by Melanie Rawn
“Educational,” Elo remarked. “Almost like Lady Sarra and Val Maurgen.”
“I bet,” Cailet said. “How far are we from Peyres?”
“Another day.” Lusira sliced more cheese and put it into the empty bowl. Cailet opened her mouth to protest that she was full. Elomar scowled, and Lusira said, “All of it. You were unconscious for over two days.”
“Send someone ahead to make sure the Ladder is secure—”
“Taigan already did. Jored should be there now, in fact. He left yesterday morning.”
“Jored? He doesn’t have a Folding spell yet.”
“He learned,” Elo said succinctly.
“They all did, even Dessa and Mikel.” Lusira gave over the last slice of bread and poured more tea.
“Do I dare ask who’s been carting me around like a sack of wheat?”
“Joss, of course.” Lusira smiled. “He says his Folding is lousy, so he might as well make himself useful. Not that you’re much of a burden—and Saints know he’s got muscle enough to carry three of us without breaking a sweat.”
Cailet drank off the last of the tea and pointedly handed over the empty cup, plate, and bowl. “Are you happy now?” she asked Elomar.
“Deliriously.”
“Then send Mikel in with those Globes. Any glimmers in any of them, by the way?”
“Nothing.” Lusira stacked dishes, handed them to her husband, and brushed crumbs off the bed. “That could be both good and bad, naturally.”
Good, if these Mages had nothing to report; bad, if these Mages had been killed. Unfortunately, Mikel didn’t recall the names carved into the little wooden stands he’d swiped the Globes from.
“Just Telomir Renne’s,” he told Cailet. “I looked especially for his.”
“Good thinking. Now,” she said, settling herself cross-legged in bed with the six glass spheres on the bed before her, “picture the shelves in your mind. Close your eyes. This isn’t magic, just memory. See what you saw when you entered the office.” When he nodded, she went on, “You searched right off for Telo’s. It was on the third shelf, right in the middle.”
“I took it—and the one next to it. To the right.”
“That’ll be Pier Alvassy at Combel.” Frowning, she examined the six orbs nestled in folds of her black fur cloak. Telomir’s she had already set aside; it was one of the first she had made, and was larger than the newer ones. Besides, she contacted him rather often at Ryka Court, and so knew it pretty well by sight and touch. Pier’s she wasn’t so certain of, but of the five left three were quite small—no bigger than plums—so they must be for younger Mages. The other two were as big as Grand Roke apples, and so must have been made about the same time as Telo’s. If she’d had half a brain, she told herself, she would’ve had the glasscrafter etch the names onto the orbs—but then she’d never anticipated any situation in which she’d have to guess which belonged to whom.
“Any more from that shelf?” she asked Mikel.
“No,” he replied, eyes still squeezed shut. “One directly below Pier Alvassy’s—and another from that row, but whether it was three or four to the left I can’t remember. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. The one you’re sure of is one I’m sure of, too—Nia Girre.” Nia was a Scholar, Associate Dean of St. Mittru’s College in Kenroke before her retirement—and for a long while had been the only Mage Guardian in that city. Cailet knew her Globe to be one of the oldest. The other apple-sized one must be Pier’s, she realized; she’d made his and Elin’s at the same time, about a year after Telo’s. So that left the three small ones.
“I was picking them out pretty fast,” Mikel said, opening his eyes. “Teggie went into the other room to find you—” He stopped, blushing all over his boyishly freckled cheeks—which bore a man’s three-day stubble of amusingly carrot-red beard. Cailet nodded understanding, keeping a carefully expressionless face. “Anyway, things were crashing and collapsing all over, and I kept thinking about the fire getting upstairs. I looked over at the desk, I remember, and—” With a snort of disgust at himself he reached inside a pocket and produced a small bronze statue. “I took this, too. I thought you might want it.”
