Torchlight

by Theresa Dahlheim

  She lifted her head, and Graegor found that he could breathe. Thundering cheers drowned the stadium again, and the Thendal magi opened a path in their ranks to allow their sorceress to ride up to the box seats. Lord Natayl was suddenly there, dour as always but also smug, and he lent his hand to help her up to the dais.

  Her presence within Graegor’s mind was featureless. But as she slipped between Arundel and Ilene’s chairs to go up to the third row, Graegor caught a glimpse of her face. The straight-line set of her lips and straight-ahead focus of her eyes told him what their bond didn’t—she had been frightened out there.

  Graegor was growling in the back of his throat. Lord Natayl had no right to do this to her just to create a spectacle. Of course her power would protect her, but knowing that in her head and feeling it in her heart were separate things. He wished he could help her. She was so close—if she would only look over here and see his sympathy and reassurance, or turn inward to their bond ...

  She settled into her chair with a graceful sweep of her skirt, and Lord Natayl sat next to her. On her other side was King Motthias of Thendalia, whom Graegor had met several times but could not bring himself to like. He was tall and quite good-looking, and he always, always seemed to be talking to Tabitha. He started again now, almost before she sat down. How could he possibly have so much to say?

  I bet he repeats himself. Graegor’s only consolation was that since the magi king was talking to her, it meant she hadn’t made a telepathic link with him. Yet.

  Two women appeared near Tabitha’s chair, from behind a white curtain that separated the box seats from the servants’ area extending beneath the upper level of the Hippodrome stands. One carried a bowl of water and a white towel, and the other had a glass of wine. Tabitha continued to nod at King Motthias’ comments as she dipped her hands in the bowl and patted them dry on the towel. But she was not yet completely composed, for she took a large gulp of the wine, and she still wore a fixed frown, as if concentrating very hard.

  Graegor saw Lord Natayl looking down at him, so he pretended to be looking at the Tolander contingent seated next to the Thendals, and eventually he turned back to the stadium floor. The Thendal magi there had apparently already shown their best, for even the mammoths’ rearing and bellowing could not compare to the precision spear throwing, flying fire and whirlwind steel.

  After they finished their performance, Graegor sneaked a look back at Tabitha. Lord Natayl and King Motthias were talking together, each leaning toward Tabitha to be heard by the other, and between them she stared straight ahead. Graegor saw her take a deep breath. Her hands held her nearly-full wine glass in her lap.

  He hoped she would be all right. She probably knew some of the same meditative prayers that he did—the prayers on which he’d tried to focus during the long hours of his pre-festival vigil at the basilica. Thoughts of her had distracted him from those prayers then; it was odd to think that she might be reciting them now to keep herself under control.

  That thought drew his eyes down the row of chairs beyond her, all the way to the end, to the Essenans. Beside Lord Lasfe, Rossin sat as if tied by ropes to his heavy chair. During the past days, they had all been required to attend many ceremonies and events, and every time, Rossin had looked thoroughly spooked. He could not seem to get used to having so many people surrounding him, and right now the city was fully twice as crowded as usual—tavern keepers, traders, and shipowners were making a year’s profit for their meanest labors. It didn’t matter that no one trespassed upon the Essenan magi in their walled-off, underground seclusion; it was still right in the middle of the city, right in the middle of far too much noise and chaos.

  The wildness in Rossin’s eyes was unnerving, and Graegor turned forward again. His own troubles were small compared with the Essenan sorcerer’s struggle to simply sit there and not lose his mind. Why Rossin didn’t just change shape and fly away, Graegor didn’t know, but he suspected that Lord Lasfe was constantly soothing him, the way Graegor had constantly soothed his black horse.

  He glanced down his own row to check on Koren. She was still very pale. She started to turn her head toward him, and he hurriedly looked out at the stadium floor.

  Student magi were bringing out bales of hay, wooden bulls-eyes, and other equipment for the day’s chief entertainment. For the first time in Maze Island’s history, the magi were going to compete in sports from which they were normally banned. Graegor had been to the games and the races several times by now, and knew how frustrating it was to just watch and not play. He still couldn’t play, but at least the magi were getting their chance to show what they could do.

  They did not disappoint. In the target shooting with longbows, crossbows, javelins, and hammers, the targets were placed twice as far downfield as usual, or were half the size, and the magi shot while blindfolded, or standing backwards, or on the backs of horses zigzagging through obstacle courses. Then came bouts of one-on-one combat with knives, swords, and quarterstaves, where the magi would leap six feet high to escape a blow or change position, or would juggle three weapons at a time, or would whirl the blades and shafts so fast that only the sounds of impact revealed that the weapons were there at all. This was Graegor’s favorite event, particularly the quarterstaff duels. He wondered how well he would do out there.

  Badly, he decided. Any fighting prowess he’d shown was due to his magic, not genuine skill. If he wanted to be honestly good at it, he’d have to practice.

  Acrobatics came next—the long jump, pyramid climb, pole vault, and a dozen others. In every event, the magi’s astonishing speed, strength, and agility made their advantage over ordinary athletes abundantly clear. He felt sympathy for those ordinary athletes, who deserved even more praise for doing what they did all on their own, without magical powers to boost their talents. No wonder they didn’t want magi in the ring with them. It really wasn’t fair.

