by Melanie Rawn
There was only one quick way out of Roseguard. Warris was waiting for them out on the pier, grinning as he flourished a knife in one hand and the white velvet in the other.
“You think I’m too stupid to know why I was supposed to stand lookout while you stole Collan’s litter? There’s not a constable of the Watch anywhere near the docks—and you think I don’t know why? I knew you’d use me and be rid of me even before I heard my Name from the shadows—not because of the fight in the bar, but because some First Daughter said I stole her purse!” He laughed, and wiped his bloodied broken nose on the embroidered cloth. “I stole better than that, Lady!”
“You don’t even know what you hold! It’s useless to you—”
“To me, truly told. But to the Captal? Take me with you wherever you’re bound, or I’ll put it in her hands myself.”
She nearly killed him where he stood—and was grateful that she’d restrained her temper when he flapped the Ladder over the railings. If he let go, it would be lost in the dark waters below.
“You think I’m too stupid to know all these little markings and signs mean magic?”
“I think,” said her son from behind him, “that you’re too stupid to live.”
“No—!” Glenin cried, too late. Without using any magic at all, nothing but his strength and his height—and not even full-grown yet—he flung a loop of stout rope around Warris’s neck and throttled him.
And during the struggle—for the rolls of fat at Warris’s throat made it a long, difficult death—the white velvet Ladder was torn in two.
The twins were fighting her even as Warris fought her son. There was no question who was most important. She went to help him, and lost her grip on Taigan and Mikel. When Warris finally lay still, she heard pounding feet on the wooden docks, and they barely made it to the pylon Ladder in time.
So now they were on a cargo ship bound from Kenroke to Seinshir, lacking the twins and the irreplaceable Ladder. A disaster that had nearly cost her her son. He was too miserably sick now for her to have the heart to reprimand him. Once they were back home, however. . . .
Still, she thought as she cuddled him closer, protecting him from the battering storm outside, he had said something in Kenroke this morning that marked him as a true Malerrisi.
“He had a knife. He was going to kill you and me both, and ransom the twins. But he did worse than that. He disobeyed you, Mother. You! He deserved to die.”
He understood. Her beautiful, brilliant, supremely gifted son understood what it was to be a Malerrisi. Let the Mage Guardians consider it a sin to use magic for personal gain; a Malerrisi knew that the only real sin was defying the Warden of the Great Loom.
12
“I think Tarise was wrong about the politics,” Sarra said some two weeks later.
She and Collan were sitting up late on the balcony after celebrating the twins’ Birthingday. A bottle of wine cooled on the low table between them, and the night air was rich with roses, and the Ladymoon glinted silvery on the gardens. Taigan and Mikel had been packed off to bed an hour ago, which meant it was finally quiet enough to listen to the fountain. The pipes through which the water passed had been rebored and the gears realigned and retimed so that “Rose of Sheve Dark” sang softly with the dance of fat droplets shining like earth-fallen stars. Collan could not have designed a better setting for his first night alone with his Lady in nine weeks, but he knew better than to think she’d be finished analyzing and discussing things before Fifteenth at the earliest.
So he indulged her passion for dissection, certain that in an hour or two she’d be ready for more interesting passions. “I think she’s wrong, too, but tell me how you figure it.”
“Hoping to change my vote by stealing my children is a foolish ploy unworthy of Glenin. What interest could she have in legalities? She sits in her Castle as she has for over ten years, training up good little Malerrisi for future mischief. Personally, I don’t think she intended to take the twins anywhere. She just wanted me to know that she can if she wants to.”
“I think you’re mistaken there, but we won’t quibble. What’s important is that they’re safe, and Cailet sent her best Scholar to renew the old Wards and set up new ones—and you’re finally home again.”
She smiled at him, lifting her glass in a toast. “For the rest of the year, Minstrel mine. No meetings, no special sessions, no convocations. I don’t know how it happened, but I’m not going to argue with it.” She sipped wine from a long-stemmed bubble of rainbow crystal. “By the way, Granon Isidir sends his warmest regards.” When he growled an inarticulate reply, she grinned. “I just wanted to see if you were still jealous after all these years.”
“Jealous? Me? Of that overbearing, underwhelming—”
Sarra was laughing. “Of course not—not after all these years. He’s still a good dancer, though.”
The image of Sarra, whirling past a bonfire clasped far too closely in Granon Isidir’s arms on the night the Rising won, was calculated to annoy him even further. He ground his teeth, pasted a sweet smile on his face, and said, “You’ll pay for that, Lady.”
“I’m counting on it!” She refilled their wineglasses and asked, “Did Miram ever find that boy? The one in the gardens that night.”
After much interior debate, Collan had decided to mention the boy but tell no one—except Cailet—his suspicions. The timing was still wrong for his involvement in the kidnapping; Taigan and Mikel hadn’t mentioned any boy being with Glenin at any time; and would Glenin have risked her precious son in such a venture? Col doubted it.
“No, Miram and Riddon haven’t been at Sleginhold much the last few years to keep track of everyone there, what with the babies coming one after another.” He grinned. “I think they’re trying to outdo Lady Lilen in sheer numbers of Ostins.”
