One last, very important task. Up to the parapet on the roof of the Residence and her tiny, hidden greenhouse tray that held the cuttings of the bushes and trees that she could propagate when she arrived at her new home. Including rootstocks of the main Yew of their most ancient grove, and clippings of others. She’d transfer each into a bespelled flask and be done.
Working in the sunshine and the quiet high above the estate, caring for plantlings, setting them in a container that would fit in her best saddlebag, she soaked in the atmosphere of her estate and said good-bye as the sun dipped toward the horizon, until footfalls broke the silence.
Lori turned. “Vi?”
“Here you are!” Vi yanked Lori from the roof onto the parapet walkway, slamming her against the taller, waist-high wall of the crenellation. Lori yelled as her body hit the stone, her whole side bruised.
She reached for her Flair, for her personal armor, but as in the glider accident, it didn’t respond as quickly for her as when she coated others.
Zus arrived, grabbing her hair and spinning her away, this time with more accuracy as she headed for the lower, square opening in the wall. She’d fall three stories onto flagstones and die.
Lori flung out her arms, thought she heard a bone crack as her wrist crashed into the edge, fear and pain surging through her with awful nausea. She dropped to the floor, rolled as best she could away from the wall. Residence! she cried mentally. Help me! She sent a visual of herself, on the wall walk, hoping the Residence would buckle the stones beneath the twins’ feet, or rearrange the wall to barricade her from them. Nothing.
When she tried to visualize the stables, the images faded from her mind . . . due to fear and . . . her head had hit the wall, too, at some point; blood ran sticky down the side of her face. Her thoughts were too foggy! She dragged in a big breath. Her mind was too misty to ’port!
When it stopped spinning, she’d have a chance. No time to be conservative with her Flair. Use it all as needed. Pulling from her own reservoir, she sent the best Healing spell she knew, one that she used on her stridebeasts, to her head and her wrist, even as she staggered to her feet.
Then she saw the gleam of the weapons in their hands. To Lori’s horror, Vi held a blaster, and Zus a knife.
She stilled. “It might be hard to explain away knife or blaster wounds,” she stated. Steadying her breathing, her self, so her mind would clear, she could use her Flair.
They had no notion of her Flair, or the power of it. No one here but Baccat knew of her personal armor. And they never considered her as a person. Now she knew that to Vi and Zus she was simply an obstacle in their way. A thing, not someone with hopes and dreams like them at all.
Zus grinned, nastily. “Better that you don’t show a knife or blaster wound, but no one might notice when you’re smashed from a fall and down on the ground.”
“We can use our Flair to change you,” Vi added.
Lori didn’t think they’d ever seen a mangled body in their lives, let alone worked spells on one.
When they went out into Druida City, they didn’t see the alleys with dead rats that Lori had with Baccat. Vi and Zus were transported by glider or teleportation, saw only pretty places, rich places as elegant as D’Yew Residence. Which, Lori thought distantly, confirmed Draeg’s idea that the whole overarching plan had been made by Noble allies of the Yews.
“And no one will question us,” Vi sneered.
“Why are you doing this?” she demanded, keeping them talking.
“You’ve ruined everything. The FirstFamilies are buzzing around our allies and they told us, us, to go away.” Vi’s nose pinched. “And the FirstFamilies are talking about you, Loridana. How do they know you? How could they like you? They weren’t supposed to ever notice you.”
“Which of you will take our title, become GrandLady or GrandLord?” Lori asked. The soles of her feet pulsed with power; she felt rooted not only to the stone she stood on but all the way down through the Residence to the bedrock of the planet.
“We will share,” Vi said.
“We will share,” Zus said at the same time.
They grinned at each other, and Vi lowered the blaster and moved it aside from Lori. She didn’t seem to notice.
Lori began breathing deeply, wondering if she could—no! Don’t wonder. Do! So, through her feet, she began stringing threads of power, of Flair, from the storage areas of the Residence, from some of the less-than-necessary spells. She wouldn’t put the house in danger, but she’d use everything she needed to protect herself, reclaim what she’d funded the last couple of years.
