by Melanie Rawn
“—file me in the black tray,” Cailet finished, grinning. “Shall I have Dell schedule me in your appointment calendar?”
“I’d love to spend some time with you, but a courier’s due by Fourteenth and I really have to get this done.” She scribbled her name on the bottom of a page, closed the folder, and tossed it—without looking—into the black tray behind her. “Try the sunroom,” she said, opening a new folder. “The twins will be playing with their favorite toy—Collan.” She spared Cailet a glance and a grin. “I don’t have two children, I have three. Go join them, if you dare.”
It so happened that Cailet was too late for the fun. Col was deep in a massive overstuffed chair by the window, one eleven-year-old sleeping on each shoulder. He smiled when Cailet came in. She sank into the matching blue-striped chair, noting that the stain still hadn’t come out where Mikel had emphatically disagreed with some strained carrots—Saints, how long ago now? Eight years? Nine?
“They’ve grown,” she murmured.
Col nodded. “They do that. From one minute to the next, sometimes. Magic them a little deeper asleep, will you, so we can talk without waking them?”
She did, and struggled not to show her reaction on her face. The Wards she had set on them at birth—and renewed every so often and ever so subtly—were more worn around the edges than she’d anticipated. Strong magic, indeed, to begin pushing through when they hadn’t even reached their twelfth year.
You were the same, Gorsha told her. Only worse.
I’ll Ward them while I’m here—but will it hold?
I’ll show you the tricks I used on you. Powerful little beasties, aren’t they? I don’t envy you the teaching of this pair.
Thanks for the encouragement.
Don’t mention it.
Taigan started snoring a moment later. Col adjusted her gently on his shoulder; she sighed, and her breathing was quiet again.
“We won’t be able to fit in this chair much longer,” Collan said. “Will you look at the legs on these two?”
Cailet nodded, thinking that she wouldn’t be able to fit their magic tightly into Wards much longer either. She didn’t say so, preferring that Collan and Sarra think their children gifted Mageborns, but not as strong as they truly were. Where had it come from? The Ambrai gift was negligible; the Feiran potential great; but what was there in Collan Rosvenir that had merged with Ambrai and Feiran to produce Taigan and Mikel?
Gorsha didn’t even stir within her. Which meant that he probably knew, but wouldn’t tell her if she begged until the day she died.
“They smell so good,” Col said suddenly, rubbing his cheek to his son’s blazing red hair. “Other children smell funny, or downright stink, especially when they’re babies. But these two—ever since they were born—” He chuckled. “And it’s not because they’re cleaner than other children, because I know damned well they’re not!”
Cailet wondered when she’d ever get used to the sight of the independent, free-spirited Minstrel as a besotted father.
“I think it’s because they’re mine, you know?” he mused. “Everything about them, their scent and the sound of their voices—it just goes right to my gut, Cai. It all says protect them, take care of them, love them—”
She smiled to hide the pain his words brought her. These were things she’d never know: the smell of her babies, the sound of their voices calling out for her, the feel of their arms encircling her neck, the sweet weight of their heads on her breast. . . . She could share a little in the twins’ young lives, but Taigan and Mikel had never fit into her arms they way they did into Collan’s and Sarra’s. No child ever would, because no child would ever be hers.
She forced the hollow ache back where it belonged, in the secret part of her that not even her sister suspected: the place where she kept bitter longing for a husband and children and a normal life. She would never wound Collan by revealing how he had unintentionally wounded her.
But even concentrating on his children, he was more sensitive to her than she’d thought. “You’ll find out what I mean one of these days, Cai. There’s nothing like it. Nothing.”
I’ll have children of my mind and heart, if not my body, she told herself—the usual palliative for this emptiness inside her. For the next fifty years, children will come to me to become their truest selves. These two will, in time. None of them will ever be my own, but—but almost any woman can make babies. I can make Mage Guardians. And that’s—
—more important?
Let me be, Gorsha. Let me enjoy what I can of them without wanting what I can never have.
Your capacity for self-delusion—
I said let me be!
“Cai?”
“What? Oh, sorry. I wasn’t listening. What did you say?”
“How’s Taguare doing?”
She was glad of the chance to smile. “He’s only been at Mage Hall for three weeks, but he’s organized our library within an inch of its life, and now our little school system is getting the same treatment. He’ll submit a report to the Council late this year on the education we’re giving the village children. It’ll be a help, Col—show everyone that we don’t just sit in Mage Hall conjuring up Warming spells for our coffee.”
“So,” Collan said with satisfaction. “From a treatise on early private education—using my children as his experimental subjects!—he’s now forming policy on public schools. Quite a change from being Bookmaster for Scraller Pelleris!”
“Oh, I’d say his first experiments were on you!” she laughed. “And then on the Slegin boys. Teggie and Mikel got the refined version.”
“They miss him.”
“He sent letters for them, and for you. And there are a couple of old manuscripts in my luggage as well that he thought you might find interesting.”
He arched a brow. “Bardic manuscripts from the old Mage Academy library? He’s been promising me something special.”
