The Ruins of Ambrai

by Melanie Rawn

  Taig nodded and did as told. While he coaxed Tamsa to follow along behind him, Lady Lilen turned to Collan. “Drag all the Guards in here. When you’re finished, set the kettle on in the kitchen—the big iron kettle, not the copper. The linen closet is one door down from the kitchen. Take all the sheets and blankets you can find to the music room. It’s through the hall, you can’t miss it. Then come back here.”

  Col, too, did as told. He figured it was the usual response to this woman.

  As he stacked bodies around the greenhouse perimeter, he could hear voices from behind a pair of toppled fruit trees. The snatches of conversation chilled him to the marrow.

  “—your cloak, Telo, I’ve got to stop the bleeding.”

  “Here. I’ll get Val’s, too.”

  “No. It’s soaked through with blood.”

  Collan heaved a corpse on the pile and went back for another. He got a grip on a pair of ankles and hauled the body through the door.

  “—was defending Alin, who had no sword.”

  “Oh sweet Saints, how am I going to tell his mother?”

  He went out again, and came in again with another Guard.

  “His sword is still in the body. It must’ve happened almost simultaneously. And very fast—his wound is through the heart.”

  “So will Alin’s be.”

  There were so many bodies. The greenhouse floor was three deep in them.

  “—will kill Alin. Put your hand here, and press hard. I’ll see if I can do something about his leg.”

  There were so many bodies.

  “Val?”

  “Hush, sweeting. It’s all right, my Alinsha, I’m here.”

  “Val!”

  He went to get the last corpse. Next to last. He pulled the crimson-clothed body away by the shoulders, pausing to pull the sword from the belly. Lady Lilen and Telomir crouched just beyond the last corpse. Val’s.

  Finished. Kitchen next. But he hesitated, then stripped off his own cloak and longvest and shirt, placing them in Lady Lilen’s reach.

  Kitchen. He stopped in the doorway, stomach tensing. Saints, how he hated kitchens. Always had. For the first time in his life he wondered why.

  Iron kettle on the hob and coals fanned to flames fed with two logs, he made for the linen closet. And then the music room. Sela Trayos lay on an elegant silk sofa. She was still unconscious. Collan stood there helplessly, arms full of sheets and blankets, and told himself it wasn’t possible for him to see the rippling muscles of her distended belly move beneath her smock in a powerful contraction.

  “Collan? Look alive, young man,” said a brisk voice behind him. “Those sheets won’t do any good clutched in your arms like that. Make a bed for her near the hearth.”

  He gulped, relieved that Lady Lilen had come to tell him what to do. Later, perhaps, he might be disgusted with himself for so readily obeying a woman—he who had always prided himself on his independence, his self-reliance, he who treasured his freedom from feminine discipline and who scorned men who did as told like good little boys. Later. Perhaps. But right now he was abjectly relieved that a woman was here to give orders.

  So he did as told, and helped Lady Lilen ease Sela down onto the floor. He was ordered to fetch the kettle and on his way yell at Taig to get a move on. These things he did, because he didn’t know what else to do.

  When he returned, Sela was awake and biting her lips bloody trying not to scream. He set the kettle on the now glowing hearth and knelt beside her.

  “It’s all right, Sela, nothing to worry about. Lady Lilen will take care of everything.” Though his certainty was born of mere minutes’ acquaintance with the Lady, he was equally certain she had that effect on everybody.

  “C-Collan?” Sela gritted her teeth against another spasm. “Where’s Tamsa?”

  “Upstairs asleep with her kitten. She’s fine. Don’t worry.”

  “Thank you,” she breathed, groping for his hand. “For everything. You’ve been so good to us—”

  Squeezing her fingers lightly, he dredged up a grin from somewhere and made his face wear it. “Just don’t do anything silly like name the baby after me!”

  Sela’s smile was a sudden miracle. “I’d love to embarrass you, but I already know his name.” She caught her breath, and his hand. “Oh, St. Josselet, it wasn’t anything like this with Tamsa!”

