The Ruins of Ambrai

by Melanie Rawn

  She shrugged. Having lost almost everything else, what was a Name—even the most powerful Blood Name in the world? “But Cailet can’t come with us.”

  Desse blinked, and blinked again. “How did you—?”

  “Mama doesn’t want her.”

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “She said so. Because of what Papa did.”

  Leaning forward, he took her hands in his own. “Listen to me carefully, Sarra. I don’t know what you think you heard, but what your father did has nothing to do with whether your mother wants Cailet. She does. You must believe that. Cailet is her daughter just as much as you are—”

  “And Glenin?”

  The Mage blew out a long sigh. “Make that thirty-five. My dear, Glenin had no choice. Your father took her with him and there was nothing your mother could do. And now . . . truly told, you’re right. Cailet won’t be coming with us. It will be safer for everyone if she stays at Ostinhold. Lady Lilen will say she’s the daughter of a cousin, fostered here. There are so many Ostins that no one will remark on yet another.”

  Instinct had told her she was going to lose her second sister just as she’d lost her first. She gulped back the thickness in her throat and asked, “When can we see her again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does that mean ‘never’?”

  “A difficult word, Sarra, and not one I like to use. There are a hundred million pathways, child. We can only hope that St. Rilla the Guide shows us one that will make everything all right again.”

  That was no answer. She nearly told him so, but what was the point? The adults would do what the adults decided. They always did, for reasons of their own. Sarra made a decision, too: she would never (she used the word in deliberate defiance) order people around or arrange their lives for them. It wasn’t right.

  The next morning she stood beside the cradle again, telling the baby her name. Lady Lilen said new babies couldn’t see much. Sarra knew very well that Cailet was watching her. She could feel it. Like all babies’ eyes, Cailet’s were misty blue, but so dark that Sarra was sure they would turn black like her own eyes and their mother’s. But I won’t be here to see it happen. I might never see her again. Like Glenin and Papa.

  No. She wouldn’t lose Cailet, too. Not forever, the way sure instinct told her she’d lost father and elder sister.

  And mother, for Maichen Ambrai never left Ostinhold. She died without ever waking from a coma compounded of blood loss, exhaustion, and heartbreak. Her body was burned in secret, and the next day Gorynel Desse took Sarra—no longer Ambrai—to live in Sheve.

  4

  Sarra unpinned her bedraggled flower coronet and hooked it on the bedpost. Swearing as she unhooked the multitude of buttons down the back of her dress, she stripped the garment from her shoulders and flopped across the mattress, scowling at the ceiling. The sheet beneath her was thick and heavy, designed to keep straw from poking through the ticking. Pinderon, despite being “Gateway to Cantrashir,” was undeniably rustic. It was said that Lady Velira Witte believed in old-fashioned virtues; Sarra considered her simply cheap.

  Still, she rather liked the smell of this bed, though it was full of lumps compared to her feather mattress at Roseguard. No need there for sheets sturdy enough for bean sacks; at Roseguard, she slept on finest linen.

  Sarra brushed strands of limp white-blonde hair from her eyes and peered up at the wilting circlet of flowers. Tarise would bring a fresh one to wear at tonight’s banquet—more pink roses. This time she’d make sure all the thorns were sheared off. Her gaze shifted to the gown hanging on the back of the door. Rose pink. Again. And if not that, then peach or apricot or lavender. Every cloying, insipid pastel from garden and orchard eventually found its way to her wardrobe. When she protested that she was eighteen, not eight, Agatine always replied, “But, Sarra, you’re adorable in those colors.”

  She didn’t want to be adorable. She wanted to haul on her riding clothes, track down Gorynel Desse, and tell him she wanted to join the Rising.

  Instead she was condemned to wear rose pink and pink roses to a banquet celebrating her sister’s marriage.

  Sarra glared at the flowers, wondering what Glenin would be wearing in Ryka. Whatever the style of her gown, it would be Feiran green and gray, not Ambrai black and turquoise. Few recalled now that Glenin had once had another Name, or that the Octagon Court had once existed. It was wiser not to mention such things. Sarra could have written a hundred-page treatise on all the things nobody talked about for fear someone might be listening. Not even Wards offered protection; if one employed a magical Ward, it was assumed one had something to hide. So nobody said anything at all about anything really important.