“Copies, actually, by someone called Elseveth Garvedian. Taguare thinks she was like Falundir—a Bard as well as a Mageborn. It’s a rare combination. You wouldn’t think it would be, because there’s a lot of magic in music. But to have both talents so strongly, as this Elseveth seemed to, and to become both, as not even Falundir has done—”
“Too bad the Mage Lists were lost at Ambrai. You might be able to identify her. It’d be nice for Mikel to have somebody to emulate.” He smiled into his son’s riotous curls. “I have the feeling he’ll be Minstrel and Mage.”
“You take care of one, and I’ll see to the other. Oh, and Taguare says to tell Taigan he expects her to emulate you, and at the very least learn how to add!”
“If and when she does, I’ll set her to work on the Web accounts!” He paused, shaking his head. “After hearing how they got away from Glenin, I wouldn’t put anything past them.”
Cailet had heard the whole tale, and knew what he was coming around to. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”
He didn’t appear to have heard her. “I didn’t do such a good job of protecting them. Truly told, I’m not good for much. Men aren’t, you know. There’s no power in being a man.”
Confused, she waited for him to continue, to explain himself.
Instead, he asked, “What would you do about a woman who hits her husband?”
“What?”
“Not just a slap now and then. I mean she beats the shit out of him. And don’t quote the law at me—he can’t file a complaint because he’s got no dower for her to return, and she’d divorce him, and he loves his children too much—”
“Collan, what in the world are you talking about?”
“Power,” he said succinctly.
Still floundering, she said, “Are you asking my reaction as a woman, or as Mage Captal?”
“I’m asking as a person. And why should there be a difference? As a woman, do you have a vested interest in retaining the right to—”
“So a husband ends up with about as much legal recourse as a slave.”
Cailet nearly fell out of her chair. “Collan—are you equating marriage with slavery?”
“It amounts to that for some men,” he said sullenly.
For Collan? Impossible.
“Marriage is great for a woman,” he said. “She gets somebody to take care of the house, raise the children, work the farm—while she controls the money. If she gets tired of him, he’s gone—back to his own family, not young enough anymore for another marriage. Geridon’s Balls, you should see some of the pathetic fools in Wytte’s—trying any asinine remedy for baldness, running around and around the track like turnspits in a kitchen treadmill, trying to keep their waistlines—when a good-looking young stud comes in, they all want to kill him.”
“Col—”
But he was well into his tirade by now, and would not be stopped. “There’s no place in society for a single man. What choice has he got, even if he’s married to a woman who knocks him around? And you know what? She makes him believe it’s his fault! He had it coming—to put him back in his place. She’s out of control and it’s his fault he made her angry, so he has to be punished for it.” Mikel stirred, and Collan stroked his son’s curling red hair. “It’s got to change,” he said fiercely. “I won’t have my son grow up into that kind of world.”
There was nothing Cailet could say. Her woman’s instincts rebelled against his words—which, taken to their logical conclusion, could only lead to men’s legal and social and economic parity with women. And that was contrary to everything Lenfell was. No one knew for certain what the world had been like before The Waste War, but in its aftermath a woman’s power to bear a healthy child had quite rightly given her power in all else as well.
Cailet considered herself enlightened—she taught both women and men on an equal footing at Mage Hall, didn’t she? But when she looked at it from the perspective Collan demanded, she felt her deepest instincts conflict with her humanity.
Suddenly impatient, she wanted to ask what the hell Collan thought she could do. She was Mage Captal in a time when the Mage Guardians were few and weak, and the task before her was quite enough for one lifetime. The law was Sarra’s work. If the laws changed, society would change with them.
But because she loved and respected Collan—as a man and a person—she said quietly, “You know of such a man. And you want me to help him.”
“If you want to, fine. But that doesn’t cure the larger problem.”
She laughed uneasily. “I never thought I’d see you become political!”
“Is it politics when a woman can break her husband’s jaw without being called to account for anything but the medical bills?”
Power. I have it. So does Glenin. But this is about Sarra’s kind of power, not mine.
She was about to say so when Collan went on, “You probably could take care of this one case. But how many others are there? If there were no magic, problems would still have to be solved. That’s how the Mageborns—all Mageborns—caused The Waste War. They thought magic runs the world. It doesn’t. Magic is a tool, not a living thing.”
“I might disagree with you there.” Glenin certainly would.
“Well, don’t,” Col said bluntly. “That’s where you Mageborns went wrong. The world is people, not magic. And if there weren’t any magic at all, we’d have to find other ways of curing the world’s ills. Harder ways, maybe, but more human.”
Cailet flinched. “‘More human’?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” He shrugged impatiently, and Mikel murmured a protest in his sleep. “Magic is like—like a bandage over a wound. It hides the injury, maybe helps with the pain and the healing. But the damage is still there and won’t heal completely until the body does the work itself. The real, nonmagical, human body. Magic destroyed The Waste. Did anyone ever try using magic to heal it?”
She shook her head.
