by Melanie Rawn
GLENIN—
initiated by her father into the secrets of Malerrisi magic, she craves the power and position she believes are her rightful heritage—and she will do anything and use anyone in pursuit of her goals.
SARRA—
fostered under a name not her own when a treacherous attack destroys all she holds dear, she’ll devote herself to championing the underground resistance force known as the Rising—and to protecting the younger sister whose very existence is the most closely guarded secret in their world.
CAILET—
destined from birth to become the Mage Guardians’ last, best hope, she will grow to young womanhood ignorant of her abilities and her destiny—and will prevail only if she can overcome the spell barriers long ago imposed upon her magic.
Bound together by ties of their ancient Blood Line, torn asunder by the magical intrigues and political ambitions of their elders, these three Mageborn sisters will fight their own private war, and the victors will determine whether or not the Wild Magic and the Wraithenbeasts are once again loosed to wreak havoc upon their world.
DAW Books Presents
the finest in Fantasy by
MELANIE RAWN
EXILES
THE RUINS OF AMBRAI
THE MAGEBORN TRAITOR
DRAGON PRINCE
DRAGON PRINCE
THE STAR SCROLL
SUNRUNNER’S FIRE
DRAGON STAR
STRONGHOLD
THE DRAGON TOKEN
SKYBOWL
THE GOLDEN KEY
(with Jennifer Roberson and Kate Elliott)
Copyright © 1994 by Melanie Rawn.
All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Michael Whelan.
ISBN: 978-1-101-66631-9
Map by Marty Siegrist.
DAW Book Collectors No. 966.
Published by DAW Books, Inc.
1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
First Paperback Printing, November 1995
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA.
HECHO EN U.S.A.
Version_1
For my grandmother,
Stella Alderson
1885-1976
Contents
Also by Melanie Rawn
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Part One
Collan
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Glenin
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Sarra
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Cailet
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two
Ladders
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Betrayals
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Flight
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
The Rising
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part Three
Dreams
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
Genealogy
Selective Index
Calendar of Saints
How to Say It
Author’s Note
Part One
942–967
Collan
1
He remembered the wind.
Skittering in the far reaches of his mind were oth
er memories: warmth, and light, and snug belonging in some cheerful firelit room where a woman sang. Had these images been useful, he would have remembered them more clearly. What he knew in this life, he knew because it helped him survive.
Thus the wind. Sudden and brutal, it shoved him down an embankment into a muddy ditch, where he lay bruised and stunned while it howled down the gorge like a wounded wild animal. He tried to move, to get up and run, but was helplessly pinned. When the wind died as quickly as it had been born, he crawled out of the ditch bleeding.
Years after, he learned that while he sprawled in the mud, flattened by the wind, brigands set fire to his mother’s house. She died along with whoever else had been within—his sisters and brothers, perhaps. He didn’t remember.
More years passed before he learned that no one else had felt the wind.
He went back a long time later, and saw how it might have happened. Maslach Gorge formed a natural funnel and some freakish shift in pressure could have forced air down it. As he walked back to where another house was built around the stern chimney and another woman lived with her children, he wondered why he remembered no root-torn trees, no leaf-stripped bushes. Surely so amazingly powerful a wind had felled other things besides him.
Well, a child that age would not have noticed. He could not have said exactly how old he was when it happened. Four, he guessed—perhaps a little less, certainly no more. Eventually he chose the Feast of St. Lirance, first day and first full moon of the year, as his Birthingday. The Lady of the Winds had saved his life.
He didn’t remember why he’d wandered so far from the house. Neither did he remember the winter cold that must have been, or the time he certainly spent stumbling across ice-crusted grainfields into the forest. He had a clear memory of the cartroad, however, for it, too, had been of use to him. The rutted track had led him to where people were: people who fed him, warmed him, kept him alive, and at length sold him as a slave.
Groggy with cold and exposure, he went to the people willingly. One of them picked him up from the dirt road and settled him on her hip. She wore a plain silver bracelet set with blue onyx. If he squinted through his lashes, the pale gold sliver in the stone looked like a candle flame. He trusted the wearer because he recognized the bracelet: it had been worn by the singer beside the fire. He snuggled against the woman wearing silver and onyx, and fell asleep. It was only when he woke the next morning inside an iron cage within a dark wagon that he began to be afraid.
They fed him, tended his cuts and bruises and frostbitten toes, and kept him in the cage as they traveled. He was given clean if threadbare clothes, woolen socks too big for his feet, and a chipped clay jug to relieve himself in. The outside world vanished for him. He knew only the wooden slats of the rocking wagon, the crates and carpets piled within, and the cold iron cage.
It had been made for an animal—barely big enough to crouch in, or sit in with knees to chin. Tufts of fur snarled in the hinges. He plucked them out carefully and rolled them into a ball to feel the softness. The bronze fur smelled of cat, and for some reason that comforted him. A shred of silvery claw had been left behind as well, torn on a hinge. He remembered the fur and the claw because they’d told him something important. No feline, for all its strength and cunning, could reason even as simply as a four-year-old child. Hinges went with doors. Doors had latches that made them open. The cage had hinges, so there must be a door with a latch—and he could open it.
So he did.
The hinges squealed betrayal. The wagon jerked to a stop. He tumbled through the cage door just as the woman wearing the armlet appeared in a sudden sun-blaze rectangle at the back of the wagon. She slapped him hard enough to split his lip, stuffed him back into the cage, and tied his ankles to the iron with thick, prickly twine.