  Out of what had become habit over the course of the day, Graegor looked over his shoulder again, up to the third row. The daylight was starting to fade into evening, but—yes! This time Tabitha looked over at him, and he could swear that her eyes softened as she smiled. His heart thudded so hard it almost hurt. But then King Motthias said something to her again, and she turned to answer him.

  “She has been looking at you,” Karl said mind-to-mind. He was sitting behind Graegor, and when Graegor looked at him, startled, he shrugged. “Sometimes when I look up there, I see her watching you, until you start to turn around.”

  “Why are you looking at her?” As soon as it was out he regretted it. One of the drawbacks to telepathy was often being unable to censor himself—something else at which he was supposed to be getting better. “I’m sorry.”

  “I wanted to see what she did when she knew you couldn’t see her,” Karl said. “Once the festival’s over, you should corner her and talk to her, even if you have to climb through her window in the middle of the night.”

  “I won’t do that,” Graegor said, but his cheeks were burning.

  A few days ago, Contare, in a joking way, had listed all the people competing to make Graegor nervous during the festivities—crowds staring at him, spies listening to everything he said, heretics trying to touch him, rogue magi meaning him harm. How can one girl trump all that? he wondered. But she unquestionably did. He was more anxious about her than about everything else combined. Even his family not being here cut less deeply than how Tabitha so deliberately ignored their bond.

  The student magi cleared away the acrobatics equipment, and many people in the stands took the opportunity to leave their seats to get more to drink or to use the latrines before the races got started at sunset. This was what a Hippodrome crowd always came to see—races on foot, on horseback, and with chariots. With magi on the track, the races would be faster than ever, and no one wanted to miss a moment.

  Contare stood up as the students were setting up the hurdles for the first race, and with a slow sweep of his arm, he lit the dozens of globes suspended at
the upper tier of the stadium. Graegor could sense the sky-blue light of his master’s magic whisper past his mental shields.

  He hadn’t asked to learn to light the globes yet. He hadn’t even asked how they worked, because he liked the mystery of them for now. Besides, he still couldn’t control regular fire well enough to light a regular candle.

  The races were indeed faster than they had ever been, and the jumps over the hurdles more spectacular. The relays were especially exciting, with nine teams representing the nine races. When the Thendal team won the last relay, Graegor looked over his shoulder to see Tabitha’s reaction to her countrymen’s victory. But she was looking over her own shoulder, handing her empty goblet to a servant.

  He recognized Jeff’s mental tap, and turned to see him with some other student magi not far from the dais, waiting to set the lines for the next set of races. “Has m’lady bestowed her single smile upon you today?” Jeff asked him, nodding up in the direction of the Thendal sorceress.

  “She smiles at me all the time.” But they both knew he was exaggerating.

  “Not when you can go talk to her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If she sees you looking at her at a banquet, or at a Godsday service, she’ll smile at you. Otherwise she just looks away.”

  “Not always,” Graegor insisted. “We’ve talked before. She’s always nice.”

  “Jeh, she’s always pleasant.”

  “She’s never told me to leave.”

  “She’s never let you talk with her alone either.”

  “There hasn’t been a chance.”

  “Really?” Jeff was quite serious, his dark eyebrows lowered. “You’ve gone to her townhouse twice now, and she was ‘out’ both times.”

  This was true. Graegor was about to insist that it was just a coincidence, but Jeff broke off contact with a quick “Got to go!” He ran out onto the racetrack with the other magi carrying the starter blocks and the finish-line ribbons.

  Graegor resolved to not look back at Tabitha anymore. If Karl and Jeff had noticed how much he was doing it, probably other people had too, and he didn’t want to look pathetic. He settled firmly back in his chair and watched Jeff and the other magi speedily set up the equipment while another group of magi athletes came out and started stretching their legs.

  Maybe he was expecting too much. Would she have paid any attention to him at all, if Lord Natayl hadn’t forced their minds together? She was constantly surrounded by men trying to impress and amuse her—why should he think himself special, except for this bonding that neither of them had sought?

  He was special, though—he was a sorcerer. That had to be worth something. Especially since of the five other young men in their Circle, only Borjhul seemed to find her as fascinating as he did ... and Borjhul’s interest was suspect.

  Borjhul, Borhal—he wasn’t sure which was the Kroldon sorcerer’s true name. He had clearly thought of himself as Borhal when they had tapped minds that one time. But his master Lord Oran and all the formal proclamations called him Borjhul. Whatever his name was, he seemed to enjoy making Graegor uneasy by occasionally, casually appearing among the lords constantly in hovering attendance around Tabitha. Nothing in her manner or her mind showed that this bothered her, which of course made Graegor even more uneasy.

  It hadn’t happened this week, though, because Borjhul had company. Graegor could see her at the other end of the row of chairs in the box seats: the young maga Imperial Princess Nitara of Kroldon. Her raven-black hair was held back by a ruby-encrusted diadem, and her dark eyes were heavy-lidded in her dusky face. Graegor had been obliged to formally greet her more than once, but he avoided her whenever he could. After the business with the Kroldon ambassador in Chrenste, Graegor knew that those predatory eyes were not friendly.

