by Melanie Rawn
At dinner a few nights ago, Elsvet Doyannis had made some sweetly poisonous remark about Glenin’s newly curvaceous figure, prompting Garon to state loudly that he adored the way Glenin looked. His stupid blush had nearly given the secret away. She forgave him only because his Birthingday offered so perfect an occasion to announce the happy news. Another ten days and she could stop pretending—and start wearing comfortable clothes instead of squeezing into gowns, trousers, shirts, and vests now much too tight.
She was out of breath by the time she climbed the Double Spiral to the balcony where the family had often sat watching the sun set over the river. The wrought iron chairs and benches from Isodir still littered the balcony, paint long since weathered away and cushions rotted to nothingness. Yet she could remember each lavishly embroidered pillow, if not the grandfather and cousin who had worked them. Gerrin Ostin and his namesake, Gerrin Desse, had vied in laughing rivalry to outdo each other in the intricacy of their needlework. Glenin could almost see clever fingers dancing across big, ornate embroidery frames, remembered inspecting each pattern’s progress. Grandfather had been working on a new cushion for her just before she left for Ryka Court: Feiran Leaf Crown, Halvos Feathers, Vekke Circled Triangle, and Ostin Oak Tree quartered in the middle of an Ambrai Octagon. She remembered asking why her father’s ancestral Name sigils were not included, and the scorn that flickered over Grandmother Allynis’s face.
Glenin gave a shrug. The threads had probably been picked out by nesting birds years ago. There was nothing left of the Ambrai she had known as a child.
And this suited her very well. She intended to reweave the fabric of Ambrai into whatever pattern she chose and rule here as Lady Glenin Feiran. But she would rule Lenfell from Ryka Court. She refused to allow the worldwide government to intrude on her personal, private city.
And the Malerrisi? From what place would she rule them?
Lightly she clasped the wrought iron banister, imagining the view ten years from now. All wreckage cleared away, broad avenues bustling with traffic again, shiny new buildings of glass and marble replacing those burned to the ground, a bigger concert hall to outdo even the gigantic Ryka Opera House, massive wharves and docks filled with the produce of every Shir—
—and no Mage Academy to blot the hillside across the river.
Bard Hall could stay, and the Healers Ward. She’d be generous, for those establishments would once again make Ambrai the center of musical and medicinal arts. But in place of the Academy, using all the best design elements and none of the awkwardnesses that had always displeased her, she would build a true magnificence to replace Malerris Castle. Her son would learn magic there.
Great graceful towers rose in her mind’s eye, obliterating the remains of the Mage Academy. But imagination could not obscure the sight of the five small barges drifting under the half-shattered gray bulk of St. Viranka’s Bridge.
Glenin sucked in an astonished breath and watched as ropes flew out and caught on iron moorings imbedded in concrete. The barges were laboriously hauled in and many people jumped to the shingle of rocky bank. One person snagged her attention: a thin blonde girl, the first to leap ashore. Too tall to be Sarra Liwellan—but who, then? Why did Glenin not quite recognize her?
The girl scrambled up a slope where stairs had once been and stood on the paved River Walk surveying the ruins of Ambrai, clear noon sunlight mirrored in her white-gold hair. So intent was Glenin on tracking down the familiarity that long minutes passed before she felt the other thing. As she narrowed her eyes to stare at the girl, she finally felt it: the Captal’s Summons.
This girl, the new Mage Captal?
Ridiculous. Outrageous. Impossible.
All the same, Glenin fashioned a delicate lancet of magic and sent it slicing through the half-mile of air between them. Ladders required little effort; fine work like this demanded prodigious control. She was more than capable of it—but her baby had never experienced such concentrated magic. He quivered within her and for an instant she didn’t know if the cold fear in her heart was his or hers or a combination of the two. She broke off the spell before it found its target, and slumped, shaking, against the balcony balustrade.
Forgive me, my darling, forgive me! she pleaded with her child, frantic for indication that all was well despite her folly. Beloved? Sweeting, are you all right?
