by Melanie Rawn
“You fool,” she murmured, keeping her voice soft so as not to startle the baby further. “The one use you could have been to me, and you failed. Get out of my sight.”
And with that, hatred finally triumphed. Rejected and reviled, Elsvet gave in to the satisfaction of having seen Glenin shaken by Cailet’s magic. Her words were so smug that Glenin wanted to slay her where she stood. “She told me to tell you something, face-to-face.”
“Say it and be gone.”
“She said this, her exact words—‘If you think you can succeed where Anniyas’s Wards and Anniyas’s Wraith failed, you’re welcome to try.’”
Glenin’s fingers clenched around the baby’s blanket. When it became obvious that she intended no response, Elsvet turned and left, wet shoes squelching on the carpet.
The baby settled, blinking up at her. She touched his cheek, stroking the soft roundness, eager for the day when that cheek would be lean and bristly with a grown man’s beard.
“So your grandmother failed, did she?” Glenin whispered to her dark-haired, gray-eyed son, her beautiful Mageborn boy. “When you’re of an age, my darling, you and I will succeed. A’verro, we will.”
TWINS
1
“. . . AND so you see, my Lord, the relinquished income from Sleginhold can be counterbalanced by an infusion of capital into the land-recovery scheme in Rokemarsh, which will in five years generate a tenfold return on the original investment. The initial outlay may leave some other enterprises with a cash deficiency, but this can be redressed by temporary diminution in production personnel at the mines, which will not only conserve remuneration but accommodate the concomitant advantage of a scarcity of ore, engendering an elevation in valuation and thus revenue. The figures are here, you can see for yourself—”
“Now, wait a minute,” Collan said, stopping the factor in mid-oration, having heard exactly one thing that made any sense to him. “Turn people out of their jobs?”
The factor blinked rapidly a few times, pale lashes quivering over watery gray eyes, heightening his unfortunate natural resemblance to a rabbit. “Why, yes.”
Col shuffled signed papers on his desk and gave the man his sweetest smile. “If it’s salaries we want to save on, why don’t we start with yours?”
“My Lord Rosvenir?” More blinks, and a hint of real water this time as tears threatened.
Though Collan had massive respect for the factor’s organizational dexterity, he felt absolutely no sympathy for him as a human being; this was the third time in as many years that he’d proposed cuts in the Slegin Web’s work force. “So the obscenity level of our profits goes down for a while. So what?”
“Profits must always increase, or—”
“Horse shit,” Collan said amiably. Then, deliberately losing his smile, he went on, “As Lady Sarra has on occasion rather indelicately stated, we’re rolling in it. Find the money somewhere else. Nobody loses work—nobody. Understand?”
“But—”
“Understand?”
A quivering sigh of regret. “Yes, my Lord.”
“I thought you would.” He stacked portfolios and reports and balance sheets with meaningful finality. “That’s all for today. Thanks for your time, it’s been fascinating.”
Col made a quick escape from his office, leaving the factor muttering polysyllabically behind him. Had there been a guild for financial officers, this young man would be elected its master by acclamation. Collan flatly refused to spend more than an hour each day cooped up with him and his incomprehensibilities. Why, he grumped to himself, couldn’t the factor’s genius have come in a pretty little female package, like Sarra’s legislative aide?
He knew very well why. Sarra had one very simple but very definite idea about the people who worked closely with her husband at Roseguard: they were invariably male. Liberal and enlightened as she was in her marital concerns, her attitude regarding her husband’s proximity to pretty women—especially during her absences—was positively primitive. As if, Collan reflected on his way to the twins’ rooms, even a beauty as spectacular as Lusira Garvedian could tempt him, even when Sarra had been gone for weeks.
Which she had. And thoughts of her were producing a reaction not at all convenient for a man who would be sleeping alone until she returned from Ryka Court.
“Damned conferences,” he muttered. “Damned meetings, damned Council, damned government—”
Sarra would have told him that separation was the price they paid for the pleasure of the rest of their lives. She worked so much—even when they were officially on holiday—that he doubted she really believed this. But he’d taught her (slowly, it was true) that when the papers and portfolios and petitions were packed away in the office at the end of the business day, it was perfectly acceptable to apply her attention just as devotedly to him and the children. In fact, he demanded it. He hadn’t spent the last thirteen years playing Traditional Husband—tending the Slegin Web, establishing and running a home, and raising the children—to spend his married life all by himself.
Roseguard had been quite a while in the rebuilding, but he’d finally gotten it the way he wanted it. Not having any personal experience of a home, but having seen plenty of examples in his travels, he knew more about what he didn’t want than what he did. Roseguard was of necessity a combination of family home, public showcase, business office, and governing center. But the four did not overlap. He would never have raised children in a museum, an accounting agency, a bureaucratic maze, or a palace. On the other hand, he was equally thankful he didn’t have to live in the chaos that was Ostinhold.
Truly told, Col was happy with his life at Roseguard—even though at times his life as Lady Sarra Liwellan’s husband was not exactly what he’d had in mind.
