by Melanie Rawn
She sent Auvry Feiran, and an army.
From Hunt week to Wildfire Glenin slept each night with his note beneath her pillow. The battles of blood and magic she saw fought inside her dreams caused her to wake sweating.
When he finally returned three days after St. Caitiri’s, it was not by ship but openly—daringly—by Ladder. He went immediately to the Council and begged leave to report that Ambrai would no longer annoy anyone with its intransigence. Ambrai was utterly destroyed.
Glenin expected to feel more than she did. She had long since stopped missing her mother and little sister. Being the center of Auvry Feiran’s life more than made up for the loss. She did regret that circumstances had forced her father to do what he’d done. But had she been given a choice, she knew she would have chosen him instead of her mother—just as he had chosen her instead of Sarra.
No one knew the fate of Maichen Ambrai and her younger daughter; rumor was they still lived . . . somewhere. It didn’t matter. Ambrai was gone. The Mage Academy, Bard Hall, and Healers Ward were charred husks; the bustling docks had collapsed into the river; wooden houses and stone public buildings and markets and even the Council House were rubble. Outlying farms were put to the torch, fields trampled. Surviving inhabitants—a tenth of the more than sixty thousand citizens of Ambrai—fled. Lady Allynis was dead, and her husband Gerrin Ostin. Tama Alvassy and her husband Gerrin Desse had been killed, and their three small children had vanished as surely as Maichen and Sarra. The Captal was dead, and at least a thousand Mage Guardians—even, it was said, the mighty Gorynel Desse.
Remembering how the old man had spoken to her father, Glenin nodded in grim satisfaction.
She fretted, though, about the Octagon Court. She loved the great palace, curious for its angularity in a world obsessed with circular architecture. At the age of six she’d earned a spanking at Lady Allynis’s own hands for riding her pony across the gorgeous black and turquoise tiles of the audience chamber. When she learned that the Octagon Court had been spared on Feiran’s order, she was glad. He’d done it for her, she knew. One day she would return and claim it and all Ambrai as hers, for one day she would hold all the powers of magic and the Great Loom.
And she would do it as Lady Glenin Feiran. And laugh as the Wraith of Grandmother Allynis howled through the Dead White Forest with rage.
In later years, as she learned about the Great Loom and the tapestry of life woven upon it, she understood that Allynis Ambrai was a thread that had to be snipped and pulled. Snags, unravelings, random colors and textures—none of these flaws must spoil the magnificent design. Grandmother’s fatal error had been to deny Auvry Feiran his rightful place as a Weaver. From this, all else had come.
She said as much, though not in so many words, to Elsvet when her not-quite-friend expressed tentative sympathy—a roundabout apology that her family’s demands had led to the destruction of Glenin’s home.
“My father should have been Chancellor, but they wouldn’t let him, the Mage Captal and Lady Allynis. People of strength and intelligence should run things, no matter what they were born.”
“Your father is certainly doing a lot in the First Councillor’s service,” said Elsvet. “My mother says he must’ve been born a Blood all unknowing.”
Glenin rounded on her. “That’s a stupid thing to say! Why is it you think that no one can possibly be smart or wise if they’re not one of you?”
“You’re one of us,” Elsvet retorted.
“Only by accident of birth—just like you,” Glenin snapped.
To reward his service at Ambrai, Auvry Feiran was elevated from First Tier to Blood. Others, most notably the notorious Scraller Pelleris, had bought Blood status like a trinket in the marketplace. But this time all Ryka Court agreed that it had truly been earned. As the celebration of Ambrai’s fall and Auvry Feiran’s rise continued long into a night ablaze with torches, Ryka Court further agreed that no one could have been so successful and done so much for Lenfell who had any taint in his ancestry.
3
Four and a half years after Ambrai’s fall, Glenin came into her magic. Six weeks later, during the spring Equinox of 956, she acquired a new tutor.
The old one, a grim little man of vast scholarship and no patience, had augmented her classroom lessons with endless lectures and vicious tests. She was relieved to see the back of him. The new one was a tall, fine-boned, tawny young man, no more than twenty-five, handsome if one ignored the occasional squint that was a result not of weak eyesight but of a habitually piercing gaze. His name was Golonet Doriaz, and after Auvry Feiran greeted him and left on other business, he revealed himself as an emissary of the Lords of Malerris.
“I say this because I have every confidence in your secrecy,” he went on in a voice that instantly fascinated her—like gravel stirred in a vat of cream, she thought, or a lion growling through velvet. “You and I will share many secrets. But only with each other.”
“And my father,” she said.
“To a point, yes.” Doriaz laced long, thin fingers together. They were without rings, and his clothes and coif were plain unadorned gray. Current fashion at Ryka Court dictated the wearing of as many colors as one could work into a costume; Doriaz evidently believed with Glenin’s father in the elegance of simplicity. “He is, after all, a Prentice Mage.”