Cailet turned the little St. Miryenne over and over in her fingers, then set it aside. “Thank you. Now think about the shelves again. You must’ve had some sort of idea who I might want to contact, or where—”
“One of them is Tiron Mossen’s!” he blurted. “I remember because Kanen’s his nephew, and we talked a few days ago about his being posted to Seinshir—Kanen, I mean, after he’s Listed—so I thought it’d be important to find out if anything was going on at Malerris Castle.”
“Better and better,” Cailet approved, taking the very smallest of the Globes and setting it next to Telo’s. “I made Tiron’s last year, when I’d finally gotten the hang of the things.”
Mikel blinked, then realized she was making fun of herself. He gestured to the largest Globe. “You mean of making them little enough not to need a crate to pack ’em in?”
“Insolent child. I still don’t know how you juggled these things so long.”
“I took that old cloak of yours that was lying across a chair, put it on, and wrapped the Globes as best I could.”
“Dear me,” she drawled. “What would your father say?”
“Huh?”
“The scandal of it, the damage to your reputation! How could you allow yourself to be seen in a cloak at least eight inches too short?” She waited for him to grin, then asked, “Which other Globes did you take, Mikel?”
Blue eyes squeezed shut behind dark copper lashes, but eventually he had to shake his head. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I think Jored came in about then and distracted me.”
“Jored?” she asked as casually as she could.
“Well, you wouldn’t remember, I suppose.”
“Not a thing after you clobbered me,” Cailet replied cheerfully. “I really must have a talk with your mother about you. Though maybe it’d do more good to speak to your father—he has a tendency to the same disrespect. Did he ever tell you about the time he gave your mother such a slap on the rear that she couldn’t sit down for a week?”
“He did?” Mikel’s eyes were twice their usual size—and his chagrin over knocking Cailet out was forgotten, just as she’d intended.
“Why, yes,” she replied blandly. “The time he kidnapped her.”
“He did?”
Cailet smiled, seeing in Mikel’s face that he didn’t know whether to believe her or not. Remiss of Sarra and Collan not to have told their children family history. “I’ll tell you the whole tale sometime,” she promised. “For now, did you have other ideas about whom to contact?”
Again he blinked, and frowned, and said, “Somebody in Domburron—I thought that might be important, too, what with Vellerin Dombur coming to Ryka Court, to see if anything’s happening down there.”
Of the two Mages in the city of Domburron, only one had a Globe. “Lila Maklyn.”
“I guess so—yes, that was it. But I don’t remember the other one, Captal. I’m—”
“If you say ‘I’m sorry’ one more time—! Don’t exasperate me, Mikel—though that comes naturally to a son of your father as well. You alone remembered to grab these things, and now you’ve given me enough information to figure out who almost all of them belong to. You may now leave me alone with them. I’ve work to do.”
With a contrite smile, he rose and went to the door. Just as he opened it, however, he said over his shoulder, “I am sorry I hit you,” and made his escape.
Cailet punched at the pillow behind her back and took pen and paper from the bedside table. She sobered as she wrote out a brief message four times: Hall destroyed; 78 dead; advise your circumstances immediately. Tearing the sheet neatly into four pieces, she set one beside each identified Globe and spent the next fifteen minutes spelling the messages into the glass spher
es. She left Telo’s for last, and to it appended, Coming to Ryka. Twins safe.
She picked up the little statue again, glad Mikel had obeyed his impulse to save it from the wreckage. But where once the Saint’s serene smile had calmed her, now it seemed a smirking mockery. What if they were all dead? What if these Mages and Prentices with her now, and those on the road to Cantratown, were the only ones left alive? Could Glenin have done it, could she have wiped out so many at one stroke?
St. Miryenne stared back at her with a simper, holding the candle like a dare: Light it again. Go on, try.
Telomir’s Globe began to radiate an almost blinding light. She averted her eyes, and saw two of the other spheres glimmer, then a third. She read Telo’s first.
Refugees here from Wyte Lynn Castle, Neele, Havenport, Cantratown, Isodir—29 casualties—Tiron Mossen from Malerris waterfall Ladder, only survivor Seinshir Mages—what the hell is going on?
From The Waste, Pier Alvassy:
Are you safe? No trouble here but will find all Waster Mages immediately. Please advise your whereabouts and intentions.
