by Lisa Shearin
I was thrilled that Justinius had not only approved my idea but put me in charge of it. I wanted to live long enough to get started.
The room had just enough light to keep the telepaths from bumping into each other. Each had a workstation consisting of a small desk next to a wide pedestal with a scrying bowl filled with water or a crystal ball mounted on top, depending on the practitioner’s preference.
Justinius made a beeline straight for a stocky, dark-haired Guardian. He was in uniform, but it looked like he’d slept in it. He probably had. Mychael and the old man had been keeping the telepaths busy coordinating the delegates’ arrivals—and gathering intelligence to use to ferret out any traitors with the mistaken impression that they’d escaped Justinius’s personnel purge. The old man was relentless and ruthless. I, for one, was glad of it. It meant he was going to do it right the first time. Not that I had any doubt.
Every other man in the room snapped to attention as the archmagus swept through the double doors. The dark-haired Guardian/telepath merely looked up from his onyx scrying bowl, his expression as worn as his uniform.
“I expected the paladin, sir.”
“Mychael’s busy, so you got me.”
The Guardian grinned crookedly. “Then I’ll make do, sir.”
“Still nothing?” Justinius asked.
“Not a word or image. I know the telepath on that ship. I’ve contacted him before, and I’ve spoken to him in person. I know how to reach him.” The Guardian’s face was somber. “He’s not with us anymore, sir.”
“Rest assured, Ben, whoever was responsible will be found and will pay.”
The Guardian nodded. “Thank you, sir. He’d appreciate that.”
A dangerous gleam lit the old man’s eyes. “I will, too.” He stepped aside for me. “Miss Benares here knows a ship that’s in the area. They might have seen something.”
“And if Phaelan saw it, he’d have acted on it—so if your friend was killed, he’s already been avenged.”
“The Fortune?” To Ben’s credit, he didn’t bat an eye at the thought of touching minds with the ship’s telepath of the most notorious pirate vessel in the Seven Kingdoms.
“That’s the ship,” I said. “Can you reach her?”
The Guardian gave me a raised eyebrow and a look.
I returned the smile. “Of course you can.” I glanced from the telepath to the archmagus and back again. “Do we need to step outside or something so you can work?”
Ben jerked his head at Justinius with a fond grin. “Ma’am, I’ve worked most of my time here with this one breathing down my neck. You standing right where you are won’t bother me in the least.”
With that, he laid his hands flat on the pedestal on either side of the scrying bowl, his eyes intent on the surface, and went absolutely still. There were conversations going on around us, and even though everyone kept their voices down, I knew I’d never have been able to do what Ben was doing, even with the Saghred’s boost.
After about five minutes, he spoke without looking up. “I’ve got the Fortune’s telepath, ma’am. Captain Benares is there with him, and he wants proof that you’re the one doing the asking.”
“He would. Phaelan doesn’t trust what he can’t see, and magic is at the top of the list.” I thought for a moment. “On Phaelan’s sixteenth birthday, he invited a whole bordello’s worth of ladies of the evening on board one of his dad’s ships to help him celebrate.” I gave an evil chuckle. “Ask him what his dad did when he found out.”
Ben raised a bushy eyebrow. “Really?”
“And that wasn’t even the first time Phaelan had done it. It was just the first time he got caught.”
The Guardian looked back into the bowl. After about a moment, he grinned. “The captain believes you are who you say you are.”
“Good, because I was about to really get personal. Ask him if he’s seen the Blue Rose.”
He silently asked, and we silently waited.
Ben raised his head from where it’d been bowed over the bowl, and squeezed his eyes shut for a few moments. I bet telepaths were constantly on the verge of a splitting headache.
“The captain said they captured a Caesolian schooner a little over an hour ago,” Ben told us. “She’d been running under full sail away from a burning ship that’d been forced onto a shoal about ten miles northwest of Gruen. The captain says he knew she was a pirate and gave chase. They engaged her, crippled her, and boarded. They found and freed six prisoners.”
“Was one of them…” I stopped and swore. “I don’t even know what Mychael’s sister looks like. Do you know?” I asked Justinius.
“Not a clue.”
“Crap…uh, she’s about seven years younger than Mychael, which would make her mid-twenties. Maybe auburn hair and blue-green eyes, though she might—”
“The captain says the paladin’s sister is safe—though righteously pissed at the situation.”
My shoulders sagged in relief.
“What about the elven ambassador, Santis Eldor?” Justinius asked.
I mentally kicked myself. Don’t ask about the head of the elven delegation. Way to go, Raine.
Ben concentrated on the scrying bowl again. After less than a minute, he looked up at the two of us and grimly shook his head. “The captain says the Blue Rose wasn’t chosen at random. She was targeted. When she was boarded, Ambassador Eldor was killed first, along with his two guards, the ship’s telepath, and the crew. The ambassador’s staff was taken captive.”
Captives—or payment for the pirates from whoever had ordered the ambassador assassinated.
Either way…Thank you, Phaelan.
Ben lowered his voice. “And something the captain feels you should know now. The pirates had been paid in goblin gold, in bags still carrying the Mal’Salin royal seal.”
