by Melanie Rawn
“You’re the Captal. Can’t you fix it? Aunt Jen says you can fix anything.” He hesitated, then added, “But she talks like that, doesn’t she?”
“She certainly does. I can’t fix anything, but I can certainly fix the part about your papa’s and Alin’s names being on the List. That was a long ride from the Hundred, are you thirsty?”
She learned then and there that she was no good at distracting children. Aidan gave her a disgusted look and said proudly, “I’m a Waster now.”
Wasters didn’t get thirsty, and even if they did, they never admitted to it. Suitably chastised by a six-year-old, Cailet was rescued from further idiocies by Lady Sefana, who called Aidan over to pay his respects to Lady Lilen.
A little later, as they were touring the latest completed section of Ostinhold, Cailet found herself beside Jennis. “I can fix anything, can I? What’ve you been telling Aidan about me?”
Her old friend was uncharacteristically solemn. “Cai, he knows how Val died. His mother made sure he knew it—the filthy Fifth-spawn. Told him his father was killed—senselessly, if you please, her exact word—protecting the Captal, who’s a dangerous person with sinister powers, also a direct quote. She made you out to be some kind of monster. We had to guide him into thinking well of you. If he gets to like you, so much the better.” Jennis made an impatient gesture. “What does it matter what we told him, as long as he now knows that his father died for a reason?”
Cailet nodded mutely. After a moment she asked, “And—Alin?”
“Rina Firennos never knew about him. She knew there was someone, but she didn’t have a name to poison in Aidan’s mind. We told him about Alin—tailored to his understanding, of course. And now that he’s getting to know the rest of the Ostins—” She finished with a shrug. “He thinks of Alin as another uncle, like Biron.” Jennis gave her a crooked little smile of understanding and linked her arm with Cailet’s.
Left arm—she kept herself from tensing up at the proximity to her maimed breast and the Ward disguising it. Jennis never noticed a thing, and in fact said, “I lean on everybody these days—Saints, if I’m this big this early, can you imagine what I’ll look like at full term?” She laughed and patted her stomach. “It’ll take three people to get me out of a chair!”
Cailet grinned. “Maybe by then Lilen will be finished using that hoist over there, and you can borrow— No fair!” she cried as Jennis jabbed a playful fist at her shoulder. “You’re pregnant, and I can’t hit back!”
The tour of the new building was completed with appropriate compliments on swift progress—but no congratulations on design, for this new Ostinhold was just as much of an architectural mangle as the old and no one could possibly think it beautiful. Praise would have had Lilen laughing herself silly and calling the speaker a liar.
She and Kanto ushered their guests into the vastness of the Colonnade, finished only a few weeks ago and the one alteration Lilen had insisted on. She wanted a sitting room large enough to hold all her children, present and future grandchildren, and whatever guests happened by. The grand name had come from the six concrete pillars holding up the ceiling. No two were alike. The demands of keeping the eccentric roof aloft dictated a staggered placement that if looked at from the wrong angle made one dizzy. But nobody expected elegance in a house that had always sprawled where it would. The massive fireplaces at either end of the long chamber didn’t match any more than the pillars did, one being moss-green marble and the other gray granite. But whatever the Colonnade lacked in design was more than made up for in its easy embrace of those welcomed within.
Although the room was not formally divided by screens and groupings of chairs and couches (which were dragged all over, to the detriment of the new rugs), people made their own small boundaries. Ostinhold as it was had never featured a room this size; everyone crowded into the old sitting room however they could. Miram or Terrill played their harps right next to clerks giving reports to Lilen, courting couples jammed in beside political arguments, and children laughed and squabbled everywhere. But the Colonnade was different. There was space enough to talk quietly with a friend or play chess or simply sit and read. The quiet would change, though, for as the Ostin daughters began to bring husbands home, children would soon follow. It was in happy anticipation that Lilen had ordered this huge room built.