From Kenroke, Nia Girre:
Malerrisi attempt failed, no casualties. Gather at Ryka Court?
From Lila Maklyn in Domburron:
Warrior, 3 Mages killed. Suspect Domburs with Malerrisi, no proof. Others, husbands, children gone to Ryka. I await instructions here.
Cailet sank into the pillow and closed her eyes. “So,” she murmured aloud. “It begins.”
Again, added Gorsha.
“I’m glad Telo’s safe—and that he’s the one in charge at Ryka. I can trust him to do what needs to be done.” She looked at the clear, silent Mage Globe, the one whose owner she hadn’t been able to name. Someone who was probably dead, and she would probably never know which of her Mages this sphere belonged to.
Elomar came in just as she finished writing her replies. He waited in silence while she sent them, asking nothing; her face must have been eloquent enough. He took each Globe from her hands as she finished with it, setting them neatly on the table. Finally, when she lay back once more, exhausted, he spoke.
“Jored has returned.”
She met his gaze. “And all the Mages at Peyres are dead.”
“Avin Sonne survives. As does the Ladder.”
“Can we be there tomorrow?”
“Possibly. If you sleep tonight.”
“Give me something, Elo,” she said. “Something so I’ll sleep without dreams. I can hear their Wraiths when I dream.”
And see Josselin, his hands holding my sword.
Caisha—it was only a dream.
2
WHEN Chava Allard announced the visitor, Glenin was far from pleased. The woman had on occasion been of use, both in her home city of Pinderon and later in Roseguard where she could report the latest about Sarra and her whelps, but recent events had rendered her much too notorious for Glenin to receive—even at this late hour, and within the obscurity of a third-rate inn on the Bleynbradden coast.
“She’s insistent,” Chava warned when Glenin refused to see the caller. “I think if you don’t let her in now, she’ll come back in broad daylight wearing her Name colors and sigil for all the world to see.”
Glenin chewed the end of her pen and looked down at the notes she was making for Ryka Court. Everything had to be perfectly timed, perfectly planned—perfectly staged. How she missed Chava’s mother! Saris had possessed a gleefully devious mind and an uncanny understanding of how to prod and nudge using every emotion known to woman or man; the new Threadkeeper was a grimly dedicated individual with little imagination and no sense of humor at all. Glenin had left him at Malerris Castle.
In fact, it was just herself and Chava on this embassy to Ryka Court—and her son, of course, once Cailet did the expected thing and arrived to declare her grievances before the Council and Assembly. Saris had, in fact, long ago predicted her behavior based on what Chava had observed during his years in Heathering. This one throw of the dice, risking all and paying for all, had been in the plotting for fifteen years. Not that it would be much of a gamble; Glenin, with Saris’s help and now Chava’s, had anticipated and provided for everything.
“A tweak to tighten the weave here, a pulled thread there—” She could see Saris’s cheerful smile, like a wolf on the hunt who smells success a long way off. “—and of course one very important thread dyed a different color for a few years!”
And now, on the eve of success, this irritating woman had come to pester her with some petty problem. Still, Chava was right. Glenin must speak to her, if only to get rid of her. She nodded curtly, and Chava—scratching at the beard she’d ordered him to grow—went to fetch Lady Mirya Witte.
She came upstairs to the tiny room wrapped in a nondescript brown cloak—threadbare, Glenin noted with irony. Mirya’s place in the Great Loom had frayed, too, in recent years. Chava took the cloak from her shoulders, bowed, and left the women alone. As Mirya took a chair without being invited, Glenin saw that the spectacular figure was spectacular no more. Despite artful padding and propping, she was thin in all the wrong places and positively drooping in others. Never handsome, unless one had a taste for horses, her face showed reversals in public and private fortunes: bags and sags and dry, wrinkled skin that caved in below the cheekbones and stretched with the stretching of her lips in a smile. There was evidence of drink in the bloodshot eyes, and of sleeplessness in the dark smudges below them. She was forty-eight, a year older than Glenin, and looked closer to sixty.
