by Melanie Rawn
“I understand, First Councillor.”
“Get out of my sight! Don’t come back until you bring me their heads! Both of them—not one and an excuse! And don’t try to take Glenin with you! She stays as warrant for your success!”
Glenin choked and nearly lost the spell. Anniyas glared up at the Commandant of the Council Guard, whose every physical line proclaimed submission. All but his hands, Glenin realized suddenly. His head was bent and his shoulders were hunched, and his back was a humble curve—but his hands fisted at his sides as if strangling his own rage.
“By your leave, First Councillor.”
“Get out!”
Glenin didn’t watch her father’s humiliating exit. The last lingering bit of magic gave her the sound of yet another priceless artwork smashing into oblivion. Opening her eyes to the sunroom’s dreary view of mist-shrouded Council Lake, she composed herself and went to meet her father.
Several minutes later he entered their suite. He flinched at seeing her, and now she sensed what distance had muted: he was injured. Though his body was whole and unhurt, his magic was badly wounded.
In theory, she knew how to help. The technique had been applied to her once. She’d overreached herself during a lesson at Malerris Castle and they’d given her the further lesson of agonizing pain and utter exhaustion before they eased her suffering. But she didn’t help her father because she didn’t know why Gorynel Desse had escaped.
“There was no time,” he muttered, sagging into his favorite chair. “The Ladder was unWarded—never knew it was there until I sensed Gorsha’s presence—he’s strong, I’d forgotten how strong. . . .”
She settled before him on a footstool and took his hands, relaxed now from their angry clenching. “You should have called for me.”
His head tilted back against the cushion and his eyes closed. “I know what he knows—but he knows what I know. You’re a cypher to him. You might have—”
I would have, she corrected internally. Aloud, she said, “How many of them were there? Do you know who it was he took to safety?”
“Agatine Slegin and her husband died. One of their sons. I assume the other three are with him. A pregnant woman, a little girl . . . one other woman, I think, and two or three more young men. None of them Mages.”
Then why waste time on them? She frowned, and rose to pour a large cup full of wine. Giving it to her father, she said, “Here, drink this.”
He sipped obediently. “One of the men had a lute strapped to his back. That’s all I remember. When the Battle Globes met—and we both called up more—the men drew their swords—” He looked down at his arm, as if expecting to see torn cloth and bleeding flesh. “I’d forgotten how powerful he is. It wasn’t just the Battle Globes—he spelled their swords at the same time, to make me believe they could. . . .” He shook his head, drank again. “But of course they didn’t. Only Gorsha’s could, and he only used magic. . . .”
“What about Telomir Renne?”
“He got away, too. I should’ve known there’d be a Ladder close by those rooms. They were Gorsha’s once.”
“You did everything you could.” It was what he’d said of her to Anniyas. They were the most galling words either Feiran could ever hear.
“I must go. She commands me to—”
“Later. Tonight. You’re not recovered.”
“If only I knew where. . . .” Gray-green eyes, dulled with weariness and sick with failure, at last met hers square on. “This is the first place we looked, and you were right. Where is the next place, Glensha? Where do I find them to bring back their heads as Anniyas orders me to do?”
“First you must go to Malerris Castle. You’ll need help. They won’t refuse it—not if it means killing Gorynel Desse.” She almost said “—and the Captal,” but caught herself in time to keep from revealing that she had listened where she shouldn’t have.
Her father nodded. “Yes. I do need their help in this.”
“And then—” She drew in a deep breath, for this particular secret, cherished so briefly, was the most important of any she’d misered away in her life. “Father, I know where they must be.”
Feiran straightened slightly, a spark returning to his eyes. “Where?”
“Ambrai.”
10
Alin woke, more or less refreshed, sometime around Thirteenth. Elomar was waiting for him, considerably healthier in magical terms; he knew his own power and how to protect himself, though the unleashing of Cailet’s magic had strained him to his limits.
Sarra, as silent as Bard Falundir for shame of their first meeting, watched Alin and the Healer vanish from the bedchamber. Elomar would do what he could to Ward Cailet while Alin brought her and Taig through the Ladder.
