by Melanie Rawn
Her voice was thick, but she forced out the words. “It’s all right, Taig. I understand.” She made herself walk toward him and take his outstretched hands.
His hands are as cold as mine. We’ll find no warmth in each other’s touch. . . .
She knew that as if she’d always known it. A memory wafted up, hesitantly offering understanding and comfort: a girl, deeply loved, who had promised to wait. That same girl, a young woman now, shaking her head in slow and sorrowful negation. “I’m sorry. You ‘re so different now. . . .”
But Cailet didn’t need a memory not her own (whose? Not Alin’s.). The endearment from childhood had told her everything. Taig had to see her as the Cailet he had known all her life, or begin seeing the others in her eyes again. He would never see her whole. She could be Cailet or the Captal but not both at the same time. And he would never see that the little girl who had worshiped him was now a young woman who loved him, and needed more from him than a brother’s love.
Maybe someday, when all this is over, and we can have a little peace . . . ?
No. Never.
It was her own voice asking, her own voice answering. Forbidding regret or bitterness, she released Taig’s icy fingers and glanced around. Elin and Pier and Elomar were staring at their hands. Falundir was watching her and Taig, compassion in his blue eyes. Sarra was looking at Col with speculation arching one brow.
“We leave on the third for Renig, then,” Cailet said, a smile curving her mouth unbidden as she caught the Minstrel’s eye. “Tomorrow we’ll try on the uniforms. You can judge the fit.”
“If I do, they’ll know we’re faking it,” he shot back. “Those tunics have to look sloppy.”
She heard the we, of course, as he’d meant her to. Odd, how she’d known him little more than a week, yet could no longer imagine life without him.
Or Sarra. Especially Sarra.
She was still thinking about it when she crawled wearily into bed. It was almost as if they had been waiting for her. As if this life had been waiting for her.
It had, for nearly eighteen years.
“Whoever said that,” she mumbled aloud, “go away and let me sleep.”
2
“What the hell is your mother running here, a shelter for stray Mages?”
Collan had dragged Taig by the elbow to one side of the entry hall, away from the latest refugees—who had very nearly fainted when Lady Lilen’s front door was answered by two men in the red regalia of the Council Guard.
Taig grinned. “She’s the central contact for all North Lenfell.”
“Oh, wonderful. Just wonderful. So all it’d take would be one of them singing to the Guard—”
“Even if they do, which is damned near impossible, it won’t matter. We’ll be gone tomorrow.” Taig slapped his shoulder companionably. “You worry too much, Col. The Council can’t and won’t touch my mother. One way or another, she owns half Lenfell.”
“It’s the half Anniyas owns that concerns me,” he retorted.
“Relax. We’ve planned for circumstances just like these.” Taig walked off to join the others in the music room. Grinding his teeth, Col followed.
Lusira Garvedian—exhausted but as exquisite as ever—had yet to unstick herself from Elomar Adennos’s side. Each looked stunned with joy at finding the other alive. Collan sighed a bit at her unavailability, but didn’t wonder, as once he might have, what the gorgeous Garvedian saw in the plain-faced, skinny-limbed Healer Mage. He liked Elo, and considered Lusira a lucky woman with excellent taste in men.
Unlike Cailet, who would probably never understand that the Rising meant more to Taig than she ever could—either as Mage Captal or as herself. Poor little kitten. . . .
Tiron Mossen and Keler Neffe were too numbed with weariness to react to anything except the embrace of deep upholstery; they sank into chairs as if they’d been on their feet for four weeks straight. Which was almost the case.
Fortified by wine and food from Lady Lilen’s larder, Lusira told their tale. She’d left Cantratown the same night Tamos Wolvar had battled Glenin Feiran with Mage Globes in Combel. What had happened to Lusira was pretty much what had happened to Lady Agatine: warned by a bouquet—genuine, delivered by a trusted agent of the Rising—she packed and fled on the appointed day. With no Mage to take her through the Ladder, she traveled on horseback to Pinderon. There, learning the extent of the disaster, fearing for her friends, she warily approached the local members of the Rising. The new mistress of the Feathered Fan hid her until passage to The Waste could be arranged.
