by Melanie Rawn
Mikel shifted nervously, and Taigan’s defiant gaze finally lowered to contemplation of the flowered Cloister rug. This morning, everything had been so easy and daring. (Well, mostly easy.) They’d been sure that once their part in the courier’s hand-off was revealed, they’d be hailed as full adults with all rights and privileges pertaining thereto.
This was obviously the last thing either of their parents had in mind. Their father had stopped yelling at them, but his eyes still smoldered. Yet there was something else, something they’d seen only once or twice: fear. It was in their mother’s eyes, too.
Mikel cleared his throat. “We’re sorry. Really.” He nudged Taigan with an elbow.
“Truly told,” she said. “But we—”
“Be quiet,” Sarra said, and for all the coldness of her eyes, her voice trembled. “You have no idea what you’re talking about!” Pacing away from them, she went to the windows, her small pale figure framed by the spring garden outside.
“Sarra,” her husband said softly, “they’re home safe.”
Taigan thought it might be time to point out the obvious. “And we made the transfer just fine, Mother.”
Mikel gulped and stared at the carpet.
“Oh, so that makes it all right?” She spun around and glared at them.
“What is it?” Collan asked. “And where?”
“Just a box,” said Taigan. “We didn’t look inside.”
Mikel added, “It’s in Teggie’s bathroom ceiling.” This earned him an annoyed glance now that promised another fist in the shoulder later.
Their father sighed. “I thought I told somebody to have that fixed.”
“I’ll go get it,” Mikel went on, seeing an escape route.
“You’ll stay right where you are,” commanded his mother. “What sort of box?”
“Plain wood,” Taigan answered. “Walnut, I think. No lock or anything.”
“But you didn’t try to open it?” Black eyes narrowed at them.
“No, Mother.” Taigan glanced at Mikel again, sharing the thought: how strange that they hadn’t even considered taking a look inside.
Their mother turned to their father. “Why would it be Warded?”
“Warded!” Taigan exclaimed.
Mikel nodded sagely, as if he’d known it all along. “The courier was a Mage Guardian.”
Collan swore under his breath. “Name? Age? Looks?” he snapped.
“Uh—he didn’t tell us his name. And he kind of looked like. . . .” Mikel trailed off and frowned at Taigan. “Was he as tall as I am?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I think he had dark hair—and maybe a beard?”
“I don’t really remember. And he could’ve been about twenty-five, or a little older, or—” He blinked. “He didn’t just Ward the box—he Warded us!”
“No,” Sarra said grimly, “himself, so you couldn’t describe or recognize him later.” She started for the door, her husband right behind her, pausing only long enough to fling back over her shoulder, “Stay put. I’ll deal with you later—and I guarantee you’re not going to like it.”
Left alone in their parents’ chambers, the twins stood silent and immobile for a full minute. At last Mikel ventured, “If the courier wasn’t supposed to be a Mage, who was he?”
“And if the box isn’t just a box, what is it? And how come those men wanted it so bad?” Taigan gulped. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. If we’re lucky, the box will keep them so busy they won’t even remember we exist until tomorrow.”
“If they can’t find us, they’ll only get madder,” Mikel warned.
“What could be worse than the way Mother looked just now?” Cool as Taigan had been most of the day, now she was fidgety. Sarra could have that effect on people.
“How about the tree house?” Mikel suggested.
“Perfect.”
But they discovered from the footman waiting in the hallway that orders had been given to confine them—not just to the Residence, but to their rooms.
Taigan maintained her composure until they’d turned their backs on their grim-faced escort and were halfway up the stairs. “Damn it!” she muttered.
Mikel heroically refrained from saying I told you so. Instead, he mused aloud, “For just a little while there I felt kind of grown up, y’know?”
2
COL was about to step up onto the porcelain commode to get at the hiding place in the ceiling when Sarra came into the bathroom.
“Holy Saints! Let me do it, you’ll break the fixtures and we’ll have water all over everything!”
He moved aside, bowing with a flourish of one hand. She shrugged out of her jacket, tossing it onto the small velvet-covered stool before Taigan’s dressing table. Steadying herself with a hand on Collan’s shoulder, she hopped up onto the commode lid, strained on tiptoe, and groped around in the hole where a bit of plaster had come down.
“I could kill those two,” she said.
“Stand in line,” he advised.
“Where—oh, here it is.” She extracted the small, square box and jumped down onto the tiled floor. “Who was the courier supposed to be?”
“Savachel Maklyn.”
“The one with a second cousin at Mage Hall?”
“The very same. And Sava’s got about as much magic as your average fish.” He tilted his head and regarded her curiously. “How do you keep all this information in your head?”
“You know a million songs,” she retorted. “How do you do it?”
“My job.”
“Exactly. Besides, Savachel’s the favorite grandson of Councillor Vasha Maklyn—first Minstrel in three Generations of the family, and she loves music.”
“He is pretty good,” Col allowed. “Who do you think took a whack at him?”