  But this baby was definitely Mageborn, and affected by whatever they were doing back in Ambrai to make that child the next Captal. Col extracted his fingers from Sela’s grip before she could break the bones.

  “Be easy, my dear,” said Lady Lilen. “Don’t worry. You’re doing very well. Thank you, Collan, but you’d best go now. They should be about ready for you in the greenhouse.”

  “Ready for me?” he echoed stupidly. He’d been adding his own incoherent petition to Sela’s Name Saint, plus Gelenis First Daughter and Lirance Cloudchaser and obscure Colynna Silverstring, long-forgotten patron of the lute, for good measure.

  “Everything’s perfectly in order here. I can take care of Sela and her children—both of them. Taig has locked Geria in the cellar until I can get around to her. In a few days,” she added maliciously.

  “Make it a week.”

  “I just might. But you’ll have to go back to Bard Hall. I can explain Sela, once the neighbors get back from the celebration in town, but I can’t explain the rest of you.”

  So that was where everyone was. He’d forgotten that this was the first day of Spring Moon. There would be more festivities on the third, with the Equinox. I should live so long, he thought sourly.

  “You’ve all been listed for bounty, you see,” Lady Lilen finished.

  “Bounty? On me?” After all the slightly shady, arguably moral, and downright illegal things he’d ever done—and gotten clean away with—helping his friends had finally made him famous in all the wrong circles.

  “I’m surprised I’m not on it, too. Although that’s probably attributable to my darling First Daughter.” Sela whimpered, and Lady Lilen reached for the box of medicines at her side. “Go on, Collan.”

  He struggled to think straight, a difficult task when all he could think about was a broadsheet with his name at the top and a woodcut of him in the middle and a substantial price at the bottom. Like the price put on a slave. The mark on his shoulder seemed to burn.

  “Alin’s wounded,” he managed. “He’s the only one who can work the Ladder.”

  “Alin is dying,” she corrected softly, not looking up. “Go. Hurry, Collan. Tell Sarra and Cailet I love them. And tell Gorsha there’s nothing to forgive.”

  He fairly stumbled from the music room—knocked into a rack of silver flutes, in fact—and slipped several times on the bloody hall floor. In the greenhouse, Taig and Telomir huddled on their knees beside Alin’s still living and Valirion’s dead bodies. Collan joined them, crouching at the edge of the circle. Bare to the waist, he shivered slightly, the increasing night chill following him into the greenhouse.

  “Now, Alin,” said Taig.

  Pale blue eyes opened. “Val?”

  “Here with us. Alin—please, little brother, you must try.”

  “Hurts,” he muttered, sounding puzzled.

  “You need a Healer. Take us through the Ladder.”

  Col shifted uneasily, wondering if Taig knew that no Healer could help his brother. The scrape of his boots on the floor drew Alin’s attention. His gaze found Collan in the dimness. A smile curved his lips.

  “Val,” he whispered.

  Gently, aware of the soaked cloth at Alin’s chest and thigh and abdomen, he reached out a hand to cradle the blond head. There was a warm, matted stickiness at the back of his skull. Expertly pitching his voice to be as much like Valirion Maurgen’s as possible, he said, “Let’s get out of here, Alin.”

  There was nothingness for a long, long time. And then there was the room at Bard Hall, and S
arra Liwellan staring at him and at Alin and then at him again, with a look on her face as if her heart had broken.

  22

  She had barely savored the child’s magic—so serene, like a still pool of pure, luminous water—when the sphere vanished.

  “Praise all Saints,” whispered Gorynel Desse.

  “But what happened? Where—?”

  “Out of reach. Safe, I think. I hope. How could you have called to an unborn?” he accused suddenly, voice like thunder across the black-mirror plain.

  “I didn’t!”

  “Something brought that baby here!”

  “Something took the Captal away, too—and it wasn’t me!” She glared up at the sky, outraged that he had all but convicted her of trying to steal the child’s magic. When his voice spoke from beside her, she jumped.