This time when she pulled on her personal armor, she made sure she kept it invisible and thinner than ever.
Then she expanded it so it reached beyond herself, slammed her cuzes against the wall, pinning their arms that held the weapons.
Lori stared at her twin cuzes. In a battle between her and them, she’d always, always, lost. Her word had never been taken over theirs.
Draeg’s furious words came to her mind, even as the remembrance of his voice stabbed her heart. “Aren’t you going to fight for your legacy? For your estate? For your home?”
As she stared at them, the gray stone of the Residence edging her view, the land descending to the bluff and the river in the distance, the answer came to her.
No. Because this was not her home.
Her home was her sense of self. Her home was the love she felt for her animals and they felt for her, as once her home had been with Draeg. And the agony of that thought had her mind, her heart frozen for a few instants.
She swallowed, stiffened her spine, sent the hurt away.
Her home was her land in the south.
This had never been her home, merely the place of her childhood that she’d survived. She cared not for the wealth, or the big estate, or the power.
* * *
Pain! It rolled through Draeg in a sickening wave, made him stagger a step or two.
“What’s wrong?” asked Tinne Holly sharply, slapping a hand around Draeg’s biceps to steady him. Draeg was in a sparring room in The Green Knight Fencing and Fighting Salon, challenging all comers. Away from the whole Yew mess that the FirstFamilies Council had convened to discuss.
Head smacking against a wall! “Lori!” Draeg snapped. Yeah, the pain wasn’t his, but from his HeartMate. “Someone hurt her!”
Tinne’s face set. “Bad?”
“Bad enough.”
“Where?”
But Draeg followed the tiny link between them, still big enough to transmit life-threatening danger, and that’s what she felt. As for him, blood drained from his face and cold sweat coated him. “She’s on the estate, near or in the Residence, I think.”
He checked the aura hooks he’d set in her Family. Yes! The female twin hovered close to Lori. The male twin moved rapidly in the same direction.
“The Residence or her Family is hurting her?” Tinne questioned.
Draeg shrugged, stepped away from his friend. “I’m going there.”
“Wait, take me, too—and, Captain of the Guards Winterberry! SupremeJudge Ailim Elder, to me, emergency! Green Knight ’port stations!”
The older man with a head of gray hair, Winterberry, arrived first, hopped off the pad, and reset it. A blazer showed in his hand. “What is it?”
“Assault and attempted murder of my HeartMate, Lori D’Yew,” Draeg said through cold lips, “at her Residence.”
Winterberry stared at him for too long, then waved. “Go. I’ll muster the guard and do this legally, by the front gates.”
“They won’t let you in.”
“Ruis Elder has Earthan machines that will break down the gates if they refuse to obey the law. The laws all FirstFamilies crafted and swore to at the beginning of our society and culture. The laws Ioho T’Yew reaffirmed, as did his daughter Taxa D’Yew, when they were confirmed as members of the FirstFamilies Council.”
Thirty-seven
Stunned, Lori stared at the twins. “
You truly tried to kill me. And not just now. The glider accident.” After a noisy sucking in of air, shaking her head, she said, “And not only me. Politics. Alliances. You’re part of the Traditionalist Stance”—she jabbed her finger at one of her cuzes, then the other—“and believe that hurting children is all right?”
“Whom are you referring to?” asked Zus in a bragging tone. “Watson Clover? Marin Holly?”
“Watson Clover.” Lori had vaguely heard of the child, and of course all of the Yews had been scandalized when Watson’s father, a former Commoner, had become the Captain of AllCouncils. She recalled that gossip since it had been talked about for a good three months at dinner.
“Watson Clover,” she repeated. “His mother is a FirstFamily child. Like me. Like you.”
“Sedwy Grove is defective,” Vi said reasonably. “She was a part of the Black Magic Cult who killed people.”
Zus grinned, and Lori definitely didn’t like the light in his eyes. Carefully, warily, she tested her link between them, felt that he’d developed a taste for killing . . . or liked the power he felt when hiring a killer to end a life. He licked his lips.
