by Melanie Rawn
Mirya flushed—chagrined at what she’d done, but infuriated at the memory. “He said nothing to the point, but the look in his eyes—! The sheer effrontery—! I tell you I was terrified for my very life!”
“Yes, well, I suppose he knew that even he couldn’t get away with outright intimidation. A woman’s word is still worth more than a man’s in the courts, after all.” Not even Sarra had been fool enough to try to get that changed. “What else did he say?”
“Oh, it was all couched in roundabout terms, but he forced me to sell my estate at Shore Hill to the Ostins. For thousands below its fair price, I assure you. Thousands!”
So she was accusing the pair of using official position for private gain. This was delightful. In addition to all the other plans she had for Sarra, Cailet, and Collan, malfeasance of such core-of-society proportions was perfect.
“I’m out on bail pending appeal,” Mirya went on bitterly. “Everything I own is signed over to the Rose-guard Justiciary. My own mother wouldn’t stand surety for me. Whatever happened to release on one’s honor as a Blood—and a First Daughter?”
“Indeed.” Glenin bestowed a benevolent smile on her guest. “My dear, you must come with me to Ryka. We’ll travel with Lady Vellerin Dombur—who, like us, believes in the virtue of the old days. I’m sure she can help. She arrives tomorrow, and we sail the next day.”
It was more than delightful. It was perfect. The Weaver had just supplied a new warp to the grand tapestry, and Glenin would have a marvelous time shuttling the unsuspecting threads back and forth to suit the design planned for years. Mirya’s lawsuit against Sarra and Collan—and Cailet, if Glenin had anything to say about it—would bring up explosive questions of misuse of power to interfere in a woman’s private affairs. Glenin hardly heard Mirya’s words of thanks—stilted and resentful with wounded pride—as she envisioned the fine tangle of legal and emotional and political skeins that would end up throttling both her sisters. And it wouldn’t even require any magic to accomplish, now that her son had proved himself worthy of being the next First Lord by using his magic to destroy Mage Hall.
3
AVIN Sonne was still in shock. He’d been in a mountain village for a week before and several days after St. Maidil’s, visiting his only son, the boy’s mother, her new young husband, and the family his son was about to marry into. Returning to Peyres on the fourth day of the week, he’d found Jored Karellos waiting for him with the horrible news that an unknown Malerrisi had killed the rest of the Sonne Mages. Jored had been shaken, too, only just having discovered the bodies before Avin arrived.
“No one came in,” Avin kept saying as Cailet held his hands beside the blazing hearth. He hadn’t slept since coming home yesterday morning, and looked it. “No one came into the shop to check on them. There must have been a Warding, don’t you think, Captal? Everyone knows us. The shop sign was turned to ‘closed’ but everyone knows to ignore that if they need us. There must’ve been a Ward that sent them away. It’s not possible that nobody needed medicine for so many days—how many was it? Three? Four? I don’t remember. There must’ve been a Ward—”
“I agree. Here, Elomar’s brought us some tea.” She didn’t drink; Elo’s eyes warned her that it contained something to calm Avin’s nerves. Not that Cailet couldn’t use a little of the same. She watched him gulp the steaming brew, part of her wishing for another bout of temporary oblivion.
The bodies of Kanelto, Virenna, Dantia, her husband, and her two younger daughters would be burned this evening. The First Daughter, Jiora, was in Cantratown; Avin requested, and Cailet gave, permission to go there by Ladder once he’d taken them all through to Ambrai.
“A fortunate survival,” Elomar said softly as the Warrior Mage’s chin sank to his chest in drug-induced sleep. “For his sake and ours.”
Cailet nodded. She knew all the Ladders, of course, but there were too many people to take through all at once to the Mage Academy, and she hadn’t time to perform shuttle service. The four days it had taken them to get to Peyres, even with Folded roads, had cost precious time—her fault, for so utterly losing control of herself and her magic that it was a struggle for others to Fold even while she was unconscious. They hadn’t told her that until this morning, when they’d set out on the last bit of the journey to Peyres. And they’d told her only because she grew curious about the relief on several faces as her efficiency got them twice as far in half the time. Gorsha’s efficiency; her own magic was still mending after the trauma, and his bestowed expertise was all that allowed her to discipline herself to the spell.