  Another cheer went up from the crowd, particularly from the Aedseli sorcerers and magi sitting beside the Telgards in the box seats. On the stadium floor, the footrace had been won by an Aedseli magus, whose skin looked night-black in the twilight. Graegor saw Arundel pointing the magus out to Ilene. Her dark hair and pink scarf fell across his arm as she bent close to him.

  He envied them. They were obviously a couple. He wished he knew how that had happened, because maybe it would give him new ideas about how to approach Tabitha. But when he had asked Contare if he knew, Contare had again declined to tell him. “Anything you hear me say about any of them is just that—hearsay,” the old man had said. “If you want know more about them, talk to them.”

  That wasn’t so easy. Language was still a problem, and so was the lack of time together outside formal events. Jeff and his friends at the Academy heard many stories about Graegor’s new peers, but it was impossible to say which were true. For instance, he doubted that Ilene had ever been a harem slave. And it seemed unlikely that Arundel, at fifteen, had single-handedly stopped a civil war.

  Then again, Rossin could shapechange into a dozen different animals. And, of course, there was Graegor’s own highly controversial exploit.

  By this point, everyone in the four kingdoms of the L’Abbanist world—everyone who wasn’t an infant or a hermit, that is—knew about the cliff coming down and the Eternal Flame reigniting. And for some reason, people seemed to think that he would enjoy telling the story again, and again, and again. Frankly, the truth wasn’t as interesting as any of the dozen other versions he’d heard. It was fun, though, to see the look on Ferogin’s face whenever some minstrel launched into yet another newly composed song to commemorate what had happened in Chrenste. Ferogin either hadn’t known about the event, or had missed the significance of it, at the time of their first meeting, and Graegor suspected that this had made the Adelard sorcerer feel foolish later. He felt strongly that Ferogin would benefit from feeling foolish more often, so he was glad to make whatever contribution he could.

  Races on horseback followed the footraces. Graegor applied all his attention to them, which was not hard, since the horses were so fantastic. Audrey would have loved this—she’d never seen races like this, not on such a track, not with such horses and riders. His friend Patrick proved his talents beyond cue-ball, winning one race, then another, on his pinto mare. He was also the first healer to reach a horse that injured itself leaping over the hurdles, and it was proof of his skill that the more senior healers who got there after he did allowed him finish the task himself. Graegor saluted Patrick as he guided the recovered horse off the track, and Patrick waved back.

  He looked over his shoulder at Tabitha. She was watching the next race.

  The sky was sapphire blue when Patrick and the winners of the other races stood before the dais to receive benedictions and praise from the sorcerers. With graceful steps, Tabitha came down to the front of the box seats, and she stood not five paces from Graegor as she and Ilene took turns performing the ancient ritual of bestowing the laurel circlets. When it was Patrick’s turn, Ilene set the crown of leaves on his bowed head—which was proper, since Patrick was half Medean. But Patrick looked over at Koren as he stepped back, obviously wondering why the honor had not come from the Khenroxan sorceress. Graegor wanted to tell Patrick that she was sick, but he couldn’t. It was clear that Contare hadn’t wanted even Graegor to know.

  The tireless crowd cheered for all the winners, who waved and made the sign of the Godcircle, or of victory, as they processed out of the stadium. Then Contare stood, and again swept his arm over his head. His power moved in blue swirls past Graegor’s shields again, and the globes around the Hippodrome dimmed almost to nothing. Murmurs of anticipation stirred through the crowd, for the last entertainment would be the fireworks.

  The creaking of wheels drew Graegor’s attention to the archway, where a team of horses was pulling something tall and indistinct into the stadium. He wanted to see it more clearly, but seeing in the dark, like seeing far away, did count as extending his power, so he didn’t try.

  Not that it really mattered; he’d never been able to repeat what he’d done that night
in Farre, when he’d seen individual stars reflected off the curve of a water droplet. Apparently, when one wanted to do it, seeing in the dark was much harder than seeing far away, and inducing a regenerative trance was much harder than just going to sleep.

  “Sir, what is that?” he asked Contare, after failing to figure it out for himself.

  “They call it a staging platform. The fireworks are packed in tubes that are attached to the platform, and the base is chained to the ground.”

  “For stability?”

  “Correct. Otherwise they’d have to bury the rockets in the ground, and we’d rather they didn’t.”

  “Why is it so tall?”

  “Broad, actually, not tall. They winch it upright when they’re moving it, so that it’s easier to haul down the street.”

  The massive platform reached the middle of the stadium floor, pulling even with the box seats and stopping with a lurch. Shadows darted around the platform, and the horses were unhitched and led away. Chains clanked against the iron rings usually used to anchor race obstacles, and then the platform itself seemed to shrink. Graegor realized that it was being lowered from a vertical to a horizontal position.

  “I heard that not even sorcerers know the secret of fireworks,” he said.

  “We do know. We’re the only ones outside the Traugott Brotherhood who do.”