certainty there was nothing of sentiment in the order that she and her pathetic remnant of Mage Guardians be permitted to survive. She knew that many must have argued for their final obliteration, but for some reason her nephew had let them live. They were no threat; most likely they were an amusement to him. And now she was dying. There was no one to become Captal after her; no one to do the Making. She was the last of her kind, and with her passing the Bequest would be lost. All the Magelore, all the learning, all the Generations of Captals would die with her.
Fittingly. Fittingly. She had been unworthy. Daughter of a traitor to the Mage Guardians, sister of one First Lord and aunt of the next—how could they be expected to follow her, trust her, believe in her?
Killing her father hadn’t been enough to prove herself. She was who she was, and that had condemned her even before she was born.
Hands held her up or she would have fallen. Voices called her name, begged for response. She had none to give. All she could do was gasp for air, her struggle to breathe spasming every muscle in her body.
The Saint’s Wheels spun a fifth time.
The endless, trackless expanse of The Waste was met at the horizon by a searing blue sky. Through this pale and arid landscape a lone figure walked. Ancient, weathered, painfully gaunt, only the eyes were alive in that hollowed and haunted face. Ragged black clothes were clutched around the body by thin hands as the woman walked without goal or purpose, black eyes misted and other-seeing and not quite sane.
She didn’t want to know. The years ahead stretched as empty and withered as the woman she’d just seen herself become. Better to have died at Ambrai with her fattier. At least that would have been a meaningful death, a fitting end for a Captal defending the ways of the Mage Guardians. What good was she now? She’d seen pasts that could have been, and now a future that might very well be. The visions scraped at her as if her mind was a raw wound, spinning round and round and round—
Again she walked through an assembly, this time dressed in plain proud black with her swordbelt tight around her waist. Her students bowed their reverence, her fellow Mages bent their heads in homage. As they should; as they most certainly should. She was the Captal, the one who had saved the Mage Guardians from oblivion, and they were right to humble themselves before her. Yet someone had dared challenge her authority, someone had questioned her right. She would answer in the ancient manner, the way of the past that she had reestablished because it had been her only guide.
She reached the testing ground and raised her sword in ironic salute to the girl who faced her. Fair-haired and black-eyed, like her; the stamp of Ambrai and Feiran clear on her face, the passionate Rosvenir mouth curling with contempt. Her own niece, her sister’s First Daughter—who was about to be taught a perilous lesson in the true powers of magic.
Another voice spoke now, low and sickly-sweet: Anniyas’s voice. As if she had, anticipated everything, set these Wards and spells because she had knowledge of what might or could or would happen that night in the Octagon Court.
Who do you hate more? Me, for showing you the possibilities? Or yourself, for believing them?
People believe what they’re comfortable believing—how wrong Collan was! Those pasts had been probable, given certain small twists in circumstances. And the futures, too. Quite likely—
But this was all wrong.
Where was Glenin? It was Glenin who had attacked her, well after Anniyas was dead—Glenin who had tormented her with searing visions and maimed her in body and spirit—Glenin who had nearly killed her—
Anniyas couldn’t have known what would occur that night. She hadn’t even known who Cailet was! Collan had been asked again and again to reveal the name, and even under the most vicious torture had kept silent. When Anniyas set these Wards and spells, when she finalized these snares, she had known nothing.
Anniyas had not known the future—any future. No one did. This was another trick, a trap waiting for any Mageborn who triggered the spell. It played on fears, used weaknesses, toyed with uncertainties. Malicious variations on the past, sadistic predictions for the future—
Yet she would be a fool indeed if she didn’t understand the warning inherent in these horrors. Such things were possible. A lurch of the turning Wheels, and . . .
It was her responsibility—to the Mages, to her family, to herself—to make sure the possible did not become probable.
She struggled away from those who held her, standing on her own. Dantian’s delicate fingers were still poised to spin, and Cailet stared at the Wheel made of seven concentric circles, like no real spinning wheel in the world. Applying another spell—this one with the flavor of Tamos Wolvar—with magic she gouged away the inner circles, leaving only the outer one. The last possibility. She faced it with clenched jaw and trembling heart. But it wasn’t what she expected.
From the sunlit balcony of her private chambers she gazed down on the new arrivals. The girl and boy stood awkwardly in the central courtyard beneath the great spreading oak, waiting for someone to notice them. It was a new sensation for these two, who had been instantly noticed all their young lives.