“I would have liked another child,” Sarra said wistfully.
“We’ve got our hands full with these two,” he replied at once, not wanting her to dwell on the daughter they’d lost and the daughters and sons they would never have. “Me, I can’t wait to send them off to Cai, so we can get a little peace around here.”
“Liar,” she accused. “You’ll miss them terribly, and the last thing you ever wanted in your life was peace and quiet!”
He shrugged and sipped wine. “I just hope they don’t change too much, you know?”
“If Glenin had taken them, by this winter we wouldn’t have known them for ours,” she said grimly. “When I think of what she must be doing to her own son—I wonder what he looks like?” she interrupted herself with seeming irrelevancy.
“If there’s any justice, he’ll be short and dumpy like Anniyas.”
“No, Glenin’s tall, and so was her father.” She was silent for a moment, staring at the fountain. “When he turns up—and he will—I want to know him for who and what he is.” She turned her glass around in her fingers. “All right, Collan. You can tell me the rest of it now.”
She’d done it to him again—switched subjects so swiftly that he felt his brain lurch to keep up with her. “The rest of what?”
“Something’s bothering you that has nothing to do with what happened to the children. Out with it, Minstrel.”
“Nothing’s bothering—”
“Then why, by your own admission, were you in a disreputable tavern drinking the night away?”
“With you gone, there’s not much to do at night. And it’s not disreputable.”
“Not with that great bull Lirenz Tigge keeping watch, I suppose. But that’s not the point. If I had to guess, and it seems I must, I’d say you were bored.”
Collan leaned back in his chair, propping his booted feet on the balcony railing. “I think maybe I am,” he said slowly.
Even though she was right, and he’d admitted it, she was in the mood for an argument. “Truly told, I don’t see how. You have at least as much work as I do. One would
think that you’d scarcely have time to breathe, what with the children, the Residence, the holdings—”
“It’s too much. And it’s not enough.”
That stopped her for a moment. “Why don’t you take on some more students? You love music and teaching—”
“I hate teaching!” This startled even him; Sarra almost flinched. “Sorry,” he muttered. “But you don’t know what it’s like, trying to find just one student—”
“—worthy of your priceless instruction?”
Collan hung onto his temper. “Falundir wasted his time on me. I have an obligation to share what I know. But there’s a political aspect to it as well. Some of my students are important Names. No matter how inept they may be, I can’t afford to offend them.”
“For my sake,” she murmured in a completely different tone. “I’m sorry, Col, I hadn’t realized.”
He shrugged and drained the wine down his throat. “It’s not that I hate it. I just don’t feel as if I’m accomplishing much.”
“With the music?”
“With any of it.”
Now she sounded bewildered. “The children are healthy, happy, doing very well in their lessons, and haven’t destroyed anything significant in the last few weeks. I’d say that’s an accomplishment. And I’m happy, which is entirely your doing. Does that count?”
“Of course it does. Never said it didn’t.”
Sarra sat up straighter, like a child coming to attention in the schoolroom. “Any man I can think of would look at you and think how lucky you are. You’re essential to so many people—not just me and the children, but all those who depend on your management of the Slegin Web. I don’t see the problem. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“There’s nothing wrong. Just not everything’s right.”
She said nothing for a long time. Then, very softly, “I miss the old days, too, you know. I can’t count the times I’ve wished I could be doing anything other than listen to those idiots drone on and on in Council. But our lives have changed, and we’re responsible for making those changes, and if the price we pay for it is a little boredom, then. . . .”
He rose, paced the balcony for a few moments, then turned to look down at her. The luster of moonlight created of her unbound hair a cascade of silver-gilt silk. But her face was in shadow, and he was glad; it was easier to say what he had to when he couldn’t see her eyes.
“Sarra, I love you and the twins more than my life. These have been good years, and I’ve been happy—but it’s not enough anymore. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before now.”
In a small voice she asked, “Are you bored with me?”
“Holy Saints, no! How could you ever think that?”
“I knew what kind of man you were when I took you to husband. They say it’s a husband’s job to make sure a woman doesn’t get bored in the marriage, but I knew from the start that I’d have to work hard to keep you interested in me. There’ve been so many other women. . . .” She sighed. “I haven’t been trying very hard lately, Col, and I’m sorry.”
“Sarra—” This was one of those situations where a hundred well-crafted lyrics came to mind, and not one of them could say what simple honesty could. “Sarra, there are no other women. Ever. Not for me.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “Maybe I keep busy so I won’t have to think about losing you.” She looked up at him, moonlight radiant on her beautiful face.
“Losing me—?” Sometimes he could anticipate the directions her mind would jump, sometimes he was a little slow to follow—and sometimes he got completely lost.
“Collan . . . are you truly unhappy, or just not as happy as you ought to be?”
“Both,” he replied helplessly.