For the time being, however, Lilen considered the Colonnade a little too peaceful when guests weren’t present. Today, with the Maurgens here, Cailet had a glimpse of what it would be like when Miram and Lenna and Tevis and Lindren were married and breeding yet more Ostins. She also knew, quite abruptly, that this room was Lilen’s way of defying her First Daughter. Mircia, Gerian, and Lile—Lilen’s only grandchildren until Miram and Riddon got busy—would never set foot here while she lived, so she had created this place for her other daughters to fill.
Glancing at Miram, Cailet bit back a smile; to judge by the earnest conversation she was having with Jennis about pregnancy, it wouldn’t be long before the Colonnade was as chaotic as even Lilen could wish. But for now there was only Aidan, who was squirming with the tedium of being polite and obviously wanted to escape all these adults and go find more congenial company. Cailet sympathized, remembering all the times she’d been bored witless by the irrelevant chatter of her elders. With a sudden grin she realized that except for Aidan, she was the youngest person in the room. And except for Lady Lilen—First Daughter of the Name with the biggest Web on Lenfell—she also had the grandest title at Ostinhold.
Kanto Solingirt approached with a glass of cordial that he claimed to have concocted himself. Cailet sniffed suspiciously at the pinkish liquid.
“What’s in it?”
“Cactus juice. What else is there to make wine out of around here?”
“Send a few bottles to Collan,” she suggested. “He’s always looking for a new way to get drunk.”
“Husbandhood doesn’t agree with him?”
“Most of the time. But not at Ryka Court.”
“Not the most ideal place to begin a marriage,” the old man agreed.
Cailet eyed him quizzically. “And Ostinhold is?”
The Scholar laughed and stroked his mustache complacently. “If you’re wed to the Lady, it can be! You’ve been here long enough to have noticed the rule. When our door is shut, it’s shut.”
“I’ll have to suggest that to Sarra.”
“Go on, try the cordial. It’s a little sweet, but I’m working on that.”
She was about to take a cautious sip when Jonna, Lilen’s maid, came up to her and murmured, “Captal, an urgent message for you. The courier’s outside. He looks worried.”
“From Lady Sarra? Ryka Court?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
“Thank you, Jonna.” She excused herself to Kanto and left the room, pausing just beyond the door to glance up and down the empty hall. Perhaps “outside” had meant literally that; she threaded her way through a jumble of corridors to a side exit into the courtyard, opened the door, and paused.
Three things happened then. And, as it occasionally did, time slowed to sluggishness that allowed her to view each as a separate action.
Fifty feet away from her, watering his weary horse at a trough, a small, brown, nondescript young man in Assembly livery caught sight of her and turned to rummage in his saddlebags.
Kanto Solingirt and his daughter Imilial Gorrst emerged from the main entry to Ostinhold and began to descend the steps.
Aidan Maurgen shot past Cailet at an all-out run, having followed her to freedom from the boredom of strictly minded manners.
Something inside her—inside her, not the Others—howled danger. She made a grab for Aidan, but in the slow expansion of time she watched her fingers miss the trailing ties of his coif by inches. She opened her mouth to call out a warning to the Mages, but her tongue had thickened within her mouth and she managed only a wordless cry.
T
he young man at the horse trough faced her now, with something wrapped in white cloth cradled in both hands. The cloth fell away. From a circle of crystal burst a shatter of silver lightning. With exquisite deliberation, so unhurried that she could watch it quest and then correct its course, the sword blade of magic sliced through the air toward her.
Aidan was running directly into its path.
The instant her gaze focused on him, time became real again, and too swift. She could never hope to reach the boy physically. There was no instantaneous spell ready for her use. She didn’t even have time to curse Gorynel Desse as she dredged up a Mage Globe and filled its angry red depths with magic and hurled it at the lightning.
Something else got there first. An explosion of magic intercepted the gush of silvery fire. It split into a million sparks ten feet from Aidan, who was knocked sideways and fell into a breathless tangle of limbs. Cailet’s own Globe absorbed some of the glittering fragments, hovered, then dissolved to nothingness, its target gone.
At least, she thought inanely, she’d had the sense to direct it at the magic and not the messenger. Him, she wanted whole. She swathed him in a Ward that froze him where he stood, the crystal in shards within the sleek white cloth draped over his hands.
“Captal!”