It might even work.
While they were gone, Val paced. Sarra stared at her folded hands. The great Bard watched her, as he had most of the night; she could feel it, and could not meet his gaze.
He knew who she was. Of this she had no doubt. His eyes said more than most voices. But she just couldn’t look at him. The real irritation was that if she’d thought about it for just a minute, she would have recognized this place and spared herself the mortification. She and her mother and Gorynel Desse had used this Ladder long ago. Of all the things she’d been compelled to forget, a long walk in the dead of night had not been one of them: the walk from the Octagon Court to Bard Hall.
“They’re coming,” Val said suddenly. “I can feel it.”
An instant before they appeared in the center of the room, Sarra could feel it, too: Cailet’s magic. The girl was imperfectly Warded by Elomar Adennos—who barely made it to a chair before his knees gave out. Alin staggered into Val’s strong arms.
Taig cradled Cailet in his arms, her bright head tucked to his shoulder. As he placed her gently onto the bed, Sarra stifled a cry at the sight of her sister’s haggard face, scored by lines of suffering that aged her twenty years.
“Don’t look so grim,” Taig said. “Healer Adennos’s Ward will protect other Mageborns until Gorsha can help her.”
“You mean he made a prison for her,” Sarra corrected, “until she can be fully Warded again.”
“Well . . . yes.”
“No. No more Wards.”
Taig drew up the threadbare quilt and tucked Cailet in. “Sarra, we can’t risk it. You saw what happened to Alin and—”
“No!” she repeated. “Taig, she’s in pain.”
He coaxed her to the far side of the room, away from the others. “Gorsha can help.”
“Can he? What if the Wards break again, with even worse results? Her magic has to be freed so she can learn to control it. To use it.”
Taig shrugged uncomfortably. “Let’s let him decide, shall we?”
“She’s my sister and my responsibility!”
“Don’t you understand? It was seeing you that collapsed her Wards! If it happens again—”
Glaring up into his quicksilver eyes, she hissed, “I’m her sister! Not you or Desse or anyone can make me leave her!”
“You don’t know what’s at stake here.”
Sarra turned away from him. “She is! You’ve protected her all these years, you and the whole tribe of Ostins, and thank you very much, I’m grateful. But—”
“Gracious of you,” Taig snapped.
“But I’m here now. And I won’t be separated from her again.”
“You have no idea what’s going on,” he insisted. “The Rising may not survive this, Sarra. People are dying all over Lenfell. They’ve known for years that this might come, and they know to get here if they can, but so many of them simply didn’t believe it—”
He didn’t understand that none of them mattered. Not him, not Alin and Val, not even Sarra herself. She knew it as surely as she now understood the warning of her dream. Sarra had faced Glenin without magic. Cailet must not. Her magic must be set free. And
she had only Sarra to fight for her birthright as a Mageborn.
“The Rising be damned,” she said flatly. “Cailet will have her magic.”
“Because you say so!”
“Yes!”
There was a noise of many people outside the closed door, and Taig slapped a hand to his sword. “Shit! They’re here. Val, stop hovering over Alin, he’ll be fine. Go talk to the Mages. Find them somewhere to sleep. It’ll be tomorrow night at the earliest before you can take them to the Academy.”
“Mages?” Sarra waited for Taig’s explanation. None was forthcoming. So she followed Val out the door. As little as anyone but Cailet mattered, she must behave as if they did.
The lie at least had the virtue of giving her something to do.
“—by whatever Ladders are still functioning. Alin Ostin will take you through,” Val was telling a group of exhausted, frightened Mage Guardians. Six of them, travel-stained and hollow-eyed, with four children no older than Jeymi. No, mustn’t think about Jeymi.
“But where can we go?” one young man asked, holding tight to a sleeping toddler. “The Council Decree says we’re outlaws, we’ll die if they find us—”
“They won’t find you,” Sarra told him. Stepping around Val to stand in front of him, she went on, “My name is Sarra Liwellan, and I—”
“Liwellan?” An elderly woman stepped forward and peered at Sarra in the dimness. “That’s not a Mageborn Name.”