The old man spat a word in a language I didn’t recognize. If it wasn’t a curse word, it should have been.
“I couldn’t have said it better,” I told him. “We do not need that. Goblin gold being paid to assassinate an elven ambassador before the peace talks even start. It wasn’t Chigaru, sir. He’s not my favorite person, but he wouldn’t do this. He needs these talks to succeed. But plenty of nobles who lost everything when they allied themselves with Sarad Nukpana would love to see him fail. Bags of gold with the royal seal are too obvious. It’s a setup. I’m sure of it.”
Justinius gave a terse nod. “How about the ambassador’s second in command?”
Ben looked confused. “The paladin’s sister is fine.”
“I said the ambassador’s second…” The old man stopped, then whistled. “I didn’t know that.”
Neither did I.
And neither did Mychael.
Apparently neither did the assassins, or Isibel wouldn’t have been left alive for Phaelan to rescue.
Isibel Eiliesor was the elven ambassador’s second in command.
With Eldor’s murder, she was the elven ambassador.
And if a killer didn’t want the elven ambassador alive to participate in the peace talks, she was their next target.
Chapter 5
The weight of the world dropped off of Mychael’s shoulders when I told him that Isibel was safe.
I seriously considered letting her tell Mychael about her new title when Phaelan dropped anchor in Mid’s harbor, but that’d be the cowardly way out. Mychael’s job was ensuring the security of the ambassadors and the rest of the delegates. Isibel was now the elven ambassador. Since he’d be doing the overprotective brother thing anyway, at least now he could do it officially.
Besides, from what Mychael had told me about Isibel, I knew I was going to like her. And by taking the brunt of his initial reaction to her new job title, I’d earn serious sister-in-law points.
What shocked me was that this news was a surprise.
“You’re the paladin of the Conclave Guardians and a virtual nexus of spy networks. How did Isibel hide being one step away from being elven ambassador?”<
br />
“Because she’s not using her real name. At least she wasn’t. She probably will now.”
Well, that explained a lot.
“Let me guess. She wanted to get out from under big brother’s shadow and do it herself.”
Mychael’s grunt told me I was right, and that as far as he was concerned Isibel had some explaining to do.
If Isibel Eiliesor had fought her way up through the elven foreign service to one step removed from an ambassadorship without using her family name and influence, she was one tough cookie, and I really wanted to be in the room when she and Mychael crossed verbal swords.
“Apparently she dropped the alias when Phaelan took her ship,” I noted.
“I told her how close you were to certain members of your family,” Mychael said. “I also told her that Phaelan and Mago are good men.”
I chuckled. “I hope she didn’t tell him that. As far as Phaelan is concerned, ‘good’ is a four-letter word. Mago would like it, though.”
We were in Mychael’s office in the citadel. Justinius had told Mychael to go get some rest. Markus was out of danger and Mychael had released him from the bespelled sleep. Markus was now sleeping on his own. Dalis would watch him and let us know when he woke up.
Mychael was slumped in his office chair. I stood, went around behind him, and began massaging his shoulders.
He groaned.
I smiled. A girl liked to have her work appreciated.
I didn’t have the weight of the world on my shoulders, just my red-tinged magic corner of it. Mychael hadn’t said anything yet. I had to. I needed to.
“Do you have any idea what happened with me this morning?”
He rolled his shoulders under my hands and laughed. “That covers entirely too much ground. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“What I did in the mirror room.”
Silence.
“The way I’m feeling right now, no answer is a bad answer.”
“I don’t know what happened, but I was grateful for it.” He paused. “It’s the red, isn’t it?”
“Yes. My magic’s never been red before. Quite frankly, it scares me.”
“Red doesn’t only mean dark magic. Kesyn Badru’s magic manifests as red, and so does A’Zahra Nuru. They’re not evil, far from it.”
I winced and briefly squeezed my eyes shut. I had the mother of all headaches coming on. “I didn’t mean to imply that goblin magic is evil. It’s just that…”
“Others might.”
“Others will. When I was bonded to the Saghred, my magic wasn’t red, and now it is. I just want to understand why.” I stopped massaging Mychael’s shoulders, and came around in front of him. I needed to see his face, watch his eyes, for what I was about to say. “I want to understand who I am. I thought once the Saghred was destroyed I’d go back to being myself again, or at least someone I recognized. I don’t know who or what I am anymore.” I felt the sting of tears welling up in my eyes. “Or what I’ll become.”
Mychael pulled me down onto his lap, his arms gathering me against his chest.
My throat tightened in response. Oh great, I was going to cry.
I sniffed loudly. “I don’t want to cry.”
“Then don’t cry. You don’t have a reason to.”
I lifted my head and looked at him. The tears that had pooled in my eyes trickled down my face, but no fresh tears joined them.
Mychael smiled and gently wiped my tears aside with his thumb. “Not what you expected to hear, was it?”
“No, it’s not. Though I think I like it. At this point I’ll like anything that doesn’t make me cry. I don’t have time for that.”
“We’ve had this talk before,” he said. “You’re not evil, you never were, and you never will be. And as I believe Tam has told you before, you don’t even qualify for minions.”