  The Tiers, for instance. They would be abolished as of the first of next year—a wedding gift from the Council, with all honor and gratitude accruing to Glenin for asking this rather than for jewels or a private residence. No one remarked, and Sarra didn’t point out, that she could have any jewels she wished now that she was marrying the richest young man in Ryka, or that a home away from Ryka Court would distance her from the flow of information and power. Sarra followed her sister’s career assiduously if obliquely: a fact here, a rumor there, a mention of Glenin buried deep in some official news broadsheet. The portrait gradually painted by these random daubs was not encouraging.

  Although the abolition was a good thing, and Sarra approved in principle, there were many who had vowed resistance to their last breath. Bloods, of course. Jealous of their privileges, but not seeing the real threat. The new law wasn’t an end in itself, but only another step on a long, twisted road to a destination Sarra feared. The Bloods and Tiers had defined Lenfell’s social structure ever since The Waste War. Something would have to take their place. Sarra was sure she knew what it would be.

  When the old identity disks were turned in—as they had been once before to label those few remaining Mageborns for what they were—new ones would be issued. Name. Birthweek. Education. Occupation. Colored beads for one’s Name. And a number. Everyone would be delineated more surely than even the Tiers had done. And more permanently.

  How dare they tell me who I am? Sarra thought with the angry outrage of any girl coming up fast on adulthood—and who had, as well, been forced to lie about who she truly was since she was five years old.

  She answered to the name Liwellan. She knew the names and history of that Blood back ten generations, including the “parents” who had so sadly died. She was adept in her ignorance of Ambrai and Mage Guardians, and showed only polite social interest in Lady Glenin Feiran—she who was so beautiful, so clever, so accomplished, so much the model of what every young woman ought to be. Sarra was very good at lies.

  But she never forgot the truth. Never. Ambrai was her real home. Auvry Feiran, the Butcher of Ambrai, was her real father. Glenin Feiran, Sarra’s only sister, was the real First Daughter of the Ambrai Blood. Maichen Ambrai, her real mother, had died of a fever on the journey to Sheve.

  And Sarra herself was Mageborn.

  This secret she kept most carefully of all.

  “Sarra!”

  The bedchamber door slammed open, slammed closed, and Tarise leaned back against it to catch her breath. The anticipated wreath of pink roses was tossed into Sarra’s lap. She examined it sourly, waiting for Tarise to impart whatever momentous news had brought her here in such haste. Sarra shared Tarise’s services as lady’s maid with Agatine, but it was always to Sarra that the girl ran first with any news.

  Tarise Nalle wore the Slegin household livery of ankle-length blue skirt, matching full-sleeved blouse, and yellow shortvest liberally embroidered with blue and gold rose crowns. Her honey-blonde hair betrayed her haste, straggling down her back where it had escaped its pins. She flapped a hand before her flushed cheeks to cool them, sucked in a breath, and let it out in a whoosh.

  “Well?” Sarra asked at last. “Death, birth, scandal, du
el—what?”

  “Arrival!” Tarise hitched up her skirts and plumped down on Sarra’s bed. “The Ostin Blood—two of them, anyway—Lady Lilia or Alila or something, and her son, who is the most devastatingly handsome young man I’ve ever seen!”

  “When we got here last week, our hostess’ son was the most devastatingly handsome young man you’d ever seen. What makes the Ostin sprig so special?”

  Tarise sniffed. “Dalion Witte is a mere child, a stripling, a catastrophic bore—well suited to the deadly dullness of Pinderon. But this man—!” She ticked off attributes on her fingers. “Tall, lean, perfect shoulders, long legs, gray eyes like pools of silver in sunshine, cheekbones to sigh for, smile to die for, mouth luscious as a ripe plum—and as for what’s beneath those scandalously undone lower buttons of his longvest—Holy St. Geridon!”