A few days later Keler Neffe and Tiron Mossen arrived at the bower. Of all the Mages Alin had taken back to Neele that night, they alone survived. Last in line to climb out, they’d leaped back down into the sewer when Tiron’s mother, Sirralin, cried out a warning just before she died. After three days in the maze of pipes, they emerged and sneaked aboard a cargo ship bound for Pinderon; the captain was glad enough of extra deckhands, for six of his crew had been arrested as suspected members of the Rising. A ship to Renig was next, and the regular post coach to Longriding, and here they were.
Sarra, first to speak after Lusira finished, directed her remark at Elomar. “If they were going to catch anything from that filth, I suppose they would have by now.”
“What? Oh—yes.” The besotted Healer dragged his gaze from Lusira’s face. “To be safe, I’ll give them something.”
Tiron winced. “How bad will it taste?”
This, Collan mused, from a boy who—Lusira said—staved off thirst by guzzling lukewarm bathwater as it poured down a sewer spout. Well, better a bath than—no, he didn’t want to finish that thought.
“Fairly awful,” Elomar said. “You’ll survive. Come on.”
When they were gone—Lusira as well, tucked into the curve of the Healer Mage’s arm—Cailet finally spoke.
“I wonder if there are others.”
“I doubt it.” Taig rose to check that the curtains were securely drawn. “I can’t show my recognizable Ostin face in Longriding, but Pier went out this morning for an hour or so. Want to tell her what you found out?”
The young man, who until now had been impressed with his own adventures, started at hearing his name. “Can you believe that? Three days in a sewer!”
“The broadsheet?” Taig prompted.
“Oh, that. I read that the Council reports over six hundred Mage Guardians either dead or imprisoned.”
Taig said, “The Lists burned with Ambrai, of course, but the total number of living Mages is officially somewhere around a thousand. Gorsha’s count was one thousand one hundred and nine.”
Collan glanced at Pier. “What was the header on the broadsheet?”
“Feleson Press, seventh day of Spring Moon.”
“Over a week ago. Old news. By now it’s probably eight or nine hundred.” Col chewed his lip a moment. “They won’t stop until they’ve got their thousand.”
Sarra was frowning. “Did the broadsheet say anything about trials?”
“Ryka Court,” Pier said. “They’ll be tried in two bunches: Mage Guardians first, then Rising. There was an editorial praising the government’s economy in sparing the judicial budget.”
“What’s the schedule?”
“Three weeks. Time to ship ’em all from various jails around Lenfell.”
“That’s . . . interesting.”
Seeing her exchange a glance with Cailet, Collan knew with nauseating certainty what was next. Had he said wonderful earlier? This was worse than wonderful. It was bloody damned perfect.
“Aw, what the hell,” he muttered. “You can stop running mental mazes. I’ve been in Renig Jail.”
3
While others plotted and planned based on information he gave them, Collan climbed the stairs and went to bed. If what little he’d overheard thus far was any indication, he was going to need the extra sleep.
What he couldn’t for the life of him figure out was why he was still with these crazy people. Roseguard to Ryka to Ambrai, he’d gone along with it all—and letting other people decide where he went and what he did was so foreign to his nature that he wondered if Gorynel Desse had bespelled him.
And yet . . . and yet. Here he was. And there they were downstairs scheming out his future again. Fundamental honesty made him admit that he stayed because he really did want to. First for Verald and Sela and Tamsa; then, maddeningly, Sarra; now Cailet. Poor kitten. . . .
Truly told, she seemed to be doing all right for herself so far. If he listened to her without looking at her, he could believe she was Mage Captal. It was watching her face, her very young face, that jostled his perceptions—and reinforced his determination to give her all the help he could.
Saints help him.
As for the rest of them—he’d now met more Mage Guardians than he had fellow Minstrels, and he couldn’t say he was entirely enamored of the breed. They kept arriving at Lady Lilen’s house, and Cailet kept sending them away after a good meal and a good night’s sleep to places she felt were safer. They didn’t like it much, but they went. Captal’s orders.