“He’ll wake clearheaded in two hours,” Elomar went on. “His friends here sent food. I suggest we eat.”
Again she nodded, and rose to ease the sleeping Mage into a more comfortable position in the big, soft chair. “Can someone local care for the shop? I’d hate for the town to go without medicines.”
“Josselin arranged it.”
When Avin woke, he escorted them all through Peyres to the opera house. Five Prentices, four Mage Guardians, and the Mage Captal made quite a spectacle on the streets at midafternoon. Cailet evaluated the glances they received. Inquisitive, certainly; toward Avin, compassionate; some frightened, some angry, some puzzled. But no satisfaction, no approval of what had been done. These people had lived beside the Sonnes, knew them, relied on them, were their friends. What they feared was a lack of Mages, not their presence in the community.
A girl of about sixteen approached from a bakery door, carrying a basket with something wrapped in a white napkin inside. “Will you see Jiora?” she asked Avin, and when he nodded she said, “Would you give her this? It’s just some baking I did this morning, those butter-walnut cookies she likes. And please tell her how sorry I am about your family.”
It seemed to be the signal for others to express sorrow and outrage, concern and pity. No, these people did not fear magic. They valued it and its practitioners, and urged Avin to come back soon.
Still, Cailet reflected as she walked down a theater aisle between rows of empty seats, there would be other places with other opinions. Large cities that didn’t care if magic existed or not, because in the press of people contact with Mages was rare; small towns where magic was looked on askance even after so many years and so much effort; tiny villages unfamiliar with Mages because there simply weren’t enough Mages to go around.
Backstage, she squeezed into the Ladder circle with Elomar, Dessa, Taigan, and Mikel, and wondered what the point had been. What had all her work and worry been for? What had nearly twenty years of her life accomplished? She was thirty-eight years old—what did she have to show for it but a duplication of what had occurred the year she was born? A handful of Mages who’d survived the wreckage of what should have been their strong-hold—
“Well?” said Elomar, and Cailet gave a start. “Are we going, or aren’t we?”
She closed her eyes and felt the Blanking Ward rise, and within moments they had left the afternoon behind in Peyres and were in a warm summer morning in Ambrai. Stepping out of the Ladder in the coldroom below the Academy kitchens, she didn’t wait for the others to arrive from Peyres but instead climbed the stairs to a ruin just like the one she’d left behind her. Nothing accomplished, nothing built, nothing changed from all those years ago—she might just as well never have lived at all.
Now, that’s the outside of enough, Gorsha scolded. Feeling sorry for yourself will get you exactly nowhere.
She didn’t even bother telling him to shut up, spare her the clichés, and leave her alone. Striding across grassy, tree-dappled slopes that had once thronged with Mages and Prentices and were now a public park, she headed for the shell of the Warders Garrison. In it was the Ladder that led to Telomir Renne’s rooms at Ryka Court—rooms that had belonged to Gorynel Desse when he was First Sword. She was just about to go inside, and to Ryka, when she heard someone shout her name.
Turning, she saw the tall, dark, elegan
tly clothed figure of Granon Mikleine running up the hill from the direction of the main city. Granon and Cailet had been born the same week in 951, and born too soon—for which the massacre in Ambrai was responsible. Cailet’s mother had gone into premature labor on hearing what her divorced husband had done; Fiella, Granon’s mother, had seen her own husband die. If not for the heroic efforts of a Healer Mage that had kept the baby in his mother’s womb until Fiella was safely removed from Ambrai, Granon and Cailet would have shared a Birthingday as well.
As she waited impatiently for him to catch up to her, she heard Gorsha mutter, St. Garony’s Gilded Gavel, that boy looks more like his grandfather every year.
Gorsha was sentimental about this grandson of his dearest friend. If one could believe his reminiscences, he and the first Granon had been rivals in everything from the appointment as First Sword to the bed favors of every beautiful, desirable young Mageborn woman at the Academy—none of which had prevented them from being boon companions. Granon Mikleine was the only man besides Tiva Senison that Gorsha had ever lost a woman to. But while Tiva had become Lilen Ostin’s husband and the acknowledged father of her children, Granon, like Gorsha, had been wary of marriage and official fatherhood. He’d died that second day at Ambrai, protecting two Captals—Leninor Garvedian and Lusath Adennos—while Gorsha guided the transfer of the Bequest.