Lori’s throat had simply dried. “The Residence had me read that legal case. Sedwy was used by the Black Magic Cult. They mined her knowledge as an anthropologist for their dark rituals.” Lori’s next breath came softer. “And if you consider her defective, what about yourselves?”
They looked blank.
Flipping a hand at them, Lori said, “You’ve shown that you will attempt to kill and kidnap children.”
Their mouths fell open at the same time. Zus laughed. Vi gasped, and she screeched, “How dare you! We are nothing like them.”
“You are exactly like them.”
Shuffling feet. Lori looked toward the nearest open door down to the inside of the Residence. Cuspid stood there, standing slump shouldered and nearly broken in the doorway. He’d overheard the conversation.
Her gaze focused on him, and she asked softly with no shrill of pain or surprise. They couldn’t harm her. And soon she would be away. “You would let them kill me?”
Cuspid flinched. “They are merely . . . disciplining you.”
“By trying to throw me off this wall? But disciplining me is what you all liked to do, isn’t it?” She was surprised how much bitterness she had inside herself. She disappointed herself. She would have to work on that in the future, for sure.
“You don’t see the knife they have, that they took from the armory? The blaster? Not that they are any good with them.”
Zus tried a feeble struggle. Lori pressed back. Urine stank up the walk for a few seconds before the Residence, the very quiet Residence, whisked it away. A dark stain showed on the front of Zus’s trous. Lori shouldn’t have smiled, but she did.
Her gaze swept all of them. The two she had pinned against the wall with her expanded personal armor, the maître de maison who stood at the threshold of the door to the walk, others behind him.
But this action of her cuzes had freed her in a different way, a legal way she hadn’t thought she could use.
“You can’t expect me to stay here where my own Family tries to kill me. You can’t expect me to stay in a Residence that will not protect me. That would be stupid, and you did not raise a stupid woman. I’m leaving you, the Family, the Residence, Druida City.” The inner strands of her muscles began to tremble as the strain of holding Vi and Zus against their will wore on Lori.
Everyone appeared stunned. Both the twins’ mouths had fallen open.
“You . . . you . . . don’t want to be D . . . D’Yew?” Vi squeaked.
“I was only called D’Yew here,” Lori said quietly. “A far too empty title.”
But she could not leave it until she did one more duty, tried to set the Residence and her Family back on the right path . . . where they wouldn’t be alienating the rest of the FirstFamilies until those powerful folk ganged up on them and . . . dissolved them? Split up the Family and the Residence?
She let her anger off her reins, a little bit, not childish anger, a woman’s anger. A decent person’s anger. A Head of Household’s sorrowful anger, though only she had considered herself that.
“But I am not the only one they harmed. I suggest that when the guardsmen come calling, and they will, you hand over this murderous couple.”
“No, no, you can’t!” Vi shrieked. “They might try to . . . to . . . constrain . . . us.” She blinked rapidly as if she couldn’t even process that thought.
“Constrain?” Lori said. “For murderous attacks against the children of the FirstFamilies?” Again her gaze went to the older people, whom she was reluctant to call relatives. “How did this happen? When did this happen?” she asked. Maybe she was full of pride and hubris herself. But she’d always had a fine understanding of what would happen to her if she strayed off the line of what was acceptable.
“When did you think you are so special, so entitled, that you are above the law?”
No one answered her.
“Because the Family has wealth and power and we live isolated from the others? Is that what happened?” Lori spread her hands, shaking her head.
Finally, finally, she spoke to the oldest being of the Yews.
“Residence? Did you know Vi and Zus conspired to kill me?” She couldn’t believe that. But it must have. Where else would they map out their schemes? And this pain was nearly as bad as when she’d discovered Draeg’s true motives. “Not even the Residence respected me, liked me,” she murmured. Her determination to leave solidified into titanium.
“It began with old Ioho Yew,” Cuspid said. “He lived so long. He rose so high in the prominence of the FirstFamilies.”
“As high as you think we deserved.”
“He was a power,” Zus snapped. “The leader of the conservative faction, the elders of the FirstFamilies council.”