By and large, they were a fairly dull lot, the Warriors among them notwithstanding. There seemed an excess of Scholars; three more arrived during the night, and Collan had the bad luck to be accosted by a very famous one at breakfast the next morning.
Her name was Lisivet Mikleine. She was sixty-six years old and Dean of Neele College. Her students had hidden her, smuggled her to the sewer under Naplian Street, created a diversion for any interested Malerrisi and Council Guards, and now here she was with one of her faculty and a grandson in tow. Collan was discussing knives with the boy, Fleran, when Dean Mikleine plumped her considerable self into a chair and began without preamble to explain her pet theory. Fleran hastily decamped. Two minutes into the worthy Mage’s discourse, Col wished he’d done the same.
“My linguistic studies will interest you, Minstrel,” she said vigorously, iron-gray curls bobbing as she nodded agreement with herself. “Consider! What do we call the animal we ride? A horse. What does ‘horse’ mean?”
Laconically: “It means ‘horse.’”
“But what connection does the word have to any description of a four-legged beast with split hooves and a mane and tail, a creature that eats grass and grain and runs fast? Why not call it a fish? And what about the tree that blooms in spring with purple-blue flowers? What’s it called?”
Verald Jescarin, Master of Roseguard Grounds, would have known. Collan hadn’t a clue, and said so.
“It’s a jacaranda, of course. Now, what the hell kind of word is that?”
He sipped coffee, smiled politely, and wondered why the hell such thoughts had ever occurred to this woman. Didn’t she have enough to do as Dean of the most exclusive college on Lenfell?
Pier Alvassy came around with a pitcher of coffee. Lisivet Mikleine pointed imperiously to her cup and didn’t stop talking for an instant. Pier gave Collan a grin that said Better you in the lecture hall than me!
“There’s a little bird in Sheve Dark called the blue chitterling. A descriptive name, don’t you see? One that means something. Color and sound. And the rare Stevvin four-horn that roams upper Tillinshir—Stevvin being the village nearest its feeding range, four the number of horns on its ugly little skull—another name that describes. But horse? Jacaranda? Dolphin? Where did such words come from? Nobody knows.”
Collan didn’t see why anyone would want to. He didn’t say so. And that was another thing: he’d caught himself minding his manners recently. Disgusting.
“Well? Don’t you think it’s odd?” demanded the Dean.
“Uh-huh.” He ate faster; the end of his meal would mean an end to his martyrdom. But, by St. Velireon the Provider, this was the best coffee that had been provided him all year, and he sincerely hated to rush through his first cup in the morning.
She pointed her egg-laden fork at him. “Why name some things with words that have no meaning, and yet name others with descriptions of what they are?”
“They ran out of funny words?”
“No, no! They already had names for those things! Horse, jacaranda, dolphin—they were familiar and were given the familiar names. But things they’d never seen before—that’s when they used descriptions rather than—”
“Your pardon, Scholar, but who is ‘they’?”
“Our ancestors, of course. They came to Lenfell long before The Waste War. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Haven’t you been listening? I’ve compiled a list of over a thousand names that mean nothing, and another thousand that mean something. I have it somewhere in my baggage—”
Collan blinked. “Came to Lenfell from where? How?”
“Damned if I know,” Scholar Mikleine said mournfully. “But it’s all in the language, you know. The clues. What they already had names for, and what was new to them so they had to make up names for it.”
He was intrigued in spite of himself. Half a Minstrel’s trade was language, after all. Which led him to think of the other half. Perhaps some of the music as well as some of the words came from sources he had never imagined.
“My oath on it,” she said, “they came to settle Lenfell the way we settle new areas of Kenrokeshir. Nothing on the face of this whole world dates from much before The Waste War. And that couldn’t have destroyed everything. So obviously there was a time when we were here, and a time before we were here.”
“You mean there’s somebody else out there somewhere?”
