by Melanie Rawn
He could have gone to Tillinshir—but he wanted to come back to Ryka. To me. I know he did. And he died because of it.
“Glensha . . . I know how deeply this hurts you. I know you cared for him. But you must take pride and comfort in his courage. He helped everyone he could. He never thought once of himself, only of the others.”
But at the last, he thought of me. He was coming to Ryka.
“I am proud of him,” she replied stiffly. “His thread was strong enough to preserve the whole fabric of the Loom. He won’t be forgotten.”
7
Once again, it all happened just as Auvry Feiran had said it would.
Rumors lurched and spasmed worldwide. Assembly representatives and Council members went home to their Shirs, holding public forums and being interviewed for the local broadsheets, and anyone who bothered to read a sampling from each region was bound to notice certain similarities in what was said. Whether an individual was for Anniyas or deplored Anniyas, the subject of Mage Guardians was foremost on every agenda.
They had strongly protested the destruction of fellow Mageborns, even though the Lords of Malerris were their enemies. They avowed themselves innocent of complicity, but three circumstances argued otherwise.
First: Several burned corpses had been discovered with collar pins easily identified as swords: Warrior Mage insignia.
Second: Auvry Feiran, former Prentice Mage, commanded the Council Guard though he was not at the battle (he’d been conspicuous at Ryka Court, as everyone agreed). Was it so outrageous to think that the destruction of Ambrai and the Mage Academy had been a ruse to make people think Feiran’s loyalties were now with the Council?
Third: Those few score Lords of Malerris who were not at the Castle, too old or ill to attend or unable to get passage in time, had been mysteriously murdered in their beds the very night of the attack. Who could get past Mageborn Wards but other Mageborns—namely, Mage Guardians?
Only see what they’d gained! said those for Anniyas. Whatever the Guardians lost at Ambrai, whatever their current state of disarray, the Lords of Malerris were utterly gone.
Only see how absurd the accusation was! said those who deplored Anniyas. How could the broken, disorganized, virtually leaderless remnants of the Guardians mount so overwhelming an attack? Moreover, as suspicion would invariably fall on them, how could they be so stupid?
The Captal dithered and protested to the Council and finally issued a formal denial of involvement. He reminded all and sundry that on accepting the post of Commandant of the Council Guard, Auvry Feiran had been stricken from the Mage Lists. Names had been so stricken only a few times before in the long history of the Mage Guardians. The dishonor was total, the erasure complete. It was as if that Guardian had never existed, not even in fireside grandfather tales. This was the fate Captal Garvedian ordered, and Captal Adennos reconfirmed, for Auvry Feiran. Proof of Feiran’s loyalty to the Council—or a move to cover Guardian involvement.
Some said Feiran was loyal, but only to the First Councillor—who played each side against the other in an attempt to obliterate all Mageborns.
Others said all fault lay with Risson Dalakard. Just as the Doyannis Blood’s demand that the Council break the blockade of Ambrai’s ports led to Ambrai’s fall, the Dalakard Blood had been the instrument of Malerris Castle’s destruction. (Both Bloods howled injury at this.)
No, official rumor agreed at last, there were no conspiracies, no deliberate malice, no wheels within wheels. The consensus among those who governed the Shirs, supervised the Guilds, and otherwise held positions of importance was that the whole sorry mess was due to a lamentable series of accidents. To view it as anything else led to discomfort of the acutest kind.
And so it was decided for the peace of Lenfell to cease speculations and get on with life. Truly told, what would be so different? In the nine years since Ambrai the Mage Guardians had not resumed their usual roles as teachers, healers, protectors. Their former influence was becoming a memory. Lenfell was doing fine without them. As for the Lords of Malerris—they had never been as involved in the world as the Guardians, anyway. For the most part they kept their magics to themselves inside their Castle. They had never had governmental ambitions; they were concerned with trade only insofar as the excess produce of their lands was offered for sale; they traveled rarely. Most of Lenfell didn’t know anyone who had even met a Lord of Malerris. As with the Mage Guardians, the lack of them would not be felt.