“Neither’s Maurgen,” Val said. “Are you going to condemn anyone who doesn’t have magic the way Anniyas condemns anyone who does?”
“Don’t lecture me, boy.” The wrinkled old Mage snorted. “I recognize you—I heard about that little dance you and your lover led the Council Guard last year in Cantratown. But Rising or not, in these times I trust no one I can’t trade spells with. And what would the adopted daughter of Lady Agatine Slegin be doing here?”
“As it happens,” Sarra interposed smoothly, “Liwellan isn’t my Name. I’m not at liberty to tell you the real one. Suffice it to say I’m the daughter of Mage Guardians.” True, in a way. There was magic in both her parents’ families. “They were lost with Ambrai.” Also true: Maichen’s dying had begun the moment she heard what Auvry Feiran had done here—and the man who had been Sarra’s father had been lost in the wrecking of this city.
She continued, “My own magic was Warded for my safety. But I am as Mageborn as any of you. So when I tell you that you will not be caught, you may trust me as you would one of your own. I am one of your own. So is Valirion Maurgen—and so are all those who oppose Anniyas and the Malerrisi.”
“Understood, Lady,” said another woman, with a warning look for the others. “In fact, I believe I can guess who your parents were—though I will never speak of it again.”
“Huh! Easy enough to say things you don’t have to prove!” the old one scoffed.
“Do you doubt Lady Sarra’s word?” Val asked quietly.
“I doubt everything and everyone, boy. That’s why I’m still alive. And I say the hell with Anniyas and the Malerrisi for tonight. I’m tired and cold and I want a bed to rest my old bones in.”
Sarra suspected this was her version of a graceful capitulation. “Domni Maurgen, would you escort them? Thank you.”
After only a few steps, the venerable Mage paused and turned. “By the way, girl, I suppose you know those Wards of yours are set in stone.”
Sarra blinked. She had sensed no probing—not that she’d know what it might feel like, she reminded herself bitterly.
“But something’s been chipping at them lately.”
Yes—a solid steel chisel named Cailet. “You know about Wards?” Perhaps she could bolster Elomar’s work.
“Enough to recognize Gorsha Desse’s crafting. My specialty is knives.” One wrinkled lid winked, and one gnarled hand twitched her cloak aside to show a low-slung belt laden with a dozen daggers. “Just what you lack, isn’t it?” the ancient mocked. “A thousand-year-old Warrior Mage!”
This was pretty much what Sarra was thinking. She couldn’t help a blush.
“Feeble is as feeble thinks, girl. My knives have seen more Malerrisi guts than you have years, just in the last few days.”
Quick as summer lightning, a blade carved a silvery path through the air and thunked, quivering, into the floor at Sarra’s feet.
“Keep it to remind you,” the Warrior Mage said.
When she was gone, Sarra crouched to inspect the knife. Slim, plain, and unadorned, with twenty-two notches carved into the hilt—she gulped when she’d counted them—it was difficult work to pry it from the grouting between flagstones. A Warrior Mage’s knife, for a Warded Mageborn. Sarra slid it into her own belt and rose shakily to her feet. This knife alone had as many kills as she had years.
Back inside Falundir’s room, Elomar stood by the bed gazing down in mingled worry and awe at the girl who lay there, still as death. He flicked a glance at Sarra and shook his head.
“By Sparrow and Flame, she is a power,” he murmured. “Her magic feeds only on itself, yet is never consumed. It grows, self-nourished.”
“It sounds like nothing so gentle as Miryenne’s Flame,” Sarra said. “More like Caitiri’s Fires. Elo, will she burn you up before Gorynel Desse comes?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps I can show her how to Ward herself—slide a note into her prison, as it were.”
Sarra regretted that he’d heard her earlier remark. “Do what you can.”
But she knew—and damned her instincts for the knowing—that Gorynel Desse must come soon.
