The Ruins of Ambrai

by Melanie Rawn

  “Of course. I’d forgotten.” Climbing to her feet, she brushed off the seat of her trousers and started down the steps.

  Sarra followed. “I want you to consider why they never did it again.”

  “What?” Cailet stopped and turned. Her sister stood two steps above her, and it was suddenly a strange thing to be looking up at tiny, fragile Sarra—who just as suddenly looked like a formidable Saint come to life.

  “I haven’t forgotten the Wraithenbeasts. I’ve thought about them every day since I figured out what Anniyas has in mind. I’ve explained it to you, and I know you don’t entirely believe me, but what little magic I have tells me it will happen. I want you to consider why Mage Guardians don’t work the way the Malerrisi do before you try to do it. I don’t want you to find out to your cost right in the middle.”

  Cailet tilted her head. “I assume you have some thoughts on the matter? Warnings? Speculations?”

  Sarra frowned, black eyes narrowing, the Saint’s solemn aspect acquiring a sheen of anger. “Don’t play Captal with me, Cailet Ambrai. It doesn’t impress.”

  It hovered on her lips to rebuke her sister—who had no magic and no sure knowledge, only instinct. Go right ahead—and lose the only person who loves you for you, Captal.

  Not Gorsha this time. Her own voice.

  “I’m sorry,” she blurted out, and Sarra’s eyes softened. “It’s just—I have my own instincts, Sarra, just as strong as yours, and if they’re right, then it won’t ever come to that. Not even close.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” she lied—and she must be getting better at it, for all Sarra did was nod thoughtfully. “When I have a better idea, I’ll let you know.”

  That, at least was the truth. Part of it, anyhow.

  They set off again through the deserted streets of their ancestral city, and by mid-afternoon climbed the garden wall that led into the Octagon Court. For a full hour they simply sat, side by side, on a wrought iron bench beneath a bravely flowering cherry tree. They stared up at what had once been the pride of Ambrai, each silent with her own thoughts. Cailet surmised that Sarra must be remembering. She was wrong.

  “A lot of it depends on what you have to work with,” Sarra commented after a while.

  “To work with?” Cailet echoed.

  “The Mages and the Rising. The Healers are a great help, of course, in the usual run of things, but not much use in a fight. The Scholars . . . well, they’re resources, I suppose. The general run of Mages is fairly extraordinary, though. It seems Gorsha chose wisely when reviewing candidates for leading double lives. Some were scheduled to be collected by Alin and Val and me on our trip back to Roseguard.” She kicked at a tuft of grass. “But it seems to me the ones you really need are the Warrior Mages. I’ll have a talk with Taig about the Rising, see who can do what, who’s got influence where—”

  “Sarra,” Cailet said gently, “not one of them has influence enough anymore to buy a cup of coffee on credit. As far as any of their friends and family know, they’ve vanished—and in these times there’s only one reason to disappear without a trace.”

  Sarra began toying with the end of her braid, tied off this morning with a piece of twine. Cailet remembered the flowers that had crowned her hair in another garden, and the elegant pastel dress, and how much she’d hated this lovely girl who’d been sitting with Taig in the moonlight.

  “Caisha . . . this is it for them, isn’t it? They’ve thrown in their lot with us. We’re responsible for them now. They have no lives but what we can win for them.” She looked up and met Cailet’s gaze. “I do mean ‘we,’ you know.”

  Bereft of words, Cailet nodded. This is mine—the love I have for her, the love she offers me. Sarra’s mine.

  But Sarra was also Collan’s, and it was her misfortune not to have discovered it sooner. Cailet wondered if either of them knew that he was just as much hers. I guess that’s my job, she told herself. And the smile she smiled inside was as much her own as the one she gave Sarra, though she didn’t tell her sister the impetus of her humor. Whatever else happened, whatever else she must do, it simply had to end with two broken vows: Sarra’s never to marry one of those loud, pesky, impossible creatures called a man, and Collan’s never to become that gelded, contemptible beast, a husband.

  Pushing herself to her feet, Cailet held out a hand to her sister. “Come on. I want to go home, too.”

