Shadowborn

by Alison Sinclair

  The headquarters for the Borders troop had originally been a ballroom on the northeast side of the manor. It was a late addition, conceived last century as a stage for the high social ambitions of one of the baronelles. But after her triumphs, the tiered balconies, the elevated orchestral platforms, and the lush reliefs and scrollwork had grown shabby with decades of neglect. Tradition held that sometimes the ghost of the baronelle could be heard weeping for its ruin, though from what Ish knew of the lady, weeping with rage was more likely.

  The courtyard and ballroom were bustling. The courtyard was full of horses, mules, and carts; the ballroom was full of men and a number of women, milling around the entrance to the armory off in one intimate gallery, the mustering station for departing and returning troops, and the entrance to the kitchen. Troops were generally young and inevitably hungry. A final group was gathered around a huge relief model in an open side gallery. A woman was stretching over it to place a marker, her reach slightly impeded by the swell of her abdomen: Lavender’s identical twin, Laurel, married a year, and five months pregnant.

  At her shoulder, to Ishmael’s not unmixed relief, was her father. Most Darkborn were relentlessly modern in outlook; Baron Xavier Stranhorne was an exception, having personally taken an axe to the first telegraph pole raised on his land. He was a relatively young man, only a few years older than Ishmael, and well educated, with a degree in history from the university in Minhorne and a lifelong interest in scholarship. His opposition to “progress” had equal parts Borders obduracy and considered decision.

  His opposition to magic was equally uncompromising. The first time Ishmael had called on him as Baron Strumheller, Stranhorne had taken him into his private library and delivered an ultimatum: “I have opened my doors to you, sir, as a peer and a neighbor. But should you exercise or even discuss your unnatural practice within my halls, my doors will be closed to you forever. Do you wish to dispute this?”

  “These are your halls, sir. I do not.” Stranhorne nodded—he had the refreshing trait of not needing to beat down an adversary who’d submitted—and the matter was settled. Ishmael had scrupulously respected Stranhorne’s prohibition, and Stranhorne had scrupulously extended to him the courtesies of a peer and host. Were it not for Stranhorne’s daughters, their relationship would have remained that of cooperative but distant neighbors. Ishmael would have regretted that.

  Lavender hailed her father and sister cheerfully. “Told you we’d find him.” Turned her head, sonning the gathered troops. “Pay up!”

  He might have known there’d be a pool as to who might retrieve him.

  Xavier Stranhorne’s face was unreadable, which was not reassuring; the scholarly baron was not particularly demonstrative, but he did not hide what he felt. He said, “Welcome, Strumheller”—which title was no accident, undeserved though it was. “I’m afraid I’m greeting you with awkward tidings. Your sister sent a telegram from Strumheller this evening. Ferdenzil Mycene’s been charged with the warrant for your arrest. He’s on his way with a dozen mounted men.”

  Lavender caught her breath, her expression horrified. “Mycene! What was the archduke thinking?”

  There was no love lost between Stranhorne and the Duke of Mycene and his heir. Mycene’s territorial ambitions included the extensive archipelagos off the Stranhorne coast, including the island home of the late Baronelle Stranhorne. And the warrant was for the murder of Ferdenzil’s betrothed, Lady Tercelle Amberley. For the sake of his peace of mind, Ishmael was glad he had not known Mycene was hunting him.

  “Mycene’s also got a prisoner: the physician who was traveling with you.”

  Ishmael had been afraid of that. When Ishmael had decided to leave the train, his ally, Dr. Balthasar Hearne, had gone on to Strumheller to carry word to Ishmael’s brother and sister that he was still alive. Ish hoped the physician had not suffered for his willingness to act as messenger and decoy.

  Laurel stepped forward and hugged him firmly. He returned the hug, gladdened to feel her girth. The last time he had passed through, she had been worrisomely thin and sick with early pregnancy. He was not surprised to hear her murmur against his ear, “Library—we’ll join you.” Laurel had always been the cunning one of the pair.

  “We can give you provisions,” Lavender said urgently. “Get you away on a fast horse.”

  “No,” said Ishmael and Stranhorne together. Ishmael continued, “I was coming to Stranhorne, whatever befell. You need t’hear my report. You need to know what’s behind the ducal order.”

  “That can’t be more important than your freedom, surely,” Lavender said.

  “I think it is.”

  “Then let me intercept Mycene,” urged Lavender. “Misdirect him.” Her father got a pained expression on his face; Lavender was a notoriously poor liar. Laurel just said, “Lavender, think.”

  This was best not discussed in an open hall. With this many men and women around, there were bound to be those who, for the best or worst of reasons, might reveal information to a man carrying the archduke’s warrant. Ishmael nodded to Stranhorne and worked his way through the group, returning handclasps and greetings as he went, but not stopping. Alone, he made his way to