The people never talked to him. To each other, yes, and they even sang sometimes after the wagon had stopped and it got colder and darker. But they never talked to him. He wondered, years later, why they’d been so circumspect around so small a child. Surely they couldn’t have feared he would identify them to the authorities. There were no authorities in the Tillinshir backlands where brigand wagons rolled. He didn’t understand about the cage, either. How far could a little boy run before they caught him?
He was halfway through his life before he knew the reason for the cage was the armlet, and what it had told the brigands about the woman they’d killed, the woman who had been his mother.
He never knew how many days he spent in the cage. Forty, perhaps fifty, to judge by the distance from Maslach Gorge to Scraller’s Fief. One day he was dragged out by the scruff to stand on shaky legs before a tall, skeletal man whose black eyes were the coldest he had ever seen—but not the coldest he would ever see in his life.
He remembered how Flornat the Slavemaster had looked him over with those eyes like chips of ice-sheened obsidian, and paid for his new acquisition in real gold. This memory had nothing to do with survival; it burned with shame in his mind. Even at four years old, he understood that the man had traded a shiny yellow circle for him, the way he’d once seen someone—he didn’t know who—trade a brass cutpiece for a copper kettle. A price had been put on him: a cost for a commodity, a statement of his worth, a definition of his value by someone who saw him only as a live, healthy, usable item for sale.
He told her about it once, about how it had made him feel like a thing instead of a person. The revelation came after a shouting match caused by the innocent gift of a silver earring. She hadn’t been trying to buy him—but she hadn’t understood his revulsion, either. After he calmed to rationality, he realized it was probably the blue onyx dangling from the silver circle that had ignited memory and temper. She’d done her best to make it up to him, but how could a Lady of Blood, born to pride and privilege, understand the unique humiliation of knowing you had been sold?
His owner was Scraller Pelleris. Scraller was that vanishing rarity, a man in complete charge of his family’s estate. He had inherited by virtue of having outlived every single one of his relations. Virtue, of course, had nothing to do with it. By the time Scraller acquired a certain very young copper-haired slave, talk had long since died down about the fortuitous (for Scraller) deaths of three sisters, four aunts, and five cousins. His mother had drawn her final breath approximately one minute after Scraller drew his first. It was said she had a premonition of what her son would become and, as she died, muttered, “I choose to join the Wraiths.” Presumably this was preferable to staying around to watch her lastborn’s career. Before Scraller was twenty, she had welcomed all her relatives into the Wraithenwood, probably with an I told you so.
Pelleris Fief became known by Scraller’s nickname. In the local parlance of The Waste, a “scrall” was the clever and invariably criminal act of making something out of nothing. Despite its connotation, Scraller used it with pride. Many people—including his own late, unlamented family—had called him worse.
Scraller’s Fief was a massive stone warren built atop a substantial pile of rock in The Waste. A climb of three hundred and eighty-six steps—one for each day of the year—past two barbicans bristling with guards led through iron gates to a courtyard scarcely wide enough to circle a wagon in. The main tower was a gigantic construction of gray granite roofed in blue tile. From the courtyard, the effect was that of a face topped by a thatch of blue hair. A broad balcony and overhanging stone canopy, both studded with iron spikes, formed toothy half-open jaws. Above were two tall windows like great pale eyes reflecting the sun. The nose was the banner dangling between the windows, crimson edged in brown and lacking a device. The First Tier Pelleris family had neither money nor influence to purchase their way into Blood status. They owned much of The Waste, but as the name implied, that wasn’t saying much. Scraller’s ambition was to swell his coffers and create a court worthy of notice by First Councillor Avira Anniyas, so he could ride through his gates into his courtyard and behold his castle grinning down at him wit
h a golden galazhi galloping across its crimson nose like a wart on the nose of a drunkard.
When Scraller was twenty-eight, the death of the last notable opponent of the First Councillor’s power gave him the opportunity he needed. In exchange for a percentage off the top, Scraller was given complete control over all economic activities in The Waste. Again, this wasn’t saying much. But Scraller hadn’t earned his nickname in vain. He undertook a massive drainage project—never mind that the noxious siphoning of The Waste Water polluted the sea into which it spilled for five years afterward. Dried salts scraped off sunbaked land revealed soil perfect for concrete—never mind that half of it was adulterated with those same salts, and tended to crumble after ten years. Scraller made a luscious profit, even after Avira Anniyas took her share.
So it was that Scraller was elevated to the status of Blood. Golden galazhi minced not only across the courtyard banner but on every door, carpet, chair, fireplace hood, pillow slip, and napkin in the castle. (The launderers said that its execution in gold embroidery on Scraller’s crimson underdrawers was especially fine.) The First Councillor was generous to those who served her well. Besides, The Waste was so far from Ryka Court that she didn’t much care what happened there so long as her percentage kept rolling in, the concrete for her own building projects was top grade, and the rebellious Mage Guardians found no succor at the Fief.
In the Council Year 942, Scraller’s latest acquisition had no knowledge of economic or political matters. He knew that he had been safe, and now was not; that he’d been sold, and did not like it. And when Scraller’s mark—the inevitable galazhi—was painfully etched in yellow ink on his right shoulder, he knew it was all real. The warm hearth and the woman’s soft singing were gone forever.
Eventually he was found to be quick of mind, so he was given the rudiments of an education—just enough to make him a more useful servant to his master. He was taught to read and write, and showed an aptitude for mathematics. But it was several years before his real value became apparent.
He was a musician born. To him, notes on a page were like numbers in a column that added up to a sum—or a song. Cool, precise, with only one right answer, music and mathematics were the same to him.
It took a Bard silenced forever and a Lady of ancient Blood to teach him that they weren’t the same at all.