  Together they entered the Octagon Court.

  25

  There was a blister on his right foot.

  It was between the big and second toes, and the spell-woven slippers had almost healed it, but rubbing the toes together chafed it raw again. This he did on purpose, time after time, and it kept him both silent and sane.

  It was pain he gave himself, as distinguished from pain that was given to him, and he knew that when he was unable to make the distinction between the two he would be lost.

  The toe bled hardly at all, so Auvry Feiran didn’t notice. There was no other blood competing for attention; the pain was entirely in his mind. This was another reason he kept the wound open. It was physical. The other was not.

  Trying to keep count of days would have frustrated him, so he didn’t bother. He was given food at irregular intervals, always the same bread and cheese, so there was no possibility of tallying breakfasts or dinners. He was allowed to sleep every now and then, and sometimes woke reasonably rested and sometimes was jarred awake still soggy with exhaustion, so his internal rhythms were off-kilter. He couldn’t even keep track of time by body processes, for the food turned his bowels to water. Auvry Feiran came and went, always in white, a disembodied head above a pair of casually clasped hands on the silver railing, and let slip no indication of how many hours or days or weeks might have passed. Whenever he let himself think about it, he didn’t think it had been that long. For one thing, the blister would have gone gangrenous; for another, judging by the hollows between his ribs, he hadn’t lost more than a few pounds.

  But he didn’t think about time very much. Why concern himself with an uncertainty that could only gnaw at him? He had more pressing worries.

  His Wards, for one.

  At their fall, he’d remembered. But now they were back—more or less. He knew about the wind and the cage and the blue onyx bracelet, but everything before that and nearly everything after were mere skitters of thought he couldn’t hang onto, like phrases of a melody or lines of a lyric that connected to nothing else he could recall. But he did remember Falundir, and the cottage in Sheve Dark, although how he had come there and why he had left were both mysteries. He remembered Sarra, too, and the magical house, and somehow all this linked up in his mind to form a kind of disjointed ballad around a single theme: a hearthfire’s warmth. The image formed a kind of steadily repeated chord holding the three disparate tunes together. The place where his mother had sung to him, the place where Falundir had given him music, the place where Sarra sat reading in her turquoise brocade robe.

  The strange song was pleasure, though. And to stay silent and sane, he required pain.

  So when his fingers, wrapped with wide swathes of white silk around a smooth silver pole, began to burn and ache and bleed without blood, he forgot the hearth and chafed at the suppurating blister on his toe and said nothing.

  The Pain Stake rose to a height of seven feet in the exact center of the white box, imbedded in the marble floor. He had awakened from a drugged sleep to find himself hanging from it by numbed hands. Straightening, he was almost comfortable: his hands were level with his chin, and he could bend his elbows and rotate his shoulders to restore circulation. But his fingers were tightly bound to the pole, and he couldn’t slide them either up or down. Neither could he pick the silk wrappings loose with his teeth. Another Ward, he told himself, and didn’t bother trying again.

  When he slept, he tried to brace his body so he wouldn’t slump and sag again and wake with wr
enched shoulders. He was fed by Auvry Feiran himself, by means of a silver fork five feet long, its two tines sharpened not only at the tips but along their length, so he must be careful not to slice open his lips and tongue when he sank his teeth into the bread and cheese. Biting down on the fork and jerking it away would probably break his teeth. So he didn’t, and accepted the food with the delicacy of a cat nibbling proffered meat. The water came in a steady stream from an expertly wielded skin, in gouts timed perfectly to his swallowing. Possibly all this was intended to humiliate him—a concept he found quite funny. What did he care how he ate, as long as there was food in his belly?

  Neither was he mortified when his bladder and bowels loosened. He did mind the smell and the mess, but he learned that while he slept someone came in and cleaned him up. The floor was always pristinely white when he woke.

  Through it all, he never said a word.

  Feiran asked two very simple questions. What is the name of the new Captal. Where is the Captal now. When no answers were forthcoming, the Pain Stake began to burn. There was no shame in crying out, or in crying. The only shame would be in answering the questions.