Some of it was fun. The performer in him liked being the center of attention. And he received lots of attention—as manager of the Web, husband of the most important woman in the Shir, and a famous personage in his own right. The Minstrel in him loved to invite fellow musicians for evenings of song-swapping; Roseguard had become known throughout Lenfell as a pivotal Bardic and operatic center.
But having a lot of money and being able to spend it just as he pleased was the most fun of all. Surprised by the total of his own savings stashed away in various banks through the years, once he’d acquired a home to invest it all in, he found he had a real talent for buying things. Sarra’s taste in interior decor rivaled her taste in dress: left to herself, she would be surrounded by and wear all sorts of faddish frippery. (She was not left to herself in the matter of clothing; he supervised all her trips to the dressmaker’s.) Collan let her have her way in her private office, which was to him a nightmare of tapestries, carpets, statuary, and stained-glass windows. But he claimed the rest of the Residence for his own. Public rooms meant to impress did so—subtly. Guest rooms meant to be comfortable were—elegantly. Everything was airy and pleasant and warmly welcoming. And it had taken cartloads of money to make it that way.
Representatives from the biweekly Hearth and Home Review sent him letters five times a year beseeching an interview and access for a sketch artist, with the purpose of rendering Roseguard in prose and woodcuts for the edification of husbands with less innate elegance than Collan Rosvenir. He’d said “No” as many ways as he knew how without offending the publisher too much, but suspected that one of these days he’d have to get nasty about it. Sarra, naturally, found the whole notion vastly entertaining. “Well, it’s your own fault for doing such a good job. I did my best by telling everyone you were more than just decorative, but—”
The thing that surprised him most about life as a husband was that life as a husband was quite enjoyable. It wasn’t just that he was Sarra’s husband, though this had much to do with it. He genuinely liked his position, his duties, his responsibilities, and all that lovely money.
He refused to dabble in politics, an attitude that earned him much credit with
conservatives who avowed that a man’s place was in the bedchamber, not the Council chamber. This interpretation of the geography of his marriage annoyed him. The old fossils couldn’t seem to get it through their heads that if he’d wanted to participate in Sarra’s public life, he would have. He got enough of politics and intrigue whenever Sarra felt it necessary to throw a pay-back-all-the-invitations-at-once entertainment. Collan was known as the most accomplished host in all fifteen Shirs—mainly because he refused to be bored at his own parties.
In addition to running the household, he kept the Web’s books. This he found to be rewarding exercise for his mathematical quirk. And by managing the Slegin fortune that Sarra had inherited, he felt he was of some real use to her—even though the initial organization of the ledgers had taken a ream of paper for calculations, gallons of strong black coffee, and a week of lurid cursing. By now everyone knew he’d catch the slightest variance in figures; “mistakes” were rare, and so was the fun of calling the culprit into Lord Rosvenir’s Awesome Presence.
Aside from his prowess with the balance sheets, Sarra also relied on his ability to tell a swindle from a sweet deal. Although the scope of the Slegin investments at first gave him pause, after thirteen years he was used to juggling fifty different ventures in nine different Shirs. From the start he was able to smell a mile off whether a new investment proposal was a cozening, a connivance, or a flat-out cheat. Thus dubious commercial propositions had become as rare as “mistakes” in the ledgers, depriving him of another source of amusement.
Midsummer of 971, something had happened that made up for the loss of such entertainment and provided two infinite sources of occupation—not to mention headaches, laughter, frustration, exasperation, and sheer unadulterated joy. What he loved best and found most satisfying about this life he never would have dreamed he’d live was a thing he’d scrupulously avoided all his life: fatherhood.
Motherhood had bewildered Sarra for the first several years of her children’s lives. She was one of those women who became comfortable with their offspring only when they were of an age to make rational conversation. Collan adored babbling with the twins, bathing them and playing with them and watching them sleep and taking them to the park where total strangers exclaimed how beautiful they were. Sarra distrusted such compliments, believing that the bestowers always wanted something from powerful Lady Liwellan. Collan knew they were only speaking the Saints’ honest truth. His children were utterly gorgeous. Precociously brilliant. Adorably witty. Truly told, they were perfect—and anyone who failed to see this was obviously demented.
It was a fine emotional and societal line most husbands walked when it came to children. A woman’s babies belonged to her as surely as her husband did—more so, for they bore her Name and he did not. But he was the one who took charge of their upbringing and education; he changed their linen, taught them to read and count, soothed their hurt feelings, bandaged their scraped knees, and made sure they were clean and acceptably civilized during their daily hours with their mother. This responsibility inevitably produced feelings of possessiveness that were just as inevitably frowned upon. Any husband who said “My children”—as if he’d carried them and birthed them and nursed them—was reproached, publicly if need be. Circumstances varied within each Name, but by and large a husband’s role was to supervise the children of the marriage exactly the same way he did the household: with diligence, exactitude, and constant consciousness that ultimate ownership was not his.
Collan found this imbecilic. How could he look at Taigan’s funny little curling mouth or Mikel’s bright blue eyes and not be struck in the gut that these children were his? Anyone whose eyebrows so much as twitched when he referred to his daughter and son as his daughter and son didn’t understand the first thing about being a father.