“Well?” Glenin asked.
“You must help me,” Mirya said. She folded stickthin fingers around each other to hide their tremors, knuckle grating against knuckle. “Hear me out, and you’ll find advantages to yourself in it.”
Mirya knew how to capture her attention, even if the promised gains were doubtful at best. But she heard the woman out, and though most of the tale was already familiar to her, she had to struggle to keep eagerness from her face and posture as Mirya came to her conclusion.
The meat of it was this: she had been coerced several years ago into not divorcing her husband—and indeed into giving him freedoms humiliating to her and disgraceful to the institution of marriage. The person who’d wrung these concessions from her was Collan Rosvenir, infamous himself for the liberties he took in his marriage and in society at large.
Twenty-six days ago, on St. Pierga’s, Mirya’s husband was found dead in an alley outside the Silver Tankard, a tavern in Roseguard. He’d just come to Sheve from Brogdenguard, where he taught at St. Caitiri’s, bringing Mirya’s First Daughter with him; she had received her Certificate and was now ready to find a husband. After delivering the girl to her mother’s house, Ellus had left his things at Wytte’s and gone out for a meal.
The murder was particularly brutal—throat slashed ear-to-ear, so deep that an autopsy revealed that not only his windpipe but his spine had been cut. He was still bleeding when found, setting the time of death at just before Fourteenth. There were seventeen other knife wounds to his body made after the death blow, which to the Rose-guard Watch indicated that even though his purse and personal jewelry were missing, this was not the work of a common thief. The vicious depth of the wound to the throat, the savage stab wounds inflicted as he bled into the gutter—these had real emotion in them: hatred, revenge, jealousy.
It had been a quick trial.
Mirya was unable to account for her whereabouts at the approximate time of the murder. Her sole remaining servant stoutly avowed in court that not only was the best carving knife vanished from the kitchen (“I keeps my knives sharp, so I do—and day after Saints’ Days every week I whet them, so I knew immediate-like”) but that the laundry hamper included a pair of black gloves soaked right through (“And before I do the knives, I puts the wash on to soak, so I do, and what were those gloves doing all damp as if someone’d already washed them clean?”). Mirya’s own First Daug
hter coldly testified that she’d gone into her mother’s rooms at Half-Thirteenth and again at Fourteenth, and found no one there. Mirya’s original denial of guilt when arrested changed under this devastating evidence to justifiable manslaughter.
“For he was my husband,” she told Glenin stiffly, “and defied me at every turn, even when I was generous to him—he ruined me in society, he mocked me by conducting himself in ways no decent husband should, he turned my mother and my daughters against me, he—”
“And you were convicted anyway of slitting his throat,” Glenin interrupted.
“How could I get a fair trial in Roseguard? Everyone there is owned by Lady Sarra.”
Mirya was taking her appeal to the High Judiciary at Ryka Court. Her defense now included a lawsuit against Sarra Liwellan and Collan Rosvenir for felonious interference between a woman and her husband, unlawful coercion, alienation of husbandly and daughterly affections, and instigating breach of legal contract.
“What?” Glenin eyed her, unsure whether to be appalled or amused.
“To begin with the first charge, they destroyed my marriage by sticking their noses in. Secondly, they forced me to give Ellus outrageous freedoms and allowing him to be employed in a distant Shir—taking my daughters with him! At the same time they forbade me to divorce him unless he consented!”
“Monstrous,” Glenin said, knowing how it would play to conservatives.
“And then, as if all this wasn’t enough, they deprived me of my last chance at happiness with a man perfectly willing to be my husband! They sent him to Mage Hall!”
Yes, I know, Glenin thought, hiding a grin. “You say they coerced you. I assume you mean they threatened to use their financial and political influence?”
“Of course. They drove me to this, it was my only escape from a hateful marriage to a man who’d lost all sense of propriety and decency—I was perfectly justified in what I did!”
“From what I know of Rosvenir, he’s more likely to’ve threatened to give you the same bruises and broken bones you gave Ellus Penteon.”