  There was no escaping the fiery Pain Stake clasped in his hands. And though no blood stained the white silk bindings, and he knew the pain was unreal—the pain he gave himself confirmed it—he must struggle always against the terror that when it was all over, his hands would be as useless as Falundir’s.

  He didn’t count how many times he writhed against the scorching silver. When it happened, he only wanted it to be over. And when it ended, he only rested his head against his hands and waited for the next time.

  Curiously enough, he became hungry for color. The white box was numbing; he actually began to look forward to the gray–green of Feiran’s eyes, the black of his eyelashes, the tanned skin of his face and fingers, the dusky rose of his lips. Recognizing this as both sick and dangerous, he thought instead of Falundir’s blue eyes. Sarra’s golden hair. The blue onyx bracelet. But these were colors seen in memory. Feiran was real.

  The pain was not.

  It couldn’t be. By now his hands would have burned away from his wrists, leaving only bloody stumps.

  A new question began to be asked. What is the name of the new Captal was followed by What is the name of the girl with short blonde hair. This seemed an urgent matter. It was quite a while before he realized the other question had not been asked. Was he supposed to believe that Feiran now knew where and needed only to find out who?

  The two names were identical. He knew that. Feiran didn’t. And never would, not from him.

  Because although he knew that the name of the new Captal and the name of the girl with short blonde hair were the same, he didn’t remember that name any more than he remembered his own.

  26

  “I left a note,” Cailet began, but Taig’s frown silenced her as effectively as if she were twelve years old again and he’d caught her stowing away on the ship to Pinderon.

  “She left a note. Hear that, Elomar? She left a note.” Taig loomed over her in the hollow marble corridor, his sarcasm echoing all the way up the Double Spiral Stairs. “When will you learn—”

  Sarra interrupted impatiently. “And when will you learn that that sword alone is guarantee of her safety? Truly told, you walk a fine line here, Taig. Don’t step over it again.”

  Cailet cringed.

  Taig turned crimson, then white, then pivoted on his heel and stalked away.

  Elomar shook his head gently; his only comment. Riddon Slegin looked deeply embarrassed; Miram Ostin only sighed. Sarra didn’t seem to notice their reactions at all.

  “As long as you’re here,” she said, “we might as well use this time to make some plans. It’s getting dark. Let’s go up to the family balcony. We can eat up there and wait for Taig to stop sulking.”

  The Ladymoon rose nearly full that evening, shimmering slightly on the Ward Elomar insisted on calling to the balcony.

  “The Summons may have been felt by others,” he told Cailet. “Please Ward yourself at all times from now on.”

  She glanced away from the beguiling diffusion of light. “What about the rest of you? Especially the non-Mageborns?”

  “Lilias and Gavirin Bekke took care of it,” Miram assured her. “She says it gives them something to do.”

  Riddon blinked as he passed a loaf of flatbread to Cailet. “They’re both in their seventies!”

  “They take turns,” Miram replied dryly. “Actually, I find the family quite interesting. Wine, Sarra?”

  “Thank you. Descendants of Captal Bekke, I take it?”

  “Collateral. She had no children. But it seems the Mageborn Bekkes are and always have been Warriors. Every last one of them. Besides Lilias and Gavirin, Rennon and Granon are here—cousins of some sort, as most of the Mages are. For instance—”

  Cailet hid a grin, knowing that a lengthy genealogical lecture was coming; Miram kept the Ostin Name’s official records.

  “—the Escovor line is especially convoluted. Except for Gaire, who’s Shonner’s son, all Mages of that Name still alive are fifth cousins. But no two of them are fifth cousins to a third.”

  “Huh?” This from Riddon, whose entire Name now consisted of himself and his two brothers.

  “Aifalun—she’s a retired Scholar—is fifth cousin to Shonner, who’s fifth cousin to Tirez, who’s fifth cousin to Jeniva, who’s fifth cousin to Sollan—he’s another Scholar. But Jeniva is Shonner’s second cousin, and Tirez—well, you get the idea.” She chuckled low in her throat. “The really fun part is that all of them are close kin by various marriages to the Kevirons—who as far as I can tell are hardly related to each other at all!”