When he did, it was from the Mage Academy—slung like a bean sack between Telomir Renne and that damned Minstrel.
11
“You made three incredibly stupid mistakes.”
First Sword Gorynel Desse waved away Tarise and the cup of steaming tea she insisted he swallow, and resettled himself in bed. He’d been lying there for four solid days, sleeping off his battle with Auvry Feiran. This afternoon he felt well enough to sit up, summon Sarra, Alin, and Val to hear their story—and then lecture them on what they’d done wrong.
“First, you didn’t question why you ended up on the wrong side of that waterfall, let alone how. I suppose you can be excused for lack of Magelore, and knowledge of how to sense such things. But that still doesn’t excuse the ridiculous manner in which you simply accepted the change of location. Shut up, Valirion, I’m not finished. To answer the questions you didn’t bother to ask yourselves, the ‘how’ of it is that you were led there by the most clever and subtle of spells—not worked on you, I might add, but at a distance on the very rocks of that tunnel. As for the ‘why’—they knew you were there and wanted to trap you without a Ladder. Sheer dumb luck that you figured it out, Alin. And absolute imbecility to have made the attempt.
“Which leads me to your second mistake. Did you ever stop to think that there might have been Wards around that chimney Ladder in Captal Bekke’s Tower? Or, worse, that it might have been destroyed? Or, worst of all, Alin Ostin, how I could possibly explain the attendant disasters to your Lady Mother?”
Alin cleared his throat. Desse speared him with a glance. He subsided.
“Third, you haven’t even begun to wonder how Glenin Feiran got to Combel.”
“By carriage, certainly,” Val offered, sounding anything but certain.
The old Mage snorted.
“By Ladder?” Alin asked in amazement.
“Not any Ladder that you know, boy.” Again he hitched himself straighter against the pillows. “I’ve never seen one, and up until now it’s been only rumor and a few lines in the Archives. But there’s a means of casting a Ladder onto silk or velvet—hell, onto plain old wool, as long as it’s pure cloth—in magic and stitchery. It’s pretty, it’s portable, and it’s just as good as the real thing. And Glenin Feiran has one.”
“That’s unsupported speculation,” Sarra said.
<
br /> “Then explain how she arrived at Renig one morning by ship, took the Rose Crown by force before nightfall, and the next day met you in that whorehouse?”
“Bower,” Val corrected under his breath.
“Whorehouse,” Desse repeated. “Which is not to say I’m not at least as fond of its charming mistress as you are. The carriage was from Renig, you say? Well, how many such rigs move back and forth around The Waste every year? Care to take a guess? One hundred? Two? She could have chosen it at a stable in Combel because of its origin, or it could have been coincidence.”
“The Captal said nothing about a Ladder,” Sarra pointed out.
“The Captal, may he prosper to a dull dotage, is no more immune to certain spells than you are—or I am. A Forgetting is one of the more complex, but recent memories are relatively easy to block. And that’s just what was done to him, so Glenin Feiran could use this portable Ladder of hers to take him and my sister’s granddaughter to Combel.”
A trace of sorrow creased his face for a moment. Sarra had forgotten that Desse was so closely related to the Alvassys.
“I add,” he went on severely, “that Glenin Feiran was in Ryka Court not three days ago—and she’d just be boarding a ship at Renig right now if there was no Ladder. I know for a fact—as does Alin—that there’s only one Ladder in Combel, and it goes to Neele.”
From whorehouse to sewer, Sarra thought. Whatever ancient Mage created it, she had a dreadful sense of humor.
“That’s three,” she told the old man. “I assume you’re finished.”
“No. The last item isn’t a mistake, it’s a potential disaster. You failed to bring Captal Adennos here with you.”
“I judged it safer for him to remain in Combel.”
“Who elected you to Venkelos’ Seat last Wraithenday?”
Her face felt scorched by anger, but her voice was coldly controlled. “That will be enough, Guardian Desse. Tarise, if he won’t swallow the medicine, stick a funnel down his throat and pour it in. Alin, Valirion, come with me.”