Sarra turned the box over and over in her hands. “How would I know? Other than a Malerrisi, that is. Those idiot children! Look at this, Col—Glenin practically advertised!” She pointed to the crafter’s mark on the underside: a spool with a threaded needle stuck into it. “How did they get away with their lives?”
“Dumb luck. We’d better call in Trelin Halvos—unless you think you can get past the Ward and open that thing.”
Going past him into Taigan’s bedroom, she said, “We don’t need her. This is meant for me, from Glenin Feiran.”
“I’ll send for her anyway—and don’t you dare open that until he arrives.”
But it was too late. Sarra did nothing to the box’s lid, but her presence, her voice, her hands upon it—whatever the identification, it was enough to trigger the Ward. Heat radiated from it until she could no longer hold it. With a sudden cry she dropped it onto the carpet. The joining came apart, the hinge dropped off, and it separated into six equal pieces: four sides, the bottom, and the lid.
Collan hauled her toward the door as six translucent Mage Globes, each as large as the box had been and flashing all the colors of the rainbow, coalesced five feet above the floor. They hovered, rearranged themselves into a circle, and chimed the same note in six octaves, the highest almost painfully shrill. But the voice that issued from each in turn was Glenin Feiran’s.
“Greetings, Sarra!”
“Lovely weather this spring, don’t you think?”
“How are your charming children and handsome husband?”
“I remember them all very well and look forward to seeing them again!”
“My regards to the Captal!”
“And here’s a little gift for you!”
Collan grabbed Sarra to his chest and flung them both out of the bedroom. He got them out of Taigan’s chambers and two steps down the hall before a blast of sound and heat struck their backs and knocked them sprawling to the floor. Sarra, half underneath her husband, caught her breath, squirmed free and got to her feet. Collan rolled over and stared up at her.<
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“You all right?” he asked at last.
“Fine. I think, however,” she said coolly, “that we’d better call the architects. Taigan’s room will need redecorating.”
3
IT was very late, or very early, depending on whether or not one had slept. Sarra, dressed in a filmy silver night-robe, sat at her bedchamber windows and gazed out at the gardens. Collan was asleep. From time to time she glanced over at him, a smile touching her lips. She’d grown up knowing that somewhere a Blooded son, suitably wealthy and advantageously connected, would be found for her to marry; that her choice had fallen on an all-but-Nameless Minstrel still amused her.
“Stop thinking so loud,” he said.
She rose from the window seat. “It’s just that the gears are stuck.”
He was propped on his elbows, head tilted slightly to one side. The years—or maybe raising their impossible children—had added gray to his coppery curls and a few lines to the corners of his very blue eyes, but also a certain unexpected sweetness to his smile. “What is it? Teggie and Mishka?”
“Partly.” She sat on the bed, watching his face by moonlight. “It may be time they went to Cailet.”
His frown was everything she’d expected. “Another year.”
She hated to ask it, but she had to. “Col, can we keep them safe?”
“Yes.” When her brows arched at his vehemence, he shrugged and went on, “I know, I know—either they learn to use this magic of yours and Cai’s, or they’ll get killed doing something even more stupid than they did today.”
After the explosion, the twins had confessed. Sarra had been struck dumb—though whether terror or fury predominated, she had no idea. The combination had rendered her mute. Not so Collan, though he hadn’t so much as raised his voice. In a quiet, lethal tone, he’d told the twins never to do anything like this again. Period. End of conversation.
But not end of speculation. The young Mage had not been a Mage but a Malerrisi; far from defending their lives, he had arranged the attack himself to bolster his credentials with whoever had arrived for the transfer. How he had managed to find out that a transfer was indeed scheduled for that day and place and time was accountable by the fact that the Minstrelsy courier had limped into Roseguard early this evening with an egg-sized lump on his head, a swordslice to his thigh, and a message for Collan from an agent in Sheve. How the Malerrisi must have exulted when the couriers turned out to be Taigan and Mikel Liwellan.
“They need to learn how to protect themselves from things like what happened today,” Collan went on. “But they haven’t learned everything you and I can teach them yet.”
“Sometimes I wonder. They’re growing up—growing restless.”
“Like you and me.”
She nodded. “I’m just not sure how much longer we can keep their wings clipped.”
All at once he grinned. “Did you get a look at them today? Especially Taigan?”
Sarra made a face. “Reckless, arrogant, defiant—exactly like you!”
“I humbly contradict you, First Daughter—the arrogance they get from you!”
“I’m never—”
“Well, we won’t quibble.” He picked up the trailing end of her braid and toyed with it. “I want them with us just a little longer, Sarra. They may think they’re all grown up, but—”
“—but they’re not.” She paused. “Even so, they’re older than most of Cai’s Prentices.”
He said nothing for a moment, then pulled an annoyed face. “I guess I still don’t quite believe that children of mine are going to become Mage Guardians.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Some,” he admitted. “But I’m proud of ’em. It’s just strange to think that something I made turns out to be Mageborn.”
“I had something to do with it, too, you know.”
“Did you? I don’t remember. Remind me.”