The important folk of Lenfell asked themselves if magic of any kind was needed at all. Their confident answer was No.
The common folk of Lenfell would have answered differently. Magic had always been in their lives. Wards were set in high pastures to protect flocks; medicines were brewed by Healer Mages; Warrior Mages cleared out brigands; non-Mageborn teachers were taught by Scholar Mages at the Academy and returned to educate hometown children—for the common folk, magic was needful.
The common folk were not consulted. Those who ruled Lenfell foresaw benefits to the diminution of Mageborns; magic had always caused trouble in public affairs and there was always the risk of another war as long as both Traditions survived with their power intact.
The Mages were greatly reduced in numbers and influence. The Lords were gone. Whether or not there had been Guardian hands in the matter ended up mattering little—except that the Council and the Guard would keep a close watch on those Mages who were left.
Then, in the new year, Ryka Court had something else to talk about. Anniyas’ only offspring, a son called Garon, was more and more often seen in the company of Glenin Feiran.
In the first weeks of 961, professional Advocates were engaged to negotiate the necessary contracts. That spring, on the Feast of St. Imili the Joyous, the pair were betrothed. Garon, not yet twenty-four, had just finished his formal education. At barely eighteen, Glenin had several years of schooling still ahead of her. They would be wed during Rosebloom three years hence, on Anniyas’s sixty-fourth Birthingday.
The First Councillor let it be known that general rejoicing would not be frowned upon. News of the betrothal was disseminated across Lenfell by St. Sirrala’s Day, and every Shir’s celebration of the holiday included at least a mention of the happy event.
Anniyas described her son as the image of his long-dead father—whose Name she never divulged. It was a woman’s privilege to reveal or not to reveal her children’s paternity, but Garon’s was a subject of constant speculation at Ryka Court. Anniyas had been thirty-eight when her only offspring, the darling of her life, was born. His looks were the opposite of her plump fairness: he was tall, slim, dark-eyed, ravenhaired. But the set of the eyes, deep and shadowed beneath heavy brows, and the full curve of the lower lip that hinted petulance, were identical in mother and son—though Garon was handsome and Anniyas was decidedly plain. Glenin’s schoolfellows fell all over themselves congratulating her on her betrothed’s fine appearance. His position as son of the First Councillor was to them a secondary consideration.
To her own great pleasure, Glenin had grown up to resemble her father. Like him, she was tall, with gray-green eyes and strong bones. But the rest of her long-dead family showed in other aspects: thick, dark-blonde hair from her mother, a perfect oval face from Lady Allynis, a long, straight nose from her Ostin grandfather. Her figure was slender and supple, her gestures graceful, her rare smiles coveted, her taste in clothes slavishly copied by every girl her age. She and Garon made a handsome couple, and they both knew it.
They also knew—and never spoke about—the differences in their characters. The long betrothal was silently understood as time to accustom each to the other’s quirks. Because each scorned as ill-bred the directness of a rousing argument, no complaint or grievance was ever aired. They were unfailingly, exquisitely, sometimes ostentatiously polite to each other. Garon deferred graciously to Glenin even when he seethed inside; Glenin smiled even when she wanted to spit in his face. She coul
d smile because every time she felt like strangling him, she imagined Grandmother Allynis’s rage at alliance between the sacred Ambrais and the family of Avira Anniyas. But at times even that trick came close to failing her when Garon was particularly annoying.
They had a single personality conflict. Garon wanted all the privileges of position and none of the work. Glenin wanted position because of the work, for through it came the accumulation and exercise of power.
Anniyas had been a power in Tillinshir and an Assembly member since before Garon was born. He’d grown up with his whims indulged, his conceit pampered, and his every desire granted, and saw no reason why manhood should differ from childhood. With the exception, naturally, of doing exactly as he pleased without anyone to say him nay, not even his mother. And certainly not the woman who took him to husband.