And whenever he thought of what Rina Firennos had done to Val Maurgen—never acknowledging him as Aidan’s father, never allowing him to see the boy—Col got sick to his stomach. Not raising his own children was inconceivable to him. Yet legally his claim on them was damned near nonexistent. That was the law.
Councillor Liwellan (as susceptible as any woman to pillow-talk) was in the long, slow process of changing the law. That was one advantage to husbanding a powerful woman.
One disadvantage was that too often she wasn’t around to be a husband to.
His duty with the factor over for the day, he was climbing the stairs to the twins’ rooms when he saw Tarise on the next landing. Dedicated as he was to his children, he could never have survived sane if not for Tarise. She loved Taigan and Mikel as much as if she’d birthed them herself. She was unable to have children of her own—which saddened her but didn’t bother her husband in the least, for Rillan Veliaz, Roseguard’s Master of Horse, considered every foal born in his stables to be his very own child.
“Well, what’s the crisis today?” Collan asked cheerfully. “Broken crockery, smashed thumbs, or I will not contradict my tutor five hundred times on the slate board?”
“The nerve of you!” she grinned. “Maligning your own sweet, charming, obedient children! Especially when they’re not here to defend themselves!”
“Where are they?”
“Treyze and Goryn Senison’s.” Tarise smoothed the violet silk of her skirts, adding, “I’m taking advantage of it by taking my husband out to a lavish, expensive dinner and the opera. They’re doing Ayidda at All Saints’—cramped but magnificent, I’m told. And I’d better hurry before one of his damned horses casts a shoe or gets the colic or something equally tedious and unromantic.”
“Barns can be very romantic—or did you forget where you and Rillan spent your first night of married life?” Collan teased.
“Don’t remind me!” Passing him on the stairs, she paused to give him a playful thwack with her fan—lace stretched over carved wooden struts, the latest in fashionable accessories, highly practical in the summer heat, and Collan’s most recent contribution to feminine adornments. Sarra thought them silly, but Taigan looked adorable fluttering one in front of her face with her mischievous green eyes sparkling above.
“You looked happy enough about it the next morning.”
“Some wedding night! Two hours wed, the feasting not yet over, and his favorite mare chooses that exact moment to go into labor!”
“Complaints, complaints. You could’ve come back inside, you know, after the foal was born, instead of staying up in the hayloft until dawn.”
“Well, no hayloft for me tonight!” She descended the last few steps, calling back over her shoulder, “The twins should be back home tomorrow morning after breakfast. Remember to send the carriage for them.”
“Have fun,” he answered, then sighed. No children to play with, no friends to dine with, not even a ticket to the opera—and no Sarra. It was going to be another dull evening.
2
“LADY Glenin? May I come in?”
Closing the Code on her desk, Glenin rose and smiled a greeting. Saris Allard was one of the few women she’d ever really liked, and a nice evening chat was just what she needed. She had spent a long day teaching her son the basics of Warming spells. His power was gratifying, but before she’d shown him how to restrain it, he’d set fire to a blanket, a cheese casserole, and a pewter tankard. Tangling with her son’s formidable magic was ever an exhausting day’s work; Glenin required some relaxation.
“Come in, Saris, please. Why don’t we go out to the balcony where it’s cool? I can’t recall a hotter summer.”
When they were seated outside with cups of iced wine, the Third Lady of Malerris, Threadkeeper, sighed and stretched out long legs in loose cotton trousers. “One would think that being pent up here all day every day, we’d run out of things to do by noon! Instead, there are never enough hours in the day.”
“Anything I should know about?” Glenin asked idly, watching the starlight play on the waterfall far below the castle.
“Nothing seriou
s. A few restless spirits wanting to get away for a while.” She laughed softly. “And one who wants to come home! My son,” she explained when Glenin looked sidelong at her.
“Chava? But I thought he enjoyed being out in the world.”
“It seems the excitement of being a blacksmith in some Tillinshir village northeast of nowhere is beginning to pall. He’d rather be back here, working for you again.”
Glenin sipped wine and considered. Chava had been an excellent aide, but she hadn’t bade him stay. When he turned eighteen, nine years ago, he’d asked to do what many of the younger Malerrisi were doing: finding places for themselves in various Shirs. He’d felt caged here, as many people did. Those Glenin trusted were sent out to build lives and identities—and relay information. Those Glenin did not trust were closely watched at Malerris Castle.
“He’s more use to us where he is,” she said at last. “If you want to go visit him—”
Saris gave a little shrug of slender shoulders. “He’s a grown man—twenty-seven this year. I shaped his life, but now he must live it according to my teachings.”
“He never struck me as being restive.”
“You didn’t know him when he was little! The trouble I had getting that boy to sleep—! Mama, I want a drink of water, a story, a different toy, the sun to come up—”
“The trouble is the magic, you know,” Glenin said. “It keeps them awake until they can learn to block it out. Someone’s always doing some sort of Working at night, and even if it’s relatively quiet, there are the Wards.”
“Yes, you’re right. Even though there weren’t that many while Chava was growing up, he used to say that the one outside his bedroom sang to him sometimes.”