“I can spend more time at home,” she offered. “We could take a holiday—we haven’t visited Cai since the twins were little, and then we could go up to Tillin Lake for a few weeks—”
“I’m not talking about a few weeks. I’m talking about what the hell I’m going to do with the rest of my life.” He heard himself talking and didn’t even know what he was about to say. “Teggie and Mishka don’t need me the way they used to. They already spend more time with their tutors than with me. And they got away from Glenin all by themselves. I’m proud of them for that, but I also know what it means. They’re growing up, growing away from us. It’ll happen more and more, and—”
“Collan! They’re only eleven years old!”
“At that age, you were bullying the Slegin boys, Cailet was running wild in The Waste, and I was a lute-playing slave at Scraller’s Fief. Our eleven-year-olds escaped Glenin Feiran! They don’t need us, Sarra. Not like they used to. And it won’t be too long before they’ll be gone, and Cailet will have the making of them as Mageborns.”
“But—it’ll be several years before they come into their magic—she said so, she doesn’t want them to go through it too young—”
“What she meant was that she wanted them to be just ours as long as possible. The day we have to give them up isn’t here yet, love, but it’ll come faster than we think.”
“And it’s worse for you, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Your life will be more empty of them than mine.”
“It already is,” he confessed. “I can’t sit around practicing the lute, or giving lessons, or supervising every twig in the orchards and every cog in the clock towers. There has to be something for me to do.”
“What do you want to do?”
How many men ever heard that question from the women who all but owned them?
“If I knew, I’d go out and do it.”
“Do you have to decide right this moment?”
He forced the tension from his shoulders and made his lips curve in a smile. “No. And I’m not going to decide it all myself either. This will affect both of us—all of us. Whatever it is I end up doing.”
She smiled back, a bit hesitantly. “You know what I want to do?”
Collan grinned down at her. “What you always want to do.”
“Then can you pretend to be a properly dutiful husband for just a little while longer, and indulge me?”
“Lady, I may be on the wrong side of forty, but I’ll be ten years a Wraith before I take ‘just a little while’ about it!”
13
FOUR days after Sarra came home, Cailet arrived in Roseguard—overland, Folding the road all the way from Mage Hall in Tillinshir. Accompanied only by Granon Bekke, she walked through the city gates at Half-Twelfth of a warm, dusky evening. Tired and thirsty, she spent a few minutes relaxing in her own house, catching up on local news with the Scholar Mage who lived there as caretaker with his family. After a brief wash and a change of clothes, she left Granon to the bath she’d been promising him for three hundred miles, and walked to the Liwellan Residence.
“I regret that Lady Sarra is unavailable, Captal,” said the legislative aide, a Vekke fifth daughter connected somehow to the Ostins—as almost everyone seemed to be. Though only two years older than Cailet, Dellian Vekke had cut her teeth on politics; her mother had been mayor of Neele for thirty years. Their branch of the Vekkes, secretly in the Rising, had been instrumental in securing the city in 969.
“Holed up in her office again,” Cailet interpreted. “Since lunch?”
“Since breakfast.” Dellian smiled, an expression that turned her high-boned face into that of a mischievous water sprite straight out of St. Mittru’s Book of River Feys. “Truly told, it’s time she was interrupted. Sorry about what I said before—it’s my stock phrase for visitors. I could set it to music by now.”
“I’ll bet. She probably hasn’t had any dinner—how about some coffee and something to nibble on? I’ll take it in.”
“Not that she’ll notice it’s you and not a servant.” Dellian shook her head, bright silvery hair swirling, as she rang for someone to take the order down to the kitchen. “If not for your Wards, a Malerrisi could wa
lk in anytime and Sarra wouldn’t even hear the door open.”
The First Lady of Malerris had done just that two weeks ago. Cailet hid a wince and said, “I’ll see what I can do about getting them to yell at her louder. How’ve you been, Dell?”
They chatted until the food arrived. The Mage Captal then played servant, opening the office door with one hand while balancing the tray in the other. Sarra didn’t even glance up from the folio on her desk.
“Put it anywhere. Thank you.”
So much for Mageborn instincts. Cailet decided a lecture on the advantages of observance was in order—plus a really shrill Ward.
“I do so know it’s you, Cailet.”
Laughing, she set the tray on a nearby table. “What gave me away?”
Black eyes met hers briefly, a tired smile in them. “After that first shock of recognizing you in Pinderon all those years ago, do you honestly think I don’t know the instant you enter a room? Sit down, I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“A he if ever I heard one,” she remarked, surveying Sarra’s desk. It fascinated Cailet, whose own organizational skills did not extend to vast quantities of paper. Sarra had made a science of it, all through the simple expedient of five painted wooden trays. Blue was for Immediately, red meant Next Week, orange indicated Soon, green denoted Pretend It’s Lost Unless Somebody Asks, and yellow signified Not My Problem. The contents of each eventually ended up in the sixth, much larger, tray behind her on a windowsill shelf: black, for Get This Out Of My Office NOW.
Sarra was plowing through the red tray, having emptied the blue, when Cailet considered that a reminder of her presence—and the cooling coffee—might be useful. She cleared her throat.
Sarra gave a shrug of one shoulder. “If you have any suggestions about flood control along the River Rine, I’m all yours for the next ten minutes. Otherwise—”