For, despite the fact that he was male, Garon took it as written in stone that he would succeed his mother as First Councillor. Had Glenin been less ambitious, he could have had the title while she wielded the power, and they would have been a perfect match. But that was not how her mind worked.
Still, she could be patient. There was much magic to be perfected in the next three years, and much to discover about how to govern Lenfell and her future husband. Sooner or later Garon would see things her way—and despite his position as Anniyas’s son, he would indeed see things Glenin’s way.
Eventually, she might let him stand at her right hand.
Auvry Feiran had no illusions about Garon or the reasons for Glenin’s acceptance of him. He’d hoped for it, while saying and doing nothing toward its accomplishment. When it happened, he asked only one question.
“Could you learn to be content with him, Glensha?”
“I think so,” she answered, and quite honestly. She considered it no part of her obligation of secrecy to keep from him her emotional truths. Only—thanks be to St. Chevasto he hadn’t mentioned love. For love of Auvry Feiran, Maichen Ambrai had defied everyone and everything. Glenin could still recall how they had adored each other with a devotion that excluded everyone, even their daughters. With their example before her of how a passionate love could shatter hearts when it died, she had no wish to find such a thing of her own.
A similar but unconsummated devotion had shattered her heart when its object died.
“It’ll turn out fine once we get to know each other better,” she went on, “and, of course, after my First Daughter is born. Garon looks a bit like Golonet Doriaz, don’t you think? Tall and thin, with black hair . . . I’ve even taught him that little trick Doriaz had of resettling his longvest.” She smiled.
“I noticed,” her father answered dryly. “Now, if you could only get him to wear something besides those garish reds and purples!”
“I’ll work on it!”
They laughed, but a few moments later he took her shoulders in his large, strong hands and said very seriously, “If he ever makes you unhappy, Glensha . . . if he ever hurts you. . . .”
“He won’t. We’re learning to understand each other and that’s the most important thing.”
What she meant was that she already understood him, and over the next years she intended that he understand precisely what she required of him. Had he been any man other than Anniyas’s son, she would simply have informed him. But Glenin must tread carefully, conscious always that her marriage would be different from those of other women: although legally the man would be hers and no longer his mother’s, this man’s mother was also the most powerful woman in the world.
For now.
After the betrothal ceremony, Garon returned to his amusements—he was an avid hunter, an excellent horseman, and a constant winner at cards—and Glenin returned to her schooling. While Garon enjoyed the social pleasures of his status, Glenin studied law, government, commerce, and magic. This last was done in secret, but it was done as thoroughly as if Doriaz were still with her.
In a way, he still was. In 960, shortly after the official report came that he had died in a shipwreck in the Sea of Snows, an elderly Advocate had delivered to Glenin a small wooden box.
“He didn’t leave much, Lady,” the woman said. “These scholarly types—well, that’s to say, all he left were books. Except for this little box, which goes to you. He was your tutor, I understand.”
When she was alone, Glenin turned the box over and over in her hands. Uncarved, undecorated, without a lock to guard the contents, yet it could not be opened until its Ward was negated. The Ward whispered quite clearly to her, as it undoubtedly had to the advocate: Take me to Glenin Feiran.
She dealt with the Ward—simple, because it had been set by the man who’d taught her such things—and opened the box. In it was a brass key. It also whispered, this time of a trunk in his private chamber. Within the trunk were piles of books and manuscripts. And below them, securing a hidden compartment, was another lock. Glenin almost missed it, and would have if she hadn’t been looking with more than her eyes. This had no key but the word that canceled its Ward—a’verro, which Doriaz had used for all the Wards he’d taught her.
She murmured it, and the lock sprang open. Inside was the real treasure: The Code of Malerris.
This great tome—thirty inches tall, ten inches wide, and eight inches thick—became her teacher. She would have sworn it spoke to her in the voice of Golonet Doriaz, and every so often when she scowled bewilderment and muttered to herself by the light of her Mage Globe late at night, she heard him say, An interesting question, Domna Glenin.