They couldn’t know that orders had specifically been given not to notice them until she herself greeted them. She watched them for a time, wondering what they were like now. She hadn’t seen them in several years. They’d grown tall and straight and strong. The girl was as sunnily blonde as ever, but the boy’s hair had darkened to brick-red. Other than that, she could tell nothing about the changes adolescence had worked on them. At last they sensed her above them, and looked up. The girl’s eyes were the color of new spring leaves. Her brother’s were bluer than the lake nearby. Fine eyes, clear and shining; fine faces, too, proud of bone and pleasing to look on, with strong portents of their maturity.
This would be her work: to shape them into the woman, the man, the Mage Guardians her sister’s twin children were meant to be.
When Cailet woke to the world around her, she found herself sprawled on the tiled floor, supported by Collan’s strong arms, with Sarra kneeling beside her. The wooden carving of St. Dantian lay in splinters all around, as if it had exploded like a Warrior Mage’s Battle Globe.
“Caisha?” Sarra’s voice was strained and anxious.
“Talk to us,” urged Col.
She smiled. If they knew what she now knew—ah, but she mustn’t tell them. It would ruin the surprise. “It’s all right now. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Sarra smoothed Cailet’s sweat-damp hair. “What did you see this time?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve made it all right.” Glancing around for Councillor Dombur, she said, “There’s a very small room behind this closet, but nothing much in it except books. I’d appreciate it if I could have first look at them.”
“Of course, Captal.”
Something occurred to her then. “Did any of you sense anything? Feel afraid, or apprehensive, or—?”
All three shook their heads. Well, she might have expected it. Sarra, though Mageborn, was deeply Warded. Collan’s Wards were even stronger. Dombur was about as magically gifted as any given lump of coal.
“All right, then. The dressing room.”
The stained glass of Avingery Lacemaker was the finest of the Warded artworks. Cailet would very much regret destroying it. But perhaps that wouldn’t be necessary. The dressing room itself was large and airy, filled with light from the clear window rising six feet above the stained glass that provided privacy. More closets, most of them mirrored, were decorated only with gold door handles shaped like various flowers. Completely innocuous. But then, so had the fresco and the carving been.
Cailet opened the closets one by one. All were empty of what Sarra had told her was an extensive, if tasteless, wardrobe. “Who got the clothes?”
Dombur cleared his throat. “Actually, they were burned. Some few of the better jewels were taken off before, of course—”
Of course, Cailet thought, amused.
“—and a Mage skilled in detecting Wards and spells—the very Mage who found these, in fact—certified the gems free of taint. Viko Garvedian.”
“Viko has a special talent for sensing magic. It kept him and his mother Tiomarin safe for many years.”
He didn’t seem to notice the dig. But surely he understood her meaning: that thanks to the Council of which he’d been a part, Viko and his mother and hundreds of other Mages had been reviled and hunted all those many years. Still, Cailet was learning about the social nicety of on occasion pretending to be conveniently obtuse.
“And we all thank the Saints for his cleverness,” Dombur was saying, “or we might not have known about these frightful Wards so quickly.”
“I’m glad he was wise enough not to confront them himself.” Cailet regarded the portrait of St. Avingery for a few moments more. Then, wondering what sinister spell would be called forth by spools and fine silk and fragile pins and the wealth of patterned lace spreading across the Saint’s lap, she called on her magic once again.
The picture in the glass exploded at the touch of a Mage Guardian’s magic. Every shard blasted like a needle into her mind, weaving a fine network of pain. The floor beneath her gave a convulsive shudder. Walls shifted, wooden doors groaned and cracked. Dust spewed from the agonized grinding stones of the outer wall. Cailet heard a distant scream and knew it was Sarra and could do nothing. The pain was excruciating, splinters of colored glass carving up the magic in her brain as a butcher carves a carcass.
She was going to die. All colors were gone, all life, everything was as white and dead as the trees of the Dead White Forest, as the cloak of a Malerrisi, as—as—
—as the white-hot heart of a Candleflame. As the silvery-white wings of a Sparrow. As the brightest Star in all the sky.
Miryenne and Rilla—the Candle and the Sparrow—but to which forgotten Saint belonged the Star?
Through the white horror came Lusath Adennos’s chiding: Oh, come now. You’ve seen the walls of Firrense. All three hundred and eighty-six Saints, painted over and over again in exactly the same fashion as they’ve been painted for centuries.