Before the younger Granon had seen his third spring, Gorsha Warded him in secret—without even Fiella’s knowledge—to protect him just in case everything went wrong and the Mages were never restored to what they’d been. He owed it to his valiant old friend, and to the lovely Atheni Mikleine, Granon’s distant cousin and Fiella’s mother.
Cailet, who now had another Mikleine to worry about, recalled that Granon was now nearly the last Mage of that Name. She’d better tell him to watch himself, or he’d be dead, too.
If you persist in this, I swear that somehow I’ll find a way to have Mikel knock you in the jaw again.
This time she did tell him to shut the hell up—and made sure of it by imagining the slammed lid of an iron strongbox with him in it. “Granon,” she acknowledged as he came up to her, breathing hard. Technically, she could have greeted him as family—he was married to her cousin Elin—but that was of course impossible to admit. She usually greeted her Mages with the warmth that came of shared magic and the private ritual in the compass octagon—but for some reason she’d never grown to like Granon. He was pleasant and well-mannered, conscientious about his magic, a devoted husband and father, and able administrator with Elin of the city of Ambrai. But the latter position had in recent years given him a fine sense of his own importance, an annoying consciousness of rank and formidable magical heritage. Though Elin was of the Alvassy, Ambrai, Desse, and Dombur Bloods, he was descended from Adennos Healers, Bekke and Mikleine Warriors, and Garvedians who had produced a brilliant Captal. Whatever wide-eyed astonishment Granon had evidenced when Cailet entered him into the Lists in 972 was gone now, replaced by a pride that slid rather too often into arrogance.
Even at this hour of the morning—barely past Sixth—he was immaculately turned out in a summer-weight velvet longvest of Mikleine purple and black, lace-cuffed silk shirt pinned at the throat with a gold device cunningly combining Alvassy Castle Spire and Mikleine Hearthfire sigils. Two earrings of onyxes and diamonds glistened in his left earlobe; one would have done, Cailet thought, seeing him with Collan’s exacting eye. His boots were polished to a blinding gleam, and the only disorder about him was the spill of thick black curls imperfectly tucked into a black velvet coif.
“Captal! Thank all the Saints you’re safe! Elin’s brother arrived two nights ago with the news—and since yesterday morning we’ve had Mages coming by Ladder from all over Lenfell!”
“I assume they’re all waiting for me to tell them what to do.”
“No, Elin and I have been taking care of that. Most were sent to Ryka Court. A few were injured, and we’ve got them in the new Healers Ward across the hill.”
Presumptuous, she thought, and wondered why she reacted so pettily to an efficiency that spared her having to give orders. She struggled to put aside her aversion. “More might be coming, I don’t know. I’m going to Ryka myself. Now.”
“Elin will want to see you first.”
Elin Alvassy was dictating to her in what should have been her own city? A woman who ruled Ambrai only because neither Sarra nor Cailet could admit to being its rightful heirs? A woman who, moreover, was a Mage Guardian and subject to Cailet’s command?
Deciding she didn’t much like Elin either, Cailet shrugged a reply and started once more for the Garrison. “I don’t have time for Elin right now.”
“Captal, she would very much like to discuss this situation with you.”
Cailet pivoted on one heel. “Which situation did she have in mind? The situation where Mage Hall has just burned to the ground because we were betrayed from within? Or the situation that’s made her order all the Mages who come here for refuge out of the city so Ambrai doesn’t attract the Malerrisi? Or is it the situation regarding Vellerin Dombur—who sent a letter asking her as Blood kin to the Domburs and Ambrais to turn a blind eye when she and Glenin Feiran take over Domburronshir?”
All three “situations” were meant to shock. They succeeded. But that last sent hot, angry sparks into Granon’s dark eyes.
“Do you spy on us, Captal?” he demanded witheringly.
“I notice you don’t deny that the would-be Grand Duchess has contacted you.”
“I notice that you don’t deny the charge of spying! Who was it? Sirron Bekke?”
She lifted one hand in the ancient sign that meant she was not to be questioned. “Well? Does Elin care more for Ambrai than for her fellow Mage Guardians? Has she developed some family feeling for her long-lost cousins, the Domburs and the First Lady of Malerris?”