Slowly she calmed, realizing that there was none of the pain she would feel if the shock had convulsed him into separation from her nurturing body. Neither did fear radiate from him anymore. She stroked the swell of him at her abdomen, soothing them both with the caresses.
He was all right. Perfectly safe. And one day he would know this for the magic it was. Recognize it—welcome it.
I didn’t mean to frighten you, my heart, I should’ve been more care ful. But now that you’ve felt magic, you’ll never be afraid of it again. Not my son!
She didn’t stay to watch the Mages and the Rising and the new Captal start across the city. She didn’t give a damn about any of them, or about Anniyas’s plans for them. Let her have them, she thought as she took her time descending the stairs. I don’t care. Nothing and no one matters except my son.
She rested for the better part of an hour on the steps of the Double Spiral before using the Ladder back to Ryka Court. The Guards nodded respectfully when she passed. She didn’t care about that, either. Whatever plots and ploys she’d been dreaming, all were subsumed in terror for her son.
There should have been finality in that—the decision made, the scheming ended. But when she reached her suite, she paced restlessly, undressing in abrupt motions that tore the buttons and laces of her clothes. I have to care what Anniyas does. For whatever she does, it will affect my son. Unless I outthink her, she’ll be the one making his future, not me.
Intolerable.
She lay down and shut her eyes. Yet she was unable to sleep until she sought her husband’s bed and the adoring warmth of his arms. At least he was good for something. She knew he’d be no use to her where his mother was concerned. Though he worshiped Glenin as her magic compelled him, Anniyas’s claim was the older, the claim of blood. When forced to choose between them, the spell and the instinct would collide. Glenin didn’t need paralysis; she needed help. And there was only one person certain to give it.
Early the next morning she sought out her father before he could leave for the albadon, and asked a single question.
“That dream you had at Ambrai—what did the girl look like?”
24
In the fifteen days since the Captal’s Summons, Mages all over Lenfell had been on the move.
In late 968, Gorynel Desse’s private count of Mage Guardians, including Prentices, was 1,109. When the Purge—as it was being called—began early the next year, 538 were immediately killed or captured by the Council Guard or the Lords of Malerris. Two weeks later, the tally was 812. By the Feast of St. Miramili, the number was 965—very nearly the thousand it was said Anniyas demanded. Add Cailet, and the Mage Guardians still free and alive totalled 144.
In 951, the year of her birth, there had been over 10,000.
Cailet arrived in Ambrai on the second day of Green Bells with thirteen other Mages. By the fourth, most of the rest began to show up.
It was uncanny. One minute she was sitting in the ruined and overgrown garden of a small stone house in the suburbs of Ambrai. The next she was staring at five dusty, road-weary Mage Guardians who bowed low to her while trying to hide shock, dismay, and amazement that their new Captal, the person who’d sent so powerful and imperative a Summons, was a teenaged girl whose name they didn’t even know.
Taig performed introductions. The five young men bowed once more. Cailet nodded acknowledgment—Sarra’s gesture without, she sighed inwardly, Sarra’s grace—and remarked on the spectacular time they’d made from Tillinshir. One of them allowed as how his brother commanded a prodigious Folding spell. Cailet complimented him wh
ile matching names and faces to Gorsha’s Lists in her head, and sent them off for food and rest.
Five hours later, three more had found her: the source of the Summons, the Mage Captal. By dusk, a total of twelve new arrivals were sleeping wherever they could find space in the six-room dwelling, and Cailet began to understand what she’d done.
But how had they done it? Senn Mikleine—officially Second Warden of Kenroke Castle, secretly a Warrior Mage—smiled at Cailet’s astonishment that so many could come so far so fast. By spells, he said; by luck; by ship and by horseback; by Ladders not even Alin, not even Gorsha, had known existed. As for how they’d escaped notice—well, dozens of Mage Guardians scattered all over Lenfell were known only to the local officers of the Rising and to—
“Gorynel Desse,” she interrupted with a sigh.