  Halfway through the recital, Sarra began to laugh. At twenty-three, Tarise’s tastes were still as completely indiscriminate as a schoolgirl’s. She admired one man for his muscles, another for his ankles, this for his eyes and that for his nose. But never had so many charms been ascribed to a single male.

  “I wonder you weren’t blinded by the first sight of this marvel!” Sarra teased, and Tarise made a face at her.

  “You just wait until you see him. His name is Taig, and he’s twenty-five—and unmarried!”

  “How many times have I told you—”

  “Wait until you see him,” the maid repeated, grinning.

  “—I don’t like older men,” Sarra finished, and stuck out her tongue.

  “Oh, be sensible! At the very least, he needs a partner at the banquet. Why not you?”

  “I’m not Witte Blood. Depend on it, First Daughter Mirya will be stuck to him like sap on a tree if he’s as handsome as all that.”

  “Mirya the Mare?” Tarise scoffed. “Don’t make me laugh!”

  Taig. Sarra repeated the name silently. The sense of knowing it was familiar, a frustration that had driven her half-mad at times over the years—things she ought to remember but couldn’t. Taig. Not a common name, but not terribly unusual, either. Well, perhaps she’d read a variant of it in some history book or other.

  Suddenly Tarise bounded off the bed. “What am I chattering on about? We have to get you dressed. I’ll do your hair.”

  “You’d do better to fix your own. Whatever would Mirya say if she saw you?” Sarra primmed her mouth and arched her brows in lethal imitation of the Witte First Daughter.

  “Oh, never mind that. Hurry! If you don’t have any interest in him yourself, have pity on the poor man, forced to partner a horse at dinner!”

  Sarra suffered herself to be helped into the pink gown. “Tarise! You know it’s useless to appeal to my better nature—I don’t have one. What are the Ostins doing here, anyway?”

  “Something tedious about trade. Why won’t my hair curl the way yours does?” Tarise complained as she drew shoulder-length strands up into a loose tumble atop Sarra’s head. “One night I’m going to sneak in and cut it all off, and have it made into a wig for myself. It’s just about the same color as mine.”

  “Rillan likes your hair,” Sarra purred.

  Tarise blushed. “What he likes or doesn’t like makes no difference to me.”

  For all her avid looking, Tarise was remarkably single-hearted. Rillan Veliaz, assistant Master of Horse at Roseguard, really was devastatingly handsome. He seemed unaware of it—indeed, was aware of nothing but his beloved horses. Certainly he never saw the charming, freckle-nosed maid who had lost her heart to him long ago.

  That’s something I’ll never do to myself, Sarra vowed with a sigh. I’m not going to “lose” my heart to any man. I’ll give it where I please.

  It never occurred to her that someday a man might just steal it.

  Taig Ostin was just as handsome as Tarise described. Tall, with broad shoulders and powerful legs, the rugged bones of his face were offset by a sensitive and humorous mouth. His eyes were indeed silvery, and he smiled with singular charm as he greeted Sarra. But there was something almost too intense about him, something burning behind his pale eyes.

  She was seated directly opposite him at the banquet table. He partnered their hostess, Lady Velira Witte; his mother, Lady Lilen, was entertained by Agatine’s husband, Orlin Renne. Sarra heard snatches of conversation between the leaden gallantries of Velira Witte’s father, who was eighty if he was a day and tended to squeeze her arm or knee to emphasize his sallies. Evidently he thought his advanced age conferred certain immunities to civility. At length Sarra picked up her goblet of iced wine, smiled sweetly, and murmured, “Touch me again and you’ll be wearing this.” The old man subsided into silence and kept his hands to himself. Sarra had that effect on men, eighty or eighteen.

  She gestured a servant to add more water to her wine. In the incredible heat of smoking torches and a thousand candles, it would be easy to drink too much. The banquet hall of Pinderon, the Witte estate which had given its name to the port city that had grown around it, was probably a pleasant place in cool weather. In summer, with a crowd of five hundred, it was an oven.