I laughed, though with the half sob that came with it, it sounded more like a hiccup. “I could have minions.”
“No, you most definitely could not have minions.” The humorous gleam left his eyes. “I’ve met evil face-to-face. You are not it.”
“Thank you.”
We sat there in silence, the tension slowly leaving me. Time to push it away and change the subject to something a little less terrifying. I eased myself out of his lap. “Any word on your parents?”
“Their ship was docked overnight in Mermeia. I’ve ordered two Guardian ships to escort them, but it will take some time for them to rendezvous. They won’t arrive until late tomorrow.”
“But at least you know they’ll be safe.” I bent and kissed the top of his head, wrapping my arms around his shoulders in a tight hug. “Think I could talk you into losing your uniform tunic? It’s in my way. A real massage—or anything else that might occur to us—would make you feel a whole lot better.”
Mychael groaned again, but this one wasn’t happy. “You could talk me into anything, but we don’t have time.”
“We could make time.”
“You have no idea how tempting that is.”
I grinned. “Oh, yes, I do. It’d make me feel better, too.”
“But we have to be at Sirens in two hours.”
“Sirens?”
Sirens was the nightclub Tam owned here in Mid. The three times I’d been there I’d barely made it out alive, though to my knowledge none of his clientele had shared my experiences. If they had, Sirens wouldn’t have been the most popular nightspot on the island.
“When I sent word to Tam and Imala telling them to delay their arrival,” Mychael continued, “I said we were having technical difficulties.”
I barked a laugh. “I don’t believe that’s what Markus would call it. So you think any telepathic communication could be intercepted?”
“I don’t know what to think, but until we know what’s happening, I’m being cautious. I included a coded message that hit the high points of what those technical difficulties were.”
“So Tam knows?”
“He does.”
“And we’re going to Sirens because…?”
“Tam has a warded room in the basement that he’s used as a workroom in the past.”
“Does it have a mirror?”
Mychael sighed. “Not exactly.”
Now it was my turn to be tense. “There’s a lot of dislike in that ‘not exactly.’”
“Before Tam returned to Regor, he told me the warding spell he was using so I could get into the room if I needed to.”
“Why would you need to?”
“To unblock the Passage door inside the room.”
My suddenly nerveless hands dropped from Mychael’s shoulders. “A Passage door?”
He nodded once.
“I’d rather chance running through a mirror with a tentacle monster,” I said.
“Me, too.”
*
The director of elven intelligence had been mirrored to death and barely brought back to life. The ship carrying the elven ambassador had been attacked by assassins on the high seas, the ambassador had been killed, and the rest of his staff taken captive. Fortunately, they had been saved by pirates who, thankfully, were related to me. One of the staffers was now the ambassador, and she was related to my fiancé.
And it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.
The Guardians were responsible for delegate security and safety during the peace talks. To say security and safety had gotten off to a bad start would be the ultimate understatement. Though technically, none of the above had happened on the Isle of Mid, so there was nothing we could have done to prevent it, that wasn’t how a lot of the delegates would see it. As soon as word got around—and it would—the peace talks would be the talk of the Seven Kingdoms, and not in a good way.
Now, two of the most important people in the goblin delegation would be arriving via a Passage door.
There was bad—and there was worse.
The Passages were worse.
“Passages” was a misnomer. For those who weren’t savvy about a
ll things magical, the word “passage” simply meant a way to get from one place to another.
Problem wasn’t with the Passages themselves; it was what could be in there with you.
The Passages were the areas between dimensions. Their boundaries flowed fog-like around our own reality. Where a Passage touched our world at one place could be just a short distance from where it touched our world in another, even though physically those points were far apart. From Mid to Regor via sky dragon was a three-day flight. Via a mirror, two steps. Via the Passages, about a mile.
A mile chock full of things waiting to kill and eat you every step of the way.
A Passage door was an opening between our world and the Passages. It could be naturally occurring, or it could have been torn by a mage. Dark mages practicing black magic were usually the only ones who would want to.
When it came to mirror magic, elves were the undisputed experts. The best mirror mages were elves, and it was through their research that mirrors had replaced the Passages as the preferred method to quickly get from one place to another.
There were things living in the Passages, and those things considered elves, goblins, and humans quite tasty.
And after what Mychael had told him, Tam and Imala had decided to take their chances with a run for their lives. I’d wondered why they hadn’t taken a sky dragon, but Mychael said considering the circumstances of Markus’s attack, Tam didn’t believe we had three days of flight time to spare.
That made me feel all kinds of better.
I’d been living in Mermeia when Tam had come to town two years ago. He was a duke and a primaru, or mage of the royal blood. Primaru Tamnais Nathrach was the ex-chief mage of the soon-to-be-assassinated goblin queen and a grieving husband of a recently murdered noble wife. Rumor had it that Tam leaving the goblin court and his wife’s murder were connected. Tam arrived in town as a goblin of wealth and influence. He purchased the palazzo of an old but impoverished Mermeian family and transformed it into Sirens—the most notorious nightclub and gambling parlor in the city. Before coming to Mermeia, Tam had already opened a Sirens location here on the Isle of Mid.