“Exactly, Captal.” He grinned again, golden-brown eyes sparkling in a handsome sun-bronzed face. Thirty-seven years of age, he was one of the last Warriors trained at the Academy by the First Sword himself. “Never put anything past him.”
“So I’m discovering,” she replied dryly.
Other Mages followed, and many brought members of the Rising with them. Ilisa Neffe and her husband Tamosin Wolvar came on the sixth with Biron Maurgen and Riddon and Maugir Slegin. Jeymi, they told her, had to be almost forcibly restrained from coming along. The next noon, Telomir Renne and Miram Ostin arrived, bearing Kanto Solingirt’s abject apologies for being too old and feeble to obey the Captal’s Summons.
Cailet winced at that. Thus far the newcomers were all under forty-five, strong enough to undertake long journeys at damned near impossible speed. But would even the older Mages feel compelled to—to obey her? It wasn’t a word she was comfortable with. When a contemporary of Gavirin Bekke—his cousin Lilias, also a retired Warder—was assisted into the Captal’s presence by two Prentices even younger than Cailet, she decided that obey was a truly terrible word.
But she had to admit its uses. The compulsion to obey her Summons had sent Imilial Gorrst riding out of Ostinhold, and on the way to Ambrai she’d scried with a Mage Globe and found Sarra.
The two appeared at dusk on the eighth of Green Bells. Cailet caught her sister in her arms and they sat in the abandoned garden, weeping together until the Ladymoon set.
They were alone together the whole of the next day. More Mages arrived and were told the Captal would be pleased to welcome them tomorrow. On the tenth, however, the sisters eluded Taig, Elomar, and all the forty-nine Mages and thirty-six Rising partisans and walked to the Octagon Court.
“I suppose I felt it, too,” Sarra mused as they picked their way through rubble-clogged streets. “All I really knew was that I wanted to go home.”
Cailet nodded. After a time she said, “I guess I put a little more into it than was strictly necessary. I feel guilty about the old ones.”
“Don’t. I think the journey invigorated quite a few of them. Enis Girre, for instance—Taig says the old man hasn’t looked so well in years.”
“That may be true,” Cailet conceded. “Just to be who and what they are again instead of hiding must be a relief. But Lilias Bekke can hardly walk, and Elo’s worried about Shonner Escovor.”
“Strange, isn’t it?” Sarra asked as they climbed a fallen stone archway. “That a man of the same Name as a Lord of Malerris should be a Mage Guardian.”
“That was centuries ago. And the same could be said of the Ambrais, Sarra.”
“She is not my sister.”
Cailet slanted a look at her.
“Or yours,” Sarra added sharply.
A little while later they crossed the river at St. Viranka’s Bridge, pausing mid-span to look downstream. Cailet ran her fingers lightly over the wounded gray stone where someone seemed to have taken a pickax to it.
“She isn’t,” Sarra said suddenly.
“I’m not arguing with you.”
“Yes, you are. I can hear it. All the little wheels turning and all the little voices—” She broke off and glanced away.
“And here I thought I was the only one who heard them,” Cailet said mildly.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. Actually, I think I’m getting used to it. Them. Alin and the Captal don’t say much, truly told. Neither does Scholar Wolvar. It’s Gorsha mostly. Sometimes he won’t shut up, and sometimes when I need him most he won’t say a single word.” She pushed away from the wall with a shrug and a rueful smile. “I’ll get it all sorted out once there’s time for it.”
“When?” Sarra asked bleakly.
After I settle a few things with Glenin-who-isn’t-our-sister and Auvry-Feiran-who-isn’t-our-father. And with Anniyas.
It’ll happen, Sarra. I knew it when you told me they have Collan.
But Collan wasn’t a subject to be mentioned again. And Sarra would order every Mage now in Ambrai to set Wards on Cailet to prevent encounters with any of the three. Sarra would be obeyed, simply because she was Sarra. I wonder what that’s like, having people do what you tell them simply because you are who you are, with no title to remind them Who You Are.
“When?” Cailet echoed. “Soon enough. I’ve given up worrying about it, so don’t you start. How far to the Octagon Court?”
