The Ruins of Ambrai

by Melanie Rawn

  Several minutes later, while unpacking her nightrobe, she and the juice parted company. She barely made it to the basin in time.

  Damn Garon! she raged weakly. Damn him to Geridon’s Hell!

  In that legendary location, men who were promiscuous, sexually importunate, or a bedsheet burden to the women who married them were condemned to the exquisite torment of a constant, total, eternally unrelieved erection.

  3

  The approach to Malerris Castle was from the north side of its island. There was no bay deep enough for an oceangoing vessel, but there was no treacherous current either, as occurred to the south with the outpouring from Viranka’s Breast into the sea. Glenin regretted that she hadn’t time to visit the waterfall. Now that the Mage Guardians knew of Ladders there and could appear at any time, it was too dangerous.

  The fishing village that was the island’s only settlement knew exactly nothing about the other inhabitants. Superstitious awe going back many Generations kept them from venturing to the Castle’s precincts even before the destruction of 960. In days past, Malerris would send down servants to purchase produce: fish of all kinds, plus vegetables and fruits from the fields uphill from the village. Now they brought in supplies by Ladder, when they could.

  “It would be nice,” remarked Vassa Doriaz while he and Glenin were rowed ashore, “to have a steady supply of fresh food again.”

  Supply was the reason given for the change in course. The night of sailing, Doriaz loosened the bung of every barrel of water taken on at the Gierkenshir port. The captain was livid, vowing not only that he would never patronize that chandler’s again, but that no other Council ship ever would either—and that Anniyas herself would hear about this.

  The gilt on the coin was that the chandler’s was an Ostin enterprise, and its ruination would suit the First Councillor up one side and down the other.

  The reserves of fresh water would take them to Seinshir but not to Domburr Castle. Because Glenin was now known to be pregnant, the captain made all speed for the nearest populated island. Which, of course, was Malerris.

  It had been renamed in 961 in Auvry Feiran’s honor. Anniyas’ suggestion, approved by the Council, a subtle reminder of the former Mage Guardian who had planned the destruction. Feiranin it became on all subsequently published maps. But few called it anything but Malerris.

  Glenin suffered the amazed stares of the villagers as Doriaz lifted her from the rowboat to the sand. She smiled and gave greeting, wondering if she would have to plead fatigue in order to avoid a welcoming ceremony slap-dashed together at no notice. She need not have worried; the inhabitants had work to do before nightfall, and so after a brief speech by the mayor they dispersed.

  Glenin and Doriaz went to the Council House for the evening. No town of any size on Lenfell lacked some sort of structure reserved for members of the government, itinerant judges, and the like. Feiranin’s was surely among the most unimpressive: four brick walls, three windows, a thatch roof, and a rough wooden door with squeaky hinges. The whole building could have fit in Glenin’s reception chamber at Ryka Court.

  Inside was a little better. Someone had furnished the single room with two chairs, a cushioned settle, a standing lamp, and several small tables. A tall folding screen partitioned off a corner sleeping area that boasted a narrow bed with a trundle peeking out from beneath, a small brazier, a frayed Tillinshir rug, and a stand with basin and ewer for washing. There were no cooking facilities; the village supplied all food and drink.

  Glenin arranged pillows on the settle and made herself comfortable with her feet propped on a chair. “I assume I’m going to become ill,” she said.

  Doriaz nodded. “We’ll forbid this place to all after the sad news of your miscarriage. You, of course, will be up at the Castle. We leave tonight.”

  “I want to get back to Ryka Court immediately.”

  “Impossible without using a Ladder.”

  “Did you think I’d mention it without having a plan?”

  “How do you intend to use a Ladder without revealing your Magebirth?”

  It involved revealing yet another secret—and this grated her already raw nerves—but because the secret was not strictly hers she shrugged it off.

  “What’s more important,” she challenged, “acknowledging that at least two Ladders still exist at Malerris Castle, or catching Taig Ostin at Ryka Court?”

  Vassa Doriaz frowned.