Granon’s stiff-spined haughtiness as he denied it told her what she wanted to know. Contact from Vellerin Dombur had been a guess, based not only on instinctive suspicion of Granon’s arrogance but on information from Telomir Renne through his Mage Globe just today. Three Councillors and seventeen Assembly Members with Dombur Blood connections had been simply approached. They needn’t actively support the bid for power; they need only not oppose it. Throw in with the Domburs, or at least keep your mouths shut, because the Mage Guardians are decimated and cannot stand against us. The sheer audacity of it, and what had dipped Telo’s pen in acid, was that Sarra had received a private letter from Glenin making the same request, based on the same Blood claims. A slap in the face, of course—a supremely insolent, supremely confident challenge to Sarra: do what you like, Glenin Feiran didn’t care.
Cailet interrupted Granon’s protestations. “Maybe I’d better see Elin after all. Bring her to the old Library. I can spare her twenty minutes.”
He went rigid with insult all the way to his coif, then informed her glacially, “My Lady is unable to leave the Octagon Court today for personal reasons. May I invite the Captal there? I assure the Captal her time will not be wasted.”
She shrugged and followed him through the parkland, across the bridge, and down the wakening streets of Ambrai to the Octagon Court. Twenty years ago she’d walked this very path with Sarra, through a city destroyed, deserted, and heaped with rubble. She admitted—grudgingly—that Elin and Granon had worked wonders. Ambrai was no longer the greatest city on Lenfell, and never would be again. But it was a viable, working community, thick with commerce and Shir government. So what if Granon was overly impressed by accomplishment? At least what he and Elin had built still stood.
He took her into the Octagon Court by the front entrance, to the accompaniment of much bowing by servants and stewards amid the marble, tapestries, and bronzes. Once upstairs out of the public area, the decoration turned from suitably palatial to skimpy and in some places ragged. Carpets were threadbare, stained from lying for years under piles of fallen tim
ber and stone; walls and ceilings still showed smoke- and fire-darkened patches no matter how many times they’d been painted. Cailet was shocked; Sarra hadn’t mentioned seeing any of this when she’d last been in Ambrai. But perhaps Elin had received her in the better rooms. These were the family quarters, and the contrast between the elegant first floor and these shabby hallways was a rebuke to Cailet’s earlier disdain.
Elin presented the best possible face to the world, creating the illusion that the Alvassys were nearly as rich and powerful as the Ambrais had once been, that the Octagon Court was nearly the graceful showcase it had always been, and that Ambrai itself was nearly as great as in former days. Money attracted money; Webs invested in prosperity, not squalor. So the downstairs reception chambers must needs be replete with fine furnishings, carpets, tapestries—and neither Elin nor Granon nor their daughters must ever be seen in public without making their clothes and jewels a show of affluence and fashion.
Cailet was thoroughly ashamed of herself. She didn’t like Granon any better, but at least she understood him more.
They were almost to the end of a long, drafty hall when Cailet stopped in her tracks. The towering oaken door to her right was Warded six ways to the Wraithenwood. She caught Granon by one silk sleeve.
“What in the Names of All the Saints is in there?”
“Elin.”
“Is she ill? Why is it Warded like this?”
“It’s a private matter. I’ll take you to her sitting room, and fetch her for you—”
Shaking her head, Cailet strode to the door. The Wards, beneath the Go Away and You’ve No Business Here, were dire: Fatal Sickness Within, Open This Door At Your Peril, and the like. Surely too much, surely inappropriate—Elin had been panicky when she’d Worked them. Cailet walked right through each one.
The door gave into a long room with uncurtained windows twenty feet high at the far end, bare of furnishings except for an iron bedstead in the corner and a cushioned wooden chair beside it. In the chair sat Elin; in the bed was a child about five years old. Piera, Elin’s youngest. Cailet bit her lip, then moved quietly forward. Was the child ill? No; Cailet smelled none of the usual medicaments and saw no signs of sickness in her face—dark with Desse and Mikleine heritage, eyes huge and brilliant, glittering not with febrile light but a restless, constantly shifting agitation. As Cailet approached, that unquiet gaze fell on her—and the small body arched as Piera let out a terrified wail. Struggling, she flung herself back and forth beneath a light sheet. Elin did nothing to restrain her; she didn’t have to. The child’s wrists and ankles were tied to the bedframe.