  “It was death that claimed Captal Adennos.” He was subdued now, sorrowful.

  “Death—? Oh, no—not the baby, too!”

  “No. The child lives, and will be born.” Pointing to the black cloak, he said, “I do not like to think what that means.”

  “How can it mean anything? It’s no more real than you or I.”

  “It’s very real, Cailet.”

  She bent down to pick it up. She couldn’t touch it. There was no tingle of a warning Ward, no invisible Mage Globe surrounding it; her hand did not pass through it; she simply could not bunch her fingers in the cloth.

  “You can have mine, if you want.”

  This was a voice she knew. Walking shyly toward her, golden hair wind-tousled and blue eyes smiling with singular sweetness, Alin proffered his own wool cloak of Ostin gray.

  “I won’t need it anymore, Cai,” he went on. “It’s not the Captal’s, but at least it’s something.”

  “Alin!” She ran to embrace him joyfully. “What are you doing here?”

  “This is where you tried to find me—remember?”

  She did; the day of St. Agvir’s Wood, and her fall and her broken arm.

  “You couldn’t find me then. But I’m here now.” He drew away and shook out the cloak. “Take it, little sister.”

  “Alin. . . .” Gorynel Desse stepped forward. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yes. I never much wanted it anyway.”

  “Forgive me,” the Mage said.

  “Why? It wasn’t you who gave me the knowing and the nightmares.” His pale gaze sought Cailet’s and he gave her a reassuring smile. “For you, they’ll just be dreams. The only thing you were ever afraid of was the dark. Take it, Cai. Val’s waiting for me.”

  She turned her back so he could drape the soft gray wool around her shoulders. “It even fits—we’re the same height.”

  “Of course it fits,” Alin chided. “Gorsha, doesn’t she know yet?”

  “Not yet. Soon.”

  Cailet looked from one to the other of them. This was the second hint of things she didn’t know.

  “It’ll be all right, Cai.” Alin hugged her briefly. “Don’t be scared. And don’t be sad, either, you or Sarra. Tell her we loved her, as much as we loved you.” He touched her cheek, smiled again, and strode into the distance with quick, eager steps.

  “But not as much as they loved each other,” Desse murmured.

  “He’s dead,” Cailet heard herself say. “They’re all dead. Scholar Wolvar, the Captal—now Alin.”

  “Yes. Tamos gave you all he knew of Mage Globes, and more besides. Alin—”

  “Ladders. Alin knew Ladders.” Her lips felt numb.

  “And now so do you. As for Adennos, I’m afraid he died before the work could be finished.”

  “Work?” She spun to face him, infuriated. “Is that what this is to you? They died doing this ‘work’ ! It killed them—I killed them!”

  “They were already dying, Cailet. The Captal’s heart was failing. Tamos was sorely wounded in other ways. And Alin. . . .” He shook his head. “I can only guess that he chose to follow Val Maurgen into death. But each consciously chose to relinquish knowledge to you. It is always so in these circumstances.”

  “That’s not true! Leninor Garvedian was alive and unhurt when you forced her to make Adennos Captal!” She knew that now. She knew many things—perhaps more than he had guessed. “You could have saved her, taken her to safety in Shellinkroth instead of him!”

  “She was forced by events, not by me.”

  “But you did it! You knew that Auvry Feiran was coming, you came to her with Adennos spelled and in tow—and then you made him Captal and she was dead before a single torch was lit in Ambrai!”

  “Enough!” he shouted. “Don’t you think I know all that? Don’t you think it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done?”

  “One question, First Sword,” Cailet said heatedly. “Why didn’t you make yourself Captal?”

  That hit, and hard. She saw it in the flinch of his whole body, in the fear and shame—and frustrated hunger—twitching across his face. Oh, she’d learned what “Rinnel” had told her to learn, all right. She knew how to read faces now.

  “I—I was too old.”

  “Liar.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, he whispered, “I was . . . not worthy.”

  “And I am?”