  Hating him, Glenin continued, “If Desse is the mind of the Rising, Ostin is the strong right arm. My father is waiting for me at Domburr Castle. Send my ship there—it’ll take a good five days, but that can’t be helped. He’s a former Mage Guardian. He can use Ladders without much comment. This is a political emergency we’ll say is a medical one. I’m going to be much sicker than you thought, Vassa.”

  Thus it was that Glenin was seen to leave the Council House five days later—pale, weak, leaning on her father’s arm. He helped her into a small horse-drawn dray padded with blankets, and drove slowly up the hill to Malerris Castle. From there Auvry Feiran took his daughter back to Ryka Court by Ladder.

  As for the large, dark-haired man who had accompanied Glenin into the Council House, he was never seen to leave it at all.

  4

  Auvry Feiran was sorrowful but accepting. Anniyas was heartbroken but determinedly optimistic for the future. Elsvet Doyannis, married now with two daughters of her own, was genuinely—if a touch smugly—sympathetic.

  Garon was furious.

  “How could you have been so foolish?” he cried, pacing her bedchamber. “It happened at last, and you ruined it!”

  Glenin lay propped on pillows, reading documents. She must rest at least a day to give credence to reports of her fragile health, even though the Healer at Malerris Castle had done her work to painless perfection. There hadn’t even been any cramping. Maddening as it was to pretend helplessness, Garon’s tirade was worse. At least he had shown decency enough to confine his anger to privacy. It was proof of his real emotion that he yelled at her at all.

  Glenin was not in the mood for it.

  She set down her papers and glared at him. “How could I? How could you!”

  He stopped pacing in mid-step. “What do you mean?”

  “This journey was planned for weeks, and you deliberately got me pregnant! If I’m not pregnant now, it’s no one’s fault but yours! You know the risks to a Mageborn child on a Ladder!”

  His lips tightened and he turned away.

  “Guilty as charged,” she fumed. “I could divorce you for this, Garon.”

  He spun around. The long, lavish ribbons decorating his shirt, designed to emphasize a slow and graceful movement, tangled about him like seaweed in a strong tide. He looked ridiculous, as most men did when they tried to follow a fashion they had not themselves set. If her absence produced such sartorial disasters as this, what else had he been up to?

  “You’d never divorce me,” said her husband. “Mother wouldn’t allow it.”

  “She knows the Laws of Breeding as well as you do! And has more respect for them as well!”

  The Laws stated clearly that a woman should bear a child only when—and if—she wished. It was a husband’s responsibility to prevent untimely or unwanted pregnancy. There were various methods, ranging from simple abstinence to lamb-gut sheaths to sophisticated drugs used by the wealthy. Garon was not the abstentious type. He had tried a sheath once and said it spoiled his pleasure—as if that mattered.

  “Husband, dear,” Glenin finished, “would you care to let your mother inspect your medicine box?” Knowing full well that the bottle in question would give him away by being too full. “Rest assured that I will. Every full moon.”

  “I was justified!” Garon snarled. Sheer bluff; his eyes were scared. “You should have had a child years ago! Mother agrees with me!”

  The old argument again—something else for which she was not in the
mood. Needing an interruption, she reached for the thoughts of a servant down the hall—gently, softly, so fleetingly the girl would never know the idea was not her own. Aloud, she said, “Compose yourself, Garon.”

  “I suppose now you’re going to punish me by denying me your bed?” he sneered. “That’s no punishment, Glenin—and it isn’t as if yours is the only one I’ve been in!”

  She froze, and negated the summons so abruptly the servant’s headache lasted into the next afternoon. “What did you say?” she whispered.

  “Well, what’s a healthy, normal man supposed to do? You’re gone for weeks at a time. I don’t fancy pretending I’m a eunuch in your absence, with nothing upright about me but my spine!”

  The emotion Garon mistook for shock was so profound that she simply could not move. Encouraged, he grinned at her.

  “I’m young, handsome, rich, and coveted. What did you imagine, that I languished in my rooms, pining for you? No, by Geridon’s Balls, not me!”

  I have to get him to touch me, she thought within the icy facade that hid not astonishment but fury. I have to get him to come over here.