The late Captal’s pedantries infuriated her. She was in agony that neither he nor the Others felt; it was her mind being hacked to pieces, her magic being riven from her—
Sweet Saints, child, not even the First Sword could take your magic from you—and it would have been better so, when you were born, to be given back when you were ready for it. This silly spell is only trying to make you believe it’s stealing your magic.
But magic could be stolen. She’d almost thieved an unborn Mageborn’s power. And what of the things she had taken from him and Alin and Gorsha and Tamos Wolvar?
Oh, my dear child, that wasn’t magic. That was knowledge. Surely you’ve discovered the difference by now?
Magic was power; knowledge was how to use it.
Just so. But while you’re trying to argue me out of saving your sanity, others are in danger of losing that and much else besides.
No spell or Ward then, but a vision: Candle, Sparrow, Star. They arose in her mind outlined in white fire, and she felt the slivers of glass vanish as if they had never been. How silly of her to flunk she was going to die. She couldn’t die now. There was too much work to be done, a whole life to be lived. All those candles to be lit in young Mageborns—all that magic to be set free on silvery wings—all those stars to be wondered at in the night-black sky. . . .
4
“CAILET? What did you just say?”
“Hmm?” She blinked, and to her surprise saw the worried face of Elomar Adennos above her. “What are you doing here?”
“Repeat what you said,” he insisted.
“I can’t. I don’t know what it was. Where is everybody?”
Elo’s lips thinned in disgust. “The next stupid question is, ‘Where am I?’ Lie quiet, and I might tell you.”
“I feel perfectly all right.” But she stayed flat on her back, liking the softness of the pillow beneath her head. She would’ve expected a colossal headache, but instead she had the sensation of being light and free and clean.
“I’ll tell you how you feel,” the Healer grumbled. A tiny Mage Globe hovered over Cailet’s toes, and slowly moved up her body at his direction. When it reached her chest, its green-gold glow intensified. Elomar cast a stern eye at her. “You know the reason for that.”
The Ward disguising her maimed breast. She stared him down. After a moment he let the little Globe continue on its path. Softly luminous, gently pulsing to the easy rhythm of her heartbeats, it completed its task without changing again in warning, and then winked out.
“You’re all right,” Elomar said.
“Told you so.”
“You’ve lied to the before, Captal. Now, do you remember what you said as you woke?”
“I was asleep?”
Breath hissed from between gritted teeth. “You were unconscious—grinning like a madwoman and completely insensible when Councillor Dombur carried you in here.”
“Dombur?”
“He has his uses as a mute pack animal. Tell the what you said just now.”
She thought for a minute, then couldn’t help a little laugh. “I remember. You’ll never believe it, Elo—I’m not sure I do!—but I found out who the Star is.”
“I’m assuming you’re going to explain that.”
“I can always tell when you’re really upset—you talk a lot more than usual. The Star that goes with the Saint, although that’s not his sigil. St. Mikellan. Startoucher.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Nobody has in centuries. But he’s another patron of Mage Guardians—and he was there on the wall
all the time!”
“What wall?”
“In Firrense, of course. St. Mikellan, climbing a Ladder to touch all the stars in the sky! And you know what the really crazy part is? He looks just like Alin!”
“Delirious,” said Lusira Garvedian. She came forward from the doorway and perched on the edge of Cailet’s bed. “Or maybe just demented—though she looks sane enough. Or as sane as anyone can be after destroying all those hideous Wards.”
“I vouch for physical health,” Elo growled. “Not mental.”
“If Cailet’s all right, you should go look in on Sarra,” Lusira said quietly.
Cailet’s heart suddenly went cold. “What’s wrong?”
Lusira exchanged glances with her husband. When he nodded solemnly, she murmured, “She miscarried of the child.”
Cailet couldn’t see them anymore. Another image white-shrouded her eyes: a blonde girl, challenging her right to be Captal—
From a long way off she heard Lusira’s voice say, “She wasn’t having an easy time, and it would’ve gotten worse. Elomar says she would have lost the baby anyway. Another week, maybe two—it’s so terrible, having carried this long, only to lose the child now.”
—her own niece, a threat to her power—
“There’s no reason she can’t have another baby. Elo will be with her the whole time, keeping careful watch. I’ve already informed the Council that we’re turning down their offer of the Public Health Ministry. Truly told, I don’t much like Ryka Court anyway.”