“You see, Cai? If they could’ve, they would’ve. So if you want to bandage this particular marriage, go ahead. But there’re thousands just like this man who don’t have a Mage Captal conveniently hanging around.”
“Changing laws is Sarra’s work.”
“She’s not doing it fast enough.”
Recalling the sight of her sister working her conscientious way through piles of folios and folders, Cailet bit back a sharp retort.
Collan shifted Taigan in his arms. “It all comes down to power. Men don’t have much.”
And Collan, she suddenly realized, was feeling its lack.
Wishing she’d thought of it sooner, she deliberately woke the twins. Their spirited welcome provided the perfect distraction—and warmed her heart besides. She forgot everything else in the delight of playing honorary Auntie Caisha to children she could never acknowledge were her kin. If they knew, they would know their grandfather’s Name—and their other aunt, and the boy-cousin living at Malerris Castle, whose magic must be just as strong as theirs.
14
THE next afternoon Falundir finally returned from the Bardic Games, and Sarra ordered a gala dinner to celebrate. Thirteen people crowded around the octagonal table for dinner, and for the first time in a long time she found herself presiding over a meal the way Grandmother Allynis used to. Dishes, flatware, crystal, candles, flowers—all had been arranged by servants, and she felt a little guilty that she had not done it herself. She really must pay more attention to her family life, she told herself, and find more time to be with Col and Teggie and Mishka.
But time was not found. It was taken. You had to grab it by the throat and wrestle it to the ground. Otherwise it got away from you.
The way her children’s childhood had escaped her. She could point to a new legal code as her major accomplishment of the last eleven years—yet she had not been the one to teach her daughter or son to read. Thousands of people’s lives had changed for the better due to her work and her hard-won wisdom—yet her children’s lives as children were nearly over, and she had missed most of it.
Taigan, seated next to her by First Daughter’s right, was lovely and golden in the candlelight—still a little girl, but with the promise of exquisite womanhood already showing in her face. Mikel, seated at the other end of the table next to his father just as a son should, was excited and not-quite-resigned to decorum—still a little boy, but with the strong bones of manhood already showing in his face. When had this happened? When had they grown so close to adulthood? Why had she allowed it to happen without her?
She paused before lighting the candles to survey the family and friends gathered around her table: Collan, Taigan and Mikel, Cailet, Aidan, Falundir, Riena and Jeymi, Lindren and Biron, Tarise and Rillan. Sarra struck a match to the rose-scented candles and murmured a brief prayer to the Saints for the health and happiness and safety of everyone seated at her table. How long had it been since she’d done this? What sort of an example had she been to Taigan, who would preside over her own table one day?
And how could Collan be restless, bored, discontented? He shared the lives of these two miraculous children. He’d steadied their steps, soothed their hurts, taught them books and music and right from wrong—he had raised them while she was off doing other things. Important things, she reminded herself. Vital things, that only she could do. She’d spent her years in making for her children a world better and more just than the one she’d been born into. But she’d never had time to show them how to live in this new world she would give them.
They were only eleven years old. Cailet had said their magic would not begin for another few years at least. Sarra would not have to give them up to her sister until then. And she vowed that these years would be filled with her children, not with the files and folios and endless busywork of her official position.
She’d
start tomorrow. She’d send back all the work that was unfinished—well, no, she couldn’t do that. But she’d complete everything tomorrow or the next day and refuse delivery of anything else. She’d send Dellian Vekke to Ryka Court to look after her offices there—well, no, she’d have to go with Dellian and help her, but only for a week or two. She’d make it known that emissaries, ambassadors, and petitioners were not welcome at Roseguard—well, no, she couldn’t do that, but she’d limit their time with her to no more than half an hour. As for the next session of the Council . . . she had to attend, she had no choice. But that wasn’t until early next year, and she’d go by Ladder from now on, much as she disliked that mode of travel.
After dinner, the men left the women alone at the table, repairing to the sitting room to discuss whatever it was men discussed when women weren’t present. Servants removed the dishes and Cloister-woven lace tablecloth, leaving the great black glass octagon bare of all but various brandy bottles and squat bell-shaped glasses. Taigan casually reached for one, earning a sternly raised brow from Tarise. Sarra gritted her teeth as Taigan sighed and subsided into her chair. Her own daughter, obeying someone other than herself! Her own fault.
When Taigan had been provided with iced coffee and the other women with flavored brandies as their tastes dictated, Riena Maurgen fixed Cailet with worried dark eyes, obviously continuing an earlier conversation. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for Aidan, of course, and I don’t object any more than my mother does—but is a Hall filled with Mageborns truly the place for one who has no magic?”
Cailet shrugged. “Aidan’s of an age to do as he likes, with Lady Sefana’s permission. I share your concern, though he did all right during his visit a few years ago.”
Sarra blinked. She could have recited the positions and dispositions of every single member of Council and Assembly, but she had no idea what her own family was talking about.
Lindren Ostin circled the lip of her brandy glass with one finger, staring at it as she said, “Ever since he was little, he’s wanted to become a Warrior Mage. When he turned fourteen and it was obvious he had no magic, he was crushed.”