  So she used a gambit more often employed by bower lads to melt the hearts of cooling customers. She buried her face in her hands and cried.

  It was a minute or two before Garon made his approach. One step, then another, a long pause, a whisper of her name and “I’m sorry,” another step. . . .

  His hand touched her shoulder. Lingered in an awkward stroke meant to soothe. Descended once again.

  “Glenin—please, don’t cry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  And she grabbed him.

  He would never know what had happened to him any more than the maid knew the real origin of her headache. But Glenin knew. Glenin was one of the best spellbinders the Lords of Malerris had ever seen. The First Lord, Warden of the Loom, had admitted as much.

  Garon left that room spellbound, and remained so for the rest of his life.

  5

  On the ninth day of Nettle-and-Thorn, the week presided over by St. Gorynel the Compassionate, Sarra Liwellan was due to speak before the Council at precisely Eighth in the morning. It was anticipated that once she had been heard and her petition for inheritance rights approved (few doubted it would not be), everyone would adjourn to the splendor of the Malachite Hall for a celebration of her new status.

  She was on view everywhere around Ryka Court in the days before the presentation. She rode out with courtiers her own age for an afternoon in the countryside, and was proclaimed by all the young blades to be a ripping fine horsewoman. She strolled the vast Council Gardens with ministers who afterward sighed that she was as charming as she was intelligent. She attended a small party given by Garon Anniyas in her honor, and the becoming modesty of her plain throat-to-heels blue gown sent other women shrieking to their dressmakers the next morning demanding similar garments. (The results were mixed; few ladies possessed Sarra’s dainty waist and firm curves.) She took family dinner with the Trevarins, the Rengirts, and the Firennos Bloods, all of whom pronounced her the most delightful girl they’d ever met and began making plans for the likeliest of their unattached sons. In fact, every unmarried man of any standing at all within Ryka Court was frantic for an instant of Sarra Liwellan’s time, a flicker of regard from her fascinating black eyes, even a glimpse of her shining golden head.

  It was all precisely as Sarra had feared, and it was driving her crazy.

  She favored her host, Telomir Renne, with twenty whole minutes of complaint early on the morning of her petitioning. He heard her out, watching as she paced the gorgeous Cloister carpets of his sitting room, and when she ran out of breath and invective laughed himself silly.

  Telomir Renne held the post of Minister of Mining by virtue of his extensive experience on the Renne holdings in Brogdenguard. He was older than Orlin by six years, and their mother had never seen fit to enlighten anyone as to the identity of Telo’s father. Her privilege, of course; the Census frowned on it, but Mother-Right was supreme. In childhood he had endured a certain amount of baiting at his unfathered status, but as his mother was a First Daughter of the Blood that owned most of Neele and half Brogdenguard, parents quickly mended their offspring’s manners.

  Jeymian Renne’s beauty had caused enough windy sighs to turn a hurricane off course. Men from seventeen to seventy had vied for her favor; whichever of them had been Telo’s father, his only visible bequest to his son was coloring several shades darker than Orlin’s and a nose several sizes larger. But for those differences and the gap in age, they might have been twins.

  Five years after Telo’s birth, Jeymian Renne had met and married Orlin’s father, Toliner Alvassy—great-uncle of Mai Alvassy, Sarra’s cousin who had impersonated her from Roseguard to Havenport. The tangle of kinship meant, naturally, that Telo was in the thick of what Sarra now called “the Family Business”: the Rising.

  As he laughed over her complaints that winter morning, Sarra had to laugh, too. The young women she knew in Roseguard would kill for a chance at the young bucks of Ryka Court. Was it Sarra’s fault she found the best of them foolish and the worst of them unspeakable?

  “You’re a spoiled brat,” Telo remarked when he got his breath back. “Here I’ve arranged for you to meet the very flower of Lenfell’s young manhood, and all you do is yawn!”

  “I’m not a brat!” She threw a pillow at him, which he caught and threw back at her. “Oh, Telo, if you weren’t here, I don’t know what I’d do. I’m glad tomorrow is my last day at Court.”