She spun around, heart lurching when her eyes lit on the toppled figure near the steps. She sprinted for him, shouting for help as she ran.
Imilial knelt beside her father, fingers at his throat to feel for a pulse. She looked up, wild-eyed, when Cailet stammered her name. “He pushed me back and conjured up that Globe—I didn’t know he knew how to make a Battle Globe, an old Scholar like him—”
Cailet crouched down to cradle the lolling head in one hand. She unlaced his coif to let him breathe more freely, told Imi to straighten out his legs from their awkward sprawl, yelled over her shoulder for someone to see to Aidan. Kanto didn’t move.
It seemed forever before she heard Telomir’s voice at her shoulder. “I felt magic—the Malerrisi’s, then his, then yours.”
“He saved my life, didn’t he,” Cailet heard herself say.
“Yes.” After watching Kanto’s still face for a moment, he murmured, “Lilen must hurry.”
Imilial moaned. “Papa—oh, St. Miryenne, no—”
Cailet glared at Telo. “I won’t let this happen. I won’t!”
“There’s nothing we can do.” He sat back on his heels, hands clasped white-knuckled between his knees and fury in his eyes. “It was over the moment Glenin finished her little gift to you. It was intended to kill whoever brought magic to bear against it. Mere Prentice I may be, but I sensed it. We can only thank the Saints that it wasn’t specific to you.”
“Kanto—?” Lilen fell to her knees beside her husband, groping for one of his hands. “Caisha, what happened?”
“Lilen—I’m so sorry—” Imilial’s breath caught on a sob. “I wasn’t fast enough—I’m the Warrior, not him! It should’ve been me!”
Bleakly, Cailet looked up at Telomir. They both knew it should have been her.
She relinquished her place to Lilen, who drew Kanto into her arms and rocked him as if he were a child. Halfway across the courtyard Lady Sefana was rocking Aidan, too, and for a moment Cailet thought she’d scream with the fear and the fury and the grief.
Telo murmured, “The boy will recover. He probably got the wind knocked out of him, and there may be a few burns. He’s not Mageborn. If he were, he’d be dying, too.”
She could only stare at him with the question in her eyes.
“You’re safe. Kanto’s magic took the killing force. But I felt the backlash, and once the shock wears off, so will you.”
“I don’t have time for that.” She almost looked over her shoulder at the dying Scholar, but could not bring herself to do it. “I’m going to Longriding. Today. Now. And then to Bard Hall and then to Ryka Court, and then to Malerris Castle—”
“Cailet, don’t be a fool!”
As fierce as her determination was, the trauma to her magic was the greater. She swayed against Telomir, felt him swing her up into his arms, and as her vision hazed he looked just enough like Gorsha for her to murmur, “Don’t you dare say ‘I told you so,’ because you didn’t.”
17
DESPITE a brisk spring breeze, Ryka Court was celebrating St. Alilen’s Day outdoors by the lake. Hordes of children hurtled across the lawns on Seekings, clutching paper lists of items they must find to win prizes. Women wore feathered headpieces; more feathers dangled from men’s coif-ties. Group after group of amateur singers took the festooned stage to compete for the Saint’s honors, while others strolled the fairground performing for cutpieces. It was rumored that Sevy Vasharron and several other operatic luminaries roamed the fair in heavy disguise, and the coins they collected would help refurbish Dinn’s Opera House, damaged during the Rising. Adding to the happy confusion were Alilen’s Dafties: mummers who capered about, teasing, juggling, declaiming nonsense poetry, adept at the sleight-of-hand that was all most people ever saw of “magic.” All were dressed as birds—white doves, black ravens, red-combed banties, waddling blue geese—with the Daftie Master gorgeously costumed as one of the gorgeous rainbow-fantail birds strutting loose on the lawn.
All very pretty, all very festive. Cailet walked into the middle of it wearing solid black Mage Guardian regimentals—the ones given her on her eighteenth Birthingday by her sister, complete with flowing cloak and silver sash. The Candle pinned to her left collar point had belonged to her father, Auvry Feiran. The blade at her thigh had belonged to Gorynel Desse, one of the Fifty Swords said to have been forged by St. Caitiri Herself.