One evening during her twenty-first year, she saw how few chapters remained to be mastered and wondered what would happen when she was finished. The remembered gravel-and-velvet voice whispered, An interesting question, Lady Glenin.
She put her face in her hands and wept—for joy, for grief, for honor, for pride, and for bitter knowledge that the one man who should have been her husband was lost to her forever.
“A’verro, Doriaz,” she whispered at last, promising him that his truth would be woven forever into the Great Loom.
Sarra
1
It had been bothering Sarra ever since they’d come to Ostinhold at Maiden Moon, and at last curiosity got the better of manners.
“Will it ever rain again?”
What was to her a perfectly sensible question brought smiles and outright laughter all around the huge Ostin dinner table. The reaction startled her so much that she simply failed to comprehend it for a moment. No one had ever laughed at her in Ambrai.
But then, The Waste was as unlike Ambrai as a place could get.
“It’s always raining somewhere, even during Wildfire,” said Geria. As First Daughter she had special speaking privileges, but the smug superiority of her tone earned her a stern glance from Lady Lilen.
“Somewhere in the world,” Taig added, “but not here.” The sympathy in his gray eyes made Sarra’s spine stiffen, but an instant later she realized what he really meant: everything happened anywhere but The Waste.
“Geria and Taig are both correct,” said Sarra’s mother, her soft voice like the brush of polished golden silk on Sarra’s skin. “What you must remember is geography’s effect on weather.” And thus a lesson began, just as if they’d been at home seated around their own table, with Granna and Granfa and Tama and Gerrin and Mai and—and—
Sarra had been ordered never to speak of her father or sister again. But she couldn’t help thinking. Or feeling. Neither could her mother. The sound of muffled weeping still came from her room at night. Ten weeks since they’d left Ambrai, and still she wept every night. So did Sarra. At Fifteenth, long after she was supposed to be asleep, she’d tiptoe into her mother’s room and curl into her arms in the narrow bed and they’d cry each other to sleep. But Sarra always woke before dawn, in time to go back to her room and pretend she’d never left it. To be an Ambrai was to be proud; she’d learned it from Granna Allynis even if it hadn’t already been in her Blood. Be
sides, Lady Lilen would be unhappy if she knew, and it was a guest’s duty to show nothing but gratitude for hospitality. So Sarra and her mother saved their tears for late at night, and never let on to anyone that it happened. Not even to each other.
“. . . so we must be very cautious about our use of water here,” her mother was saying. Sarra nodded, listening with half her mind—alert as most people’s full attention—while unruly memory spun pictures.
Her father. First and always, her father. Last summer, after a very public and very noisy fight followed by a very private and very tender farewell, he had gone away to Ryka Court. Maichen Ambrai explained it to her two daughters as a necessary deception. But on Wraithenday Auvry Feiran returned to Ambrai, and this time no gentleness followed the shouting. After five horrible days he claimed Glenin and took her away with him forever.
Sarra knew it was forever. She wasn’t sure how she knew it, but she did.
“You can’t! She’s my daughter, my Firstborn—”
“I can and I will, Maichen.”
“How can you do this? Have you begun to believe the pretense? What did Anniyas offer you?”
“That’s none of your concern. The Council has agreed to our divorce—”
“You mean Anniyas has! What did she promise? Do you really think she’ll let you share her power?”
“There’s more to the world than Ambrai.”
“And how much of it did you ask for, Auvry?”
“This is pointless. Stop it now, before we forget that we once loved each other. The divorce is a fact. You may keep Sarra, but Glenin is my daughter now. Mine alone.”
“No! NO!”
Listening from her perch on the ledge outside her parents’ third-floor chambers, Sarra knew with absolute certainty that she would never see her father and sister again. Frightened by the strength of the knowing, certain of its truth even as she rejected it, she climbed shakily down from her habitual secret spot and said nothing to anyone about what she knew.