  He folded his long frame into a chair. “Your two young Wasters have succeeded, then?”

  They were free to speak in his chambers; Gorynel Desse himself had Warded the rooms against eavesdroppers. In fact, the suite had once belonged to the great Mage in the years he had been the Captal’s representative at Ryka Court. No one, not even Auvry Feiran, had been powerful enough to cancel the Wards he had fashioned. And so they remained. Everyone knew it, just as they knew Minister Renne had not requested these rooms. They just happened to be the ones assigned the last person in Telo’s post. Personally, Sarra had her doubts that it had “just happened” that way.

  Anniyas’s chambers weren’t Warded at all. Sarra was astonished to hear Telomir say so when Val asked, though a minute later she knew she shouldn’t have been. Wards directed at non-Mageborns could be kept secret only so long as visitors to the First Councillor’s suite didn’t compare impressions. Wards intended for Mageborns would be immediately obvious. Her well-known and growing dislike of things magical meant she could have no Wards at all.

  But though a lack of Wards would make entry easier, it also indicated that Anniyas would leave nothing to the Rising’s purpose in her rooms.

  Luck had been with them, however. Sarra grinned at Orlin’s half-brother and replied, “They have succeeded indeed—and by visiting the library, if you can believe it! Val’s crushed.”

  The pair had made extensive plans for a daring raid by night—complete with blackened faces, secret hand signs for silent communication, three different escape routes, and drugged needles ready to put any chance-met guards to sleep. The fourth day of Sarra’s stay, after an idle remark of hers about books, a strapping young scion of the Doyannis Blood had organized a tour of the Council Library—of which his elderly cousin just happened to be Bookmaster. There, in a splendid display case in the main hall, was a letter to the Council in Avira Anniyas’s own hand accepting the position of First Councillor.

  “Thank all the Saints that she didn’t just write, ‘When do I start?’” Sarra finished. “She goes on for two solid pages about the honor and her unworthiness and how she’ll try her damnedest to do a good job, and the duty she feels toward the people of Lenfell, and-humble-so-forth. Every letter in the alphabet, most of them in both capital and lower case, the way she slants her signature—everything Kanto Solingirt needs.”

  “But formal style, not personal
.” Telomir slid a wicker basket from under the chair, extracting balls of black and green wool and a gold crocheting hook. “She’s not likely to use grand language in her private letters.”

  “You haven’t heard the best part. In another case there was another letter—this one to her darling Garon back in Tillinshir. He’s to pack up all his toys for a permanent move to Ryka Court and be Mama’s good brave boy on the journey, and she can’t wait to cover his dear sweet face in kisses—I almost threw up, until it occurred to me how it must gall him to have it on public display.”

  “What about the handwriting and so on?” Telo asked patiently.

  “The same, just a little more scrawled, and shorter phrasing. She uses a thick paper made in Dindenshir. Easy enough to get, and Kanto says watermarks are no problem.”

  “Neither is her seal.”

  “Not for you, the man whose family commands the finest forges—and forgeries!—on Lenfell,” Sarra agreed, grinning. “Elo Adennos is going to the Library this afternoon, and he’ll copy both letters into his Mage Globe. And that’s all there is to it.”

  “No wonder Val’s disappointed.” He paused to draw out more yarn off the green ball. “Is your presentation to the Council ready?”

  “If I practice one more time, I’ll sound rehearsed. Everything’s in order, Telo. Nothing to worry about at all.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way. In my experience, that’s precisely when one ought to start worrying.”

  “You’re as bad as Alin!”

  He glanced at the mantle clock—a fine old piece made of spruce and bronze, with a muffled tick and no hour chime—and said, “Speaking of whom, I hope this time you won’t work the poor boy half to death. Laddering is all very well, but too much of it, even for someone as experienced as Alin, isn’t healthy.”

  “We have stops at Neele and one or two other places. That’s all. I can’t wait to get home and unpack those books.”

  “I thought you were more intent on giving Gorsha Desse a lecture to burn his ears off.”