“Another two miles. Which will probably take us several hours, and by then it’ll be too late to start back.”
“I brought lunch and dinner.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
Continuing across Viranka’s Bridge, they detoured around a fallen statue of the Saint and started down the main avenue. The buildings here had housed their grandmother’s bureaucracy: commissioners of this, ministers of that, secretaries of a dozen other things. They lived on the fourth and fifth floors, had private offices on the third, did public business on the second, and spent hot afternoons in cool marble reception chambers and petition halls on the first. To Cailet’s left in successive order were Finance, Forests, Fisheries, Agriculture, Trade, and Harbors. To the right was the huge edifice of the Guilds, flanked by narrower houses belonging to various Webs. After a half-mile the avenue split to accommodate a large circle where a bronze St. Jeymian had once stood in a small ocean of green grass, surrounded by all manner of woodland animals. He and his menagerie were melted slag now, and the ground was cracked and dry.
None of the buildings had actually collapsed, but the roofs had all burned and their downward crash—and that of the wooden beams that braced each tiled floor—had crushed everything within each structure. Glass littered the street ankle-deep from windows blown out by fire. Stone statues had been smashed, bronzes melted down. White marble was everywhere stained with soot that not even seventeen years of winter rain and snow could wash clean.
Past St. Jeymian’s Circle were more office buildings. Mining, Education, Public Works, the Watch’s main constabulary and the embassies of all fourteen other Shirs lined the cobbled avenue. Cailet had never considered how complex the daily life of Lenfell’s largest and most powerful city must have been. Every class and category of person and every human endeavor was represented one way or another along these streets. She began to understand the gargantuan labors her family had shouldered for Generations—a burden Sarra was eager to assume but which Cailet knew was not for her. The Ambrais had guided the total life of the Shir, from commerce to opera to farming to bookbinding, from architecture to medicine to cattle breeding.
And magic.
But the people were all gone—except for scattered piles of bleached bones. Fewer here than at the Academy, or than she’d see at the Octagon Court.
They stopped to rest at the Council House that curved around the closed end of the street, sprawling its width in an arc of empty windows.
“It will never be what it was,” Sarra said as they sat down on the steps.
Cailet leaned her elbows on her knees and sighed as she gazed down the length
of the broad avenue to the river. “I keep trying to imagine those three days,” she murmured. “That’s how long it took to do this. The first day they burned the outlying districts, and that was easy because most of the houses were wood. Everyone fled to the central city. Thousands and thousands crowded into the streets and the Academy and the Octagon Court. That made them easy to slaughter. That was the second day. The third, they torched everything. That was easy, too. Everyone who might have stopped them was dead.”
“Could anything have stopped them?” Sarra asked bitterly.
“Enough Mages working together under the direction of the Captal could have Warded the whole city.”
“Leninor Garvedian was dead by then.”
“And Lusath Adennos hadn’t recovered from the Making. But that wouldn’t’ve mattered. It’s our great weakness, you know. We don’t easily give up control of our magic to someone else. We’re independent. We don’t think in terms of working together to become more than the sum of our parts.”
“Mages don’t think like Malerrisi, you mean,” Sarra replied. “I’d call that a great strength.”
“Under most circumstances, yes. There are only two things a Mage Guardian does without question: protect a Captal and obey a Summons. The rest of it is all open to debate and personal choice.”
“Whereas the Malerrisi allow no debate and no choice. Do you admire that, Cailet?”
“You have to admit it’d be useful on occasion. Like here, in 951.” She gestured to the wreckage around them.
“How many occasions would follow?” Sarra asked softly. “How many excuses for occasions?”
“I’m not advocating it as general practice,” Cailet responded with an edge to her voice. “I’m just saying that we may have to learn how to work together under one person’s direction—”
“Which is easy enough to say when you’re obviously the person who’ll be doing the directing. And as it happens, you’re wrong about the Mages. They did exactly what you’re talking about twice in the past. To Ward up the Wraithenbeasts.”