  Sarra wished herself back at Roseguard, at one of the open-air banquets Agatine and Orlin loved to give. They were expert at expanding their own romance to enwrap their guests. Tables strewn across the vast lawns in the cool evening breeze; silver-soft moonglow and rose-gold torchlight making beauties of the plainest men; minstrels meandering among the guests; servants timing the courses to the needs of each table, rather than waiting for everyone to finish the soup before the fish was served. . . .

  At Pinderon, Sarra’s eyes stung with the merciless blaze of candles. Her ears hurt from the enthusiasm of the household orchestra, playing loudly enough from the gallery to be heard at the other end of the hall, deafening those closer to. Her stomach recoiled from the plate of venison, served ten minutes too cold with the sauce congealing into lumps.

  No, Agatine and Orlin really knew how to give a party. Five parts careful planning, five parts solicitude for their guests, three parts imagination—and one very large part personal enjoyment: it was the perfect formula, adaptable to any activity. Even the Rising.

  Five parts planning, five parts personality politics, three parts imagination—and one part personal ambition. Yes, that sounds just about right. Now, if only Gorynel Desse would show up, I could get started.

  A dessert of lime ice in biscuit cups arrived melted and soggy. Sarra stirred it into soup, waiting for Lady Velira to signal the end of the banquet and the start of the dancing. Not that she intended to join the sets; she’d wander around for a time and then go raid Pinderon’s library.

  Of all the places she’d visited with Agatine and Orlin in the last few years, none lacked a volume or two overlooked by the Council’s Education Commission. A Shir history, a Mage Captal’s memoirs, a collection of songs, a bound volume of broadsheets, a biography—Sarra had searched miles of shelves and sneezed mountains of literary dust to find her treasures. These she tucked into her luggage and added to her growing collection at Roseguard. It wasn’t stealing. Not really. She considered it rescue.

  Just as she gleaned news of Glenin from a hundred divergent sources, she winnowed a fairly accurate history of Lenfell from nearly a hundred books. But there were always gaps, omissions, references that the writers of the time thought too obvious to explain. She had hopes that the Witte library would yield a few more precious facts, or at least some corroborations.

  “Are you as bored by this as I am?”

  The deep murmur just over her shoulder startled her. She turned in her chair and found herself staring up at Taig Ostin. Way up; he was very tall. Though he smiled, and his words were good-humored enough, a strange urgency lit his eyes, akin to the white-fire intensity she’d seen earlier.

  “We’ll have to join one dance, you know,” he went on. “For appearances’ sake. But then you’ll be perfectly justified in showing me the garde
ns.”

  She glanced around to find everyone heading for the ballroom. Past the flirtatious chatter of the guests the orchestra could be heard tuning up. The last thing in the world she wanted was to dance. She opened her mouth to begin a refusal, couched in a sharp reminder that it was for the woman to ask the man to dance, not the other way around.

  Then she saw it. Dangling from his left earlobe below the black coif was a small golden hoop, and from it hung a tiny silver flameflower. Without the book liberated from the Mettyn Residence library at Rokemarsh last year, she never would have recognized the pattern or its meaning.

  He saw reaction in her face and nodded. She placed her fingers delicately on his wrist. “I’d love to dance,” she said quietly. “Thank you.”

  As they whirled through the set, she barely noticed Mirya Witte’s furious equine glare. It was impossible not to notice Tarise’s sleek grin as the maid approached after the dance, carrying Sarra’s shawl—pink, naturally—having accurately guessed that the gardens would be next. Taig Ostin draped cobwebby lace around Sarra’s shoulders, and they made their way through the crowd.

  Taig seemed to know everyone. Much time was wasted on greetings, introductions, enquiries about relatives (of which Taig had hundreds), and comments on the evening. The one thing constant to every encounter was expression of delight at the event being celebrated. By the time she and Taig reached the garden doors, Sarra had smiled agreement so often with wishes for Glenin and Garon’s happiness that her face hurt.

  “To be universally beloved must be a marvelous thing,” Taig mused as they gained the terrace at last. “You notice they all used the same phrases.”