And he pulled her down into his arms. While kissing her, his fingers undid the braid and spread her hair all around them like a curtain of gold. She barely felt it: he had a magic all his own, and when he let her up for air, she told him so.
“Think that’s something?” he scoffed. “How about this?”
Much later, as they lay side by side with a silk sheet draped over them as shelter from the soft night breeze, Sarra felt his arms tighten around her again. “What is it?” she asked sleepily.
“Cai.”
“What about her?”
“Been a long time.”
Sarra thought that over. Her sister had last visited Roseguard just after Glenin tried to kidnap the twins—five years ago—when without their knowledge she’d Warded them yet again. She’d said then that this was the last time; and now that Sarra thought about it, she knew Cailet meant that at their next meeting, the Wards would be taken away forever. Cailet had spent years waiting for the twins, just as Gorynel Desse had waited for her. But neither Taigan nor Mikel would go through what Cailet had in coming into her magic. She’d made sure of it.
Sarra and Collan tried to get up to Tillinshir to visit Cailet every year or so. The Council didn’t have as much of Sarra as it used to, but Collan’s Minstrelsy had much more of him. Their time with each other and their children was more precious than ever. In retrospect, Sarra felt a little guilty at having neglected Cailet.
“I’m not sure I know her all that well anymore,” Collan said.
“I know her,” Sarra replied quietly. She could always feel her sister’s living presence, ever since that shocked moment in Pinderon so many years ago. But lately it seemed Cailet had withdrawn a little, putting measures of mind as well as of distance between them. “I know her,” Sarra said again, to reassure herself. “She hasn’t changed. Just gotten older, like all of us.”
“Not you,” Col said. “Any girl who can do what you just did—”
“Collan!”
He laughed and tugged at a lock of her hair. “I love you, First Daughter.”
“Oh, and now I’m supposed to tell you how much I worship and adore you, what a wonderful husband you are to me, what a marvelous life we have together—”
“Oh, I know all that,” he replied blandly.
“Then why did you say what you just said?”
“Because it’s true. I love you.”
A rare and simple statement; it brought sudden tears to her eyes. She rested her forehead on his chest and whispered, “I love you, too.”
4
THE card table’s marble top—dark blue with a gold grain, highly polished—made a fair mirror at the correct angle. Thus even with her gaze lowered, Taigan could still judge her father’s expression as he leaned over the six pieces of the Malerrisi box. The wood had survived yesterday’s blast of heat and wind; Taigan’s room had not. She had moved into one of the guest chambers. Her wardrobe had also been a casualty, which was why she had refused to accompany her mother and brother to that morning’s meeting of the Sheve Justiciary. She had no intention of being seen in public wearing the same dress she’d worn yesterday—now the only dress she had. Naturally, the disaster was to her eyes the perfect opportunity to replace her little-girl wardrobe with clothes of elegance and sophistication. Equally naturally, her parents didn’t see it that way. But Taigan was, if nothing else, her father’s daughter.
“I could make an appointment with Ela Agrenir this afternoon, and have something to wear by tomorrow.”
“Mmm,” her father responded.
“After all,” she continued as Collan continued to inspect the six interlocking squares of wood, “I’m sixteen, and that’s quite old enough to be dressed by Mother’s designer.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Besides that, I have to learn what looks best on me, so that when I make public appearances I create a good impression.” She smothered a grin of triumph as, reflected in the tabletop, one corner of his mouth twitched with involuntary amusemen
t. This was definitely the line to take with him: an appeal to his pride. His long musician’s fingers turned a piece over and over, testing weight and smoothness, and she went on, “It’s part of my position as your daughter to be at the forefront of fashion. How does it look when I’m wearing some tacky old thing meant for a little girl? We have a reputation to uphold.”
“That so?” He exchanged one piece for another seemingly identical one.
“Everybody else is wearing—”
His head lifted and his blue eyes regarded her, brows arched above them. “Mistake,” he said. “Don’t tell me you want to be a trendsetter and then talk about what all the other girls are wearing. What you should’ve said was, ‘You should see the awful stuff some of my friends had on at the party yesterday—it’s my civic duty to show them how to dress.’”
Taigan slammed the flat of her hand on the table. The pieces of the box rattled. “I’m tired of looking like a twelve-year-old!”
“When you stop whining like one, then maybe I’ll consider making an appointment for you with Domna Timarrin to replace your wardrobe.”
Her breath caught. Timarrin Allard was the most exclusive designer in North Lenfell. Though Mother preferred to patronize the local Roseguard designers, she ordered one special gown each year for the reception following the opening of the Council. And Fa was offering whole closetfuls of Timarrin Allard clothes—!
“You mean—everything?” she asked her father in hushed tones. “Dresses and ball gowns and shirts and trousers and suits and—and everything?”
“It would mean a trip to Ambrai. She doesn’t go to her clients, they go to her. And we can’t get anything from her before your Birthingday party—sorry, pixie.”
That didn’t matter to Taigan. It was only one party. There’d be hundreds more, all of them with her in the splendor of a Timarrin Allard Original. “How do you know she’ll see me?”