“So he didn’t move with the times,” Lori said. She made a cutting motion. “That doesn’t matter. I’m out of this, free of you all. What you do with these two, I don’t care.” She didn’t. She simply didn’t care about her cuzes. In one way that fact saddened her, but in another, just looking at them as they were—miserable human beings with no decency or compassion, nothing more important to them than their own needs—she was glad to be shed of them.
“No one is truly free,” Cuspid said with a trace of his old unctuousness. “You will find that your freedom itself has constraints.” Then he winced at his own usage of that word.
Lori nodded. “I hear you. I may not know what will bind me . . .” She simply couldn’t help it, she had to say the words. “Honor will. Fairness, the need to be just.” Love for her animals, whose welfare she would hold as closely as her own.
“Stup!” Zus sneered.
A booming like thunder broke the air of the cloudless blue sky.
“Open these gates in the name of the law, under penalty of forced entry,” echoed in the air across the whole of the estate.
At the same time Corax alit atop a spire and cawed, Teleport HERE! Three men appeared and rushed to them. Draeg shoved Cuspid aside and lunged for Lori. Her focus and her Flair shattered, but before Vi and Zus could do more than push against the wall, the other two men were upon them, subduing them. One was the father of the boy she’d seen in the market the night before.
“Who?” she breathed.
“Tinne Holly, father of Marin Holly, whom your cuzes tried to poison.”
Lori swayed. “Let go of me.”
“Lori—”
Tinne Holly and the other man marched her cuzes down through the door, followed by a bleating Cuspid. “Go with your friends,” she said to Draeg.
“You’re injured.”
She thought her dry lips cracked as she smiled. “Thank you for reminding me.” Using the Flair she’d summoned before, she Healed herself until she felt only bruising. Then she let the remaining energy and Flair she’d harvested sink back into the Residence and the estate. It would need energy and
Flair in the future more than she would. A last gesture of duty. Of kindness.
“Go, Draeg.”
Tinne Holly stuck his head through the door. “Better come down, Draeg and D’Yew. Winterberry and some of his guards are in, and so are some members of the FirstFamilies.”
With a snarling swearing, Draeg released her and strode to the doorway, paused there.
“You go on,” Lori said, picking up her satchel of cuttings and holding it against herself. “I am not really D’Yew. I am Lori Valerian.”
“Lori, I love you.”
The words held no meaning. Not much held meaning. She was probably in shock.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think you do.”
“Are you teleporting to the stables?”
She found herself shaking her head. “I must retrieve my bags before I leave this place.”
“Draeg Betony-Blackthorn,” a man’s voice shouted.
“Captain of the Druida City Guards.” Draeg grimaced. “We’ll talk later.” He searched her face, and then, broad shoulders slumping a little, he disappeared from sight.
A few seconds later she began to move. With each reeling step along the crenellated walkway to the door and down the stone stairs, Lori drew in deep breaths . . . and a trickle of power through her feet to keep her going.
She stopped in her rooms for the bag she’d had ready for weeks, stuck in a clunky no-time. Then she headed down the main staircase. Three-quarters of the way down, she heard voices and caught the flash of a Celtan guard’s uniform, and her stomach jumped. Guards would only slow her down, and she was determined to leave, right now. She should have taken the narrow back stairs, but it hadn’t occurred to her.
So she used every bit of her natural physical ability to glide around the end of the large balustrade and slip into the long pantry that would take her near the back door.
“I thought you’d come this way.” Folia stood tall and imposing, excellently groomed with perfect facial enhancements that seemed to add to the disgust of her curled lip.
To Lori’s own distress, she squeaked like a mouse confronted with Baccat, added a clearing of the throat to the sound, and words tumbled from her instincts, not her brain. “You were the leader all the time. Not the twins. You liked it when I was hit by the glider, showed up first when I lay on the stairs down to the river. Would you have killed me then? And you . . . yes, I smelled your perfume that night when you came into my room, before I teleported away and into the HouseHeart.”
Heart Legacy Page 32