Scholar Mikleine turned into a statue, her fork arrested in midair and dripping butter.
“If they came from somewhere else, then the somewhere else still exists, probably, with people still there, probably.”
Her distinctive almond-shaped brown eyes, common in several branches of her Name, were now perfectly round with astonishment.
“And if they came once,” Col went on, warming to his theme—and, truly told, shamelessly enjoying his accomplishment, for it wasn’t often one so startled a world-renowned Scholar, “it also means they might come back.”
Lisivet Mikleine looked positively stricken. Col began to think of more words—like seizure and stroke. At last she shook herself, buttered eggs flying in all directions, and set her fork on her plate with a clatter.
“Do you know what you’ve done, young man?” she accused. “You’ve opened up an entirely new realm of speculation!” She sounded as if he’d dug her a desperately needed new well and struck a gush of liquid pitch instead.
“Sorry,” he offered.
“So you should be! Do you realize that now I’ll have to consult whole libraries for clues? Whether or not they come back depends on why they came in the first place. Were they explorers, or were they exiles? And what about—”
He tried to be soothing. “There’s no sign that they’ve been back in the last thousand years or so. If they’d wanted to see what happened to us, they would’ve come back long ago, right?”
“—what they hoped to accomplish, and what they’d think of us now—”
Was he really sitting here discussing visitations from another world? Mages were each uniquely but all completely insane. Collan said, “Well, by now the language has changed so much we couldn’t understand each other anyway, so it’s all moot.”
“There, you see? Another bizarre word!”
“Another for your list—but I want credit for it!” He grinned his best grin and left her mumbling in a dark ecstasy of linguistic and philosophical conjecture that would, he surmised, keep her busy for the next twenty years.
Scholars! he thought, and then: Mages! with equal exasperation. He was getting just as crazy as they were. The sooner he was quit of them all, the better. He should ride up to Ostinhold and see Tamsa and the new baby, and give Lady Lilen their father’s jewelry, which he’d kept forgetting in the whirl of e
vents.
But he didn’t leave Longriding. He stayed. Damned if he knew why.
4
A Folding spell cast by the new Mage Captal got them to Renig at dusk on the fifth day of Seeker’s Moon. The duty constable at Renig Jail fell all over herself when eight dusty Council Guards marched in with three prisoners for the local collection.
Cailet had chosen Lusira for the role of captain. As her name wasn’t on the bounty broadsheets, her value as a “captive” was nonexistent. But her beauty was a vital asset; no one looked elsewhere when Lusira was around. The other “Guards” wouldn’t even be noticed and Cailet would be positively anonymous.
Lusira showed a real flair for the role, using a perfect mix of impatience and condescension in her demand for the most secure cells in the building. Nine Mages and eleven suspected members of the Rising (three of them no older than fifteen) were summarily evicted from three tiny, pitch-black basement rooms.
Falundir went meekly into the indicated cell, a smile playing about his lips as if all this was a chaotic dress rehearsal for an opera written, performed, and produced by children. The door—solid iron but for a plate-sized slot for food—clanged shut behind him. Elin Alvassy was next, glaring at her brother when he prodded her through the doorway. Sarra gave Collan a look that promised strangulation with his own lute strings if he tried for similar authenticity. He grinned down at her with cheerful ferocity that widened the eyes of the Watch constable who held the keys.
With her sister, her cousin, and the great Bard safely locked up, Cailet turned her attention to the other prisoners. Filthy, dull-eyed, hollow-cheeked, not one of the twenty was alert enough to comprehend any but the most obvious hint. She murmured a few words to Elomar, who nodded.
On the way down dark hallways to a larger cell for drunks, thieves, and petty criminals, the Healer Mage delayed the duty constable with questions. By the first turn, they lagged four steps behind; by the second, nearly ten. Taig, Lusira, and Tiron Mossen went ahead of the twenty prisoners while Collan, Pier Alvassy, and Keler Neffe walked shoulder-to-shoulder behind Cailet. Adequately screened, she nudged one of them in the back.