Everyone exclaimed on seeing her. Several people blanched. These she collected with her gaze and an inexorable spell—one from the Code of Malerris, which she considered fitting. When the three who were her quarry had come to her, she looked each in the eyes in turn. They fumed helplessly at her pilfering of their wills and their voices, but anger did not cover shock that she still lived—or fear of the knowing in her glittering black eyes.
Softly, she said, “You see before you a living Captal—not a dead martyr.”
Granlia Feleson caught her breath. Irien Dombur’s jaw tightened so severely that a muscle jumped and bunched in his cheek. And Elsvet Doyannis, biting both the pale lips between her teeth, began to tremble.
Cailet decided on Elsvet as the most likely to spew out everything she knew—if properly motivated. Fixing Glenin’s childhood friend with her gaze, Cailet freed her. After a racking cough—the spell had not been gently cast—she began to sputter with incoherent outrage.
“Save it,” Cailet advised, “for your trial.”
“Trial? On what charge?” she demanded.
“Murder.”
“What nonsense! You look healthy enough to me!”
Someone gasped. Dombur turned crimson; Granlia simply squeezed her eyes shut. Elsvet didn’t realize what she’d done until Cailet arched a sardonic brow.
“I don’t recall saying whose murder.” Glancing around at the rapt crowd, pushing windblown hair from her face, she asked ingenuously, “Dear me—did I say whose murder? I’m quite sure I didn’t.”
“No, Captal, indeed you did not.” This from the antiquated Tirri Mettyn, former Councillor for Kenrokeshir and lifelong enemy of Anniyas. Her gray eyes, sharp as whetted knives, flashed with glee as she shuffled closer across the new spring grass, clinging to handsome Granon Isidir’s strong arm. “Keep going, this is getting interesting.”
Nodding politely, Cailet turned to the threesome. “The charges are assault on Aidan Maurgen and murder of Kanto Solingirt, husband of Lady Lilen Ostin.”
Elsvet had regained her bluster. “What drivel! I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about! Are you sure you haven’t taken the day to heart, Captal? St. Alilen is, after all, the patron of crazy persons.”
“What I took to heart w
as the sight of a six-year-old boy lying unconscious, his face cut by glass and burned by magic.” She kept a stranglehold on her temper as she went on, still in a quiet, lethal voice, “And the sight of my foster mother weeping over her husband of twelve weeks, a kind and loving old Scholar Mage who sacrificed his life to save the boy—and me.”
“I’ve heard nothing of these matters,” Elsvet claimed, and Cailet saw in her flat, cold eyes that technically she spoke the truth. “I’m sorry Lady Lilen’s husband is dead, but it’s nothing to do with me.” And this time Cailet knew she lied.
“A young man currently in custody swears differently. He will testify that you knew all about it.” Releasing Granlia Feleson, she went on, “And you as well.”
She cleared her throat furiously. “How dare you use magic on a member of the Assembly of Lenfell? I’ll have you up on charges, and with all these witnesses—”
“Oh, that’s right,” Cailet said, as if she’d just remembered. “You’re part of the Assembly. Then that confirms the messenger’s story of who gave him the Assembly livery he wore. You also provided money to purchase his passage to Renig and a horse from there to Ostinhold.”
“Lies, all of it lies. I give money to no one but my husband and children and worthy causes. If this person had a uniform, he stole it.”
“Which is a punishable crime,” Elsvet put in. “Give us his name so he can be brought to trial for theft of government property.”
Neither woman lacked for stubbornness, but it was no substitute for true courage. Cailet curved her mouth in a smile she knew to be frightening. She’d seen Jennis and Miram react to it when they asked what she planned to do on this rash solitary journey to Ryka Court.
“It’s all lies,” Granlia repeated, but she could no longer meet Cailet’s eyes.
Granon Isidir cocked a brow. “If I were you, I’d keep practicing those denials. You’ll need to be much more convincing before a Justice.”
Cailet finally unWorked the magic holding Dombur. He stumbled, spat on the grass, and exclaimed, “What am I supposed to have done? Robbed the Treasury?”