  Cailet dug her fingers into his flawless regimentals, black on black from uncoifed head to dark skin, from powerful shoulders to shining boots, with a red and silver sash circling his lean waist and silver Sword and Candle at his collar, the garb of the First Sword, commander of the Captal’s Warders and of all Warrior Mages.

  “Why me? Why a seventeen-year-old girl who inherited magic by accident? Whose father’s magic came from who knows where? Don’t look so surprised, I know how startled they all were when you brought him to the Academy—all that power, all so unexpected!”

  “You can’t possibly know! Get your hands off me!”

  She tightened her grip on his longvest and shirt, staring up at him, glaring him down. “Why not you, Gorynel Desse? Why not the man with at least one Mageborn in every breeding pair of his Blood—right back to The Waste War?”

  “Because I failed!” He broke away from her with such force that she staggered. “There it is, Cailet Ambrai, the simple truth! I failed!”

  “At what?”

  “I thought you knew everything now!”

  “Tell me!”

  A glimmer of hope sparked in his eyes. “No,” he said, and smoothed his clothing with absolute finality.

  “Damn you, tell me!”

  But within her was no spell, no word, no Warding, no trick of mind or will, that could take from him what he did not want to give.

  “No,” he said again, when at last her assault ceased. “And don’t ever try anything like that again. Especially not on a Malerrisi. You may know, but you don’t yet understand, that there are defenses against magic other than that wall I showed you how to build.”

  Cailet felt all the anger flood from her body, leaving her shaky and afraid. “Oh, damn it, Gorsha, don’t you see? I just proved that I’m a mistake. This should never have happened to me.”

  “You’re wrong.” Desse pushed the thick black curls from his eyes. “You’ll have plenty of time to despise me for this, you know. But one day you’ll find out the completeness—and, I might add, the complexity—of the truth. And then you can despise me for all the right reasons. It won’t matter anymore.”

  “But you can’t tell me now.”

  “No. And I’m not sorry for it, either.” The fierce green of his eyes gentled to the warmth of sunlight through spring leaves. “You’re so young, Cailet. Too young to know so much, most would say—and will say. But I know you. There has been no mistake. Not this time.”

  He approached her, lithe and strong, and took her face between his hands. She tilted her head back, full of questions but no accusations. First Sword Gorynel Desse had been a whispered legend; Rinnel had been her fascinating,
eccentric friend. But this was a young man who stood cradling her face in his fingers now, one hand drifting up to brush her hair from her wondering eyes.

  “For just this moment, Cailet,” he murmured, “try not to hate me.”

  “I don’t—” she began.

  And then he kissed her. Not an old man’s affectionate kiss, but a young lover’s: long, deep, searching, tender—and ah, Saints, so sweet. . . .

  I would have loved you this way, Cailet. For the magic of it, the magic of you and me. Remember this, heartling. Remember that I loved you.

  23

  Something had been on Auvry Feiran’s mind, something unconnected to the finding and burning of the Academy Ladders. It had been a disappointment, of course, to discover no Mage Guardians hiding in the ruins, but this was not what shadowed his eyes.

  At last Glenin asked. They were seated in what had been a schoolroom in Captal Bekke’s Tower, where the Ladder to Viranka’s Breast still lived on the top floor. It was late, and after the day’s exertions few were awake. They’d eaten hot food that night, cooked over open fires. Smoke had risen from torched Ladders all day; even if the Mages were somewhere in the city, a few more fires didn’t matter. In fact, Glenin enjoyed the notion that they huddled somewhere in stark terror that their only means of escape had gone up in flames—if only she was sure the Mages were here.

  “If they’re in Ambrai, where?” she said to her father after casting a Warming onto her coffee mug. Chava Allard made the worst brew she’d ever tasted, and only stinging heat made it palatable. “It’s been bothering you also, hasn’t it?”

  “Hmm? Oh—no, Glensha, they are here.”

  “Can you sense them?” She was mildly irked that he might perceive what she could not. She had been the one to find the three living Ladders, after all. But perhaps his Mage training made him more sensitive to the Guardians—and to his teacher Gorynel Desse in particular.