  Riddon gave her an odd look. “This is your idea of ‘fun’?”

  “Mother always said she would’ve had a spectacular career at Census,” Taig said, emerging from the darkened chamber behind them out onto the balcony. He paused, asking, “May I come in?”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Elomar canceled the Ward to let him through, then reinstated it. Cailet was impressed by his easy control; Riddon was nearly slack-jawed.

  “How do you do that?”

  “Smoke and mirrors,” Miram said with a wink at the Healer Mage.

  When he winked back, Sarra warned playfully, “You two stop flirting or I’ll tell Lusira. Worse, I’ll tell Lilen Ostin!”

  Elo clasped his hands at his chest. “Lusira, if you must—but I beg you, not Lady Lilen!” Then, turning to Cailet, he said quite seriously, “We’re safe only from prying magic, not from an attack.”

  Riddon was still curious. “Captal—I mean, Cailet—can you do stronger Wards than this?”

  “Probably.” She shrugged and passed the wine bottle to Taig. Miram handed him a metal cup, and he sat down to share what remained of dinner. “I’m not really sure what I can do until I have occasion to do it.”

  “I see. I think.” Riddon absently soaked a chunk of hard bread in his wine. “What I meant was that if they do figure out where we are, we’ll need all the protection you can give us.”

  “I know. But I’ve got an idea bout that.” She shifted on the cold and uncomfortable iron bench; Sarra had told her there used to be cushions, lovingly embroidered by Gerrin Ostin and Gerrin Desse for each member of the family. Here, of an evening, people Cailet would never know had sat talking while the sun set and the Ladymoon rose. Sarra had memories of Ambrai. Cailet had nothing.

  “Every Prentice Mage knows how to Ward herself. What I’d like to do is link those Wards together. As if—” And here she smiled slightly. “—each was a brick in a wall. Elo, you and Elin and Keler and Tiron did it in the Renig courtroom.”

  “For a few minutes only,” he said. “But even Mages have to sleep.”

  “When they do, others will take their places. I think you’re right, and we can’t assume that none but Mages felt the Summons. So we can also assume th
ey know where we are. There’s been no move made yet, and that worries me.”

  “It takes time to transport the Council Guard,” Taig observed.

  “Soldiers against Mageborns?” Miram shook her head. “Not this time, big brother. They can’t risk a single escape. They’ll use Malerrisi. But what can they be waiting for?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Cailet admitted.

  “They know where,” Sarra said slowly. “But they don’t know who.”

  “Go on, Sarra,” Riddon urged. Cailet envied him his long knowledge of his foster-sister’s instincts.

  “The Malerrisi can get here by Ladder. There’s one here that goes straight to Ryka Court.” Sarra turned to Cailet, moonlight silvering her golden hair and black eyes. “But they don’t know who they’ll be facing.”

  “The new Captal!” Riddon gave Cailet a wide, excited grin. “They don’t know who you are!”

  Sarra murmured, “And there’s nothing a Malerrisi hates more than an unidentified thread in the Great Loom.”

  “They don’t know who you are!”

  Neither Riddon nor Miram have any idea who I really am. Sarra knows. And Elo. And Taig . . . see him over there, looking at me and still looking for Alin and probably Gorsha as well.

  “Knowing your name,” Elo said quietly, “will not help them.”

  . . . and thus Collan can do no harm. Cailet saw the unspoken words in his eyes. And the thought that her friend would endure the Pain Stake for nothing suddenly enraged her. She stood, paced to the stone balustrade, braced her fists on it as she stared up at the moon.

  “I won’t stay anonymous much longer,” she said.

  “Cailet,” Sarra warned, “if you’re thinking of doing something insane—”

  “What’s sane about any of this?” Whirling, she spread both arms wide. “The reason Ambrai died is because the Mages who stayed to defend it held to their ethic. They used magic only to protect, not to attack.” And she could see it all in one man’s terrible memories, how they tried to make of themselves a wall and failed because the Captal—the mortar that would hold them all together—was dead, and not even Gorynel Desse could take Leninor Garvedian’s place.