“Not now. Well, he is, but with the old Captal dead—”
“And the new one so foolish and ineffectual—yes, I know. But it remains that Auvry Feiran belongs to a Tradition vastly different from the one I will reveal to you.” His eyes, a light brown that was nearly golden, regarded her narrowly. “Please tell me now if you feel compelled to share all with your father. I will add that he knows and agrees to the conditions of your learning.”
“Oh.” She paused, picking at a rose in the bowl beside her chair. “Are the two Traditions so different as to make his knowing what I know dangerous?”
“An interesting question. Dangerous for whom? You, him, or me?”
“Domni Doriaz—” she began, but he shook his head.
“Address me simply as ‘Doriaz.’ Domni is not a title we favor.”
How very strange, she thought. First Daughters were always called “Lady”; their husbands, “Lord.” Everyone else was a domna or domni, terms originally earned through accomplishment in the arts, sciences, law, and so on, but now promiscuously scattered among the ordinary populace like fallen leaves.
“Doriaz, then—if it would be dangerous to anyone, then I will keep what you tell me to myself.”
“Very well. We begin in the morning, Domna Glenin.”
Domni was forbidden to her, but he could call her Domna? She was a First Daughter, and “Lady Glenin” or nothing. But she decided to wait before correcting his manners, at least until she discerned whether he would teach her real magic.
So she smiled and asked, “Why not begin now?”
“You may have the day and the night to reflect on what it is you wish to learn.”
Glenin almost retorted that it was generous of him to give her his permission to consider her own future—but something told her that sarcasm would be lost on him. Any other man with such abrupt manners would have been thrown out of her chambers and told not to come back until he’d learned proper courtesy toward women in general and a Blooded Lady in particular. But a Lord of Malerris was not just any other man. However . . . if they were all like Golonet Doriaz, what was needed most at Malerris Castle was a woman with a mind strict as an etiquette book and a hand ready with a switch cut from an apricot tree.
He unfolded his long frame from the chair. Most men found it necessary to adjust a longvest back into place with their hands—a gesture that could be awkward, furtive, perfunctory, mildly suggestive, or downright lewd. Doriaz merely gave a graceful shrug, and the thin gray material smoothed instantly from chest to thigh. A neat little trick, and one she appreciated.
“A’verro, D
omna Glenin. That is the first thing I will teach you. It means ‘truth.’ You will, I hope, come to understand its significance.”
That night she considered what she wanted from life. Or, more pertinently, from her magic. Problem was, she couldn’t define her powers yet, and her father had warned against experimentation without supervision. That, he’d told her with a wry grimace, was how he’d gotten into trouble.
The first thing was to explore her abilities, with Doriaz’s help. When she knew what was possible, she could make informed decisions about her future.
Her new teacher, however, obviously expected some sort of plan. One of the professions, perhaps? She was uninterested in the various arts and crafts, bored by the sciences, and saw no reason to waste her powers on medicine. The law, perhaps . . . but the Judiciary was a notoriously slow path to influence. The one career closed to her was that of soldier. Women of Blood Names were too valuable to risk in warfare—not that there’d been much armed conflict lately, she reflected. Lenfell’s only major military action this century had occurred seventeen years ago this summer. The Battle of Domburron had brought to heel His Exalted Grace the Grand Duke of Domburronshir, Heir to Grand Duchess Veller Ganfallin, Ruler of The Diamond Marches (which translated into about a half million square miles of snow in the Endless Mountains of South Lenfell). There had been fighting at Ambrai in 951, of course, but that had been a disciplinary action, not war. Female Mage Guardians could of course choose the Warrior side of magic. But Glenin would not become a Mage Guardian of any kind.
This led her to wonder why she’d never heard the phrase “Lady of Malerris.” Surely there must be women among them. Nowhere on Lenfell was the natural order so overset as to place men in authority over women. She must ask Doriaz about it, for if accomplishments gained a woman no recognition, then the Lords of Malerris would have to do without her.
And yet . . . they were the Weavers at the Great Loom, and nothing in life made so much sense to Glenin as the elegant, orderly, directed making of the tapestry.
Well, she’d simply reserve judgment and choice until she knew more.
This still left her with the problem of what she wanted her own thread to weave. A political career in the Assembly, and eventually a seat on the Council? Ah, but that would be to work with fools. By now she knew all the Councillors, not so much from personal acquaintance as from their dealings with her father. All but one or two were concerned only with the prestige and power of their own Names, and lacked true dedication to the greater good of Lenfell.
Glenin wondered suddenly why Anniyas didn’t just get rid of them.
If she did . . . if the Council seats were held by those who understood as Glenin did . . . if one day she took the First Chair. . . .
Yes. That was what she wanted in life. Not to sit near Anniyas, as other Councillors did; not to stand at her right hand, as her father did; but to own that First Chair.
It was not something she could tell Doriaz. He would surely laugh at such an outrageous ambition. Auvry Feiran would not laugh—but she decided not to tell him, either. This was the first secret she kept from her father.
The next morning before her first class, Glenin met Doriaz in the lovely oval library of the Feiran chambers and said, “I’ve decided that I want to be in government.” Not mentioning that she wanted to be the government.
“An interesting profession,” he replied, crossing lanky legs at the knees. “Why do you wish to spend your life looking over your shoulder for knives poised to strike you in the back?”
“You speak metaphorically, I assume.”
“I speak quite literally.”
Glenin shrugged. “I won’t have to look over my shoulder. I’ll simply make my death unprofitable for anyone—and dangerous for all.”
Doriaz rose with his little shrug—the longvest was dark green today—and gazed down at her from a great height. Glenin had to tilt her head back to hold his tawny gaze. She resented the necessity but learned something from it.
“Domna Glenin Feiran, born of the Ambrai Blood, it is my sincere wish that I will one day have the honor of addressing you as ‘Lady.’”
4
“What about poor people, Doriaz? And sick people, and criminals, and those of the Fourth Tier whom everyone despises?”
“We will give everyone her own place, her appropriate place, and there will be no poor. The sick will be cared for. Criminals will be excised as the broken threads they are, for they endanger the strength of the whole. Tiers will be abolished, and everyone will be equal with her own place in the design.”
“But that means that those who do the weaving will have to know everything about everybody, in order to decide which place is the correct one.”
“This is being arranged. Slowly. It all takes time, Domna Glenin.”
“Why can’t it happen now?”
“Because there are Mageborns who do not see the design of the Loom, or who believe each thread should be woven as it desires, wild and unplanned, without regard to the larger pattern. Our weave will be fine and beautiful, strong and resilient—free of threads that knot and spoil the whole with improper texture or color, or those that are weak and may break.”
“So until those Mageborns are gone, we can’t begin the tapestry?”
“It was begun long ago.”
“Doriaz—do you really think I’ll be one of the Weavers?”
“Everything you and I do prepares you for the place even now being readied for you at the Loom. You must be patient, Domna, and learn all I teach you.”
“I’m curious about something. Why have I never heard of any Ladies of Malerris? And you’ve never explained just what ‘Malerris’ is.”
“It means ‘Threadmaster.’ Our women are honored with the title of Lady when they prove accomplished in craft, knowledge, dedication, and obedience.”
“When they’ve whelped a Mageborn or two, you mean. That’s disgusting.”
“A child is a woman’s greatest gift to the Loom.”
“So all her magic and learning and everything else she does is worthless?”
“I did not say that, Domna Glenin.”
“But you implied it, and I still say it’s disgusting. I’m worth more than my ability to have daughters!”
“Of course. But to see your gifts continued . . . I think you shall have quite remarkable children.”
“By the right man—a Malerrisi, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“What if I don’t want a Malerrisi to father my children?”
“Obedience is not your strongest virtue. But you will learn.”
“Not in this, I won’t! Have you done your duty to Malerris, Doriaz? Well? Or haven’t they found the right girl for you yet?”
“As it happens, no. You are impertinent, Glenin Feiran. Consider, if your conceit will allow, the overall design instead of your own individual thread within it. The man—or men—who will father your children will be chosen for suitable bloodline, importance, position, and power. Are any of these things different from the qualities you yourself would seek?”
“He’d have to be handsome—I want pretty daughters.”
“Willful, impertinent, and facetious. I can see we will have no useful discussion today.”
“No, I’m sorry—please sit down. It’s just—so personal! Surely you understand.”
“Yes. But it is not a thing that can be left to chance. You will be no different from any other Blood in that you may love as you please. But your children must have the best possible chance of being Mageborn.”
“Well . . . so long as I have a choice and I’m not just told it’ll be this man or that.”
“You will be told. And you will obey. Or you will be viewed as any other Mageborn not educated in Malerrisi ways, and dealt with accordingly.”
“They wouldn’t dare!”
“Glenin, think of who you are! The only s
urviving Ambrai, powerfully Mageborn, who can ultimately influence or even become the pattern of our victory! What is your private whim compared to that?”
“An . . . interesting question, Doriaz. I begin to see what you mean.”
5
Glenin learned much from Golonet Doriaz over the next four years, though he despaired of her ever learning proper obedience. He went with her and her father when they traveled, and taught her—among other things—how to recognize those secretly Mageborn and distinguish Mage Guardian from Malerrisi. The feel of the magic was different when she sent subtle probes into their minds. The Mages all felt like her father: flexible and even chaotic at times, utterly undisciplined compared to the Malerrisi.
In late spring of 960, Doriaz was summoned to the Castle in Seinshir. Deprived of his daily presence, Glenin moped. She daydreamed all through her other classes, traced his initials on her rain-fogged windowpanes, and in general behaved as exactly what she was: a seventeen-year-old girl deep in the throes of first love.
Her father made no remark on her listless distraction, except for one evening when she set up the shadow-glass lantern in their sitting room and projected painted views of Seinshir on the wall. She’d purchased the box of ten-inch square glass slides that morning: Spectacular Seinshir: Fifty Views. She stared for a full five minutes each at the three depictions of Malerris Castle—one with the waterfall below, one from the village road, and one from out to sea. Auvry Feiran murmured that he didn’t know about there being fifty spectacular views of Seinshir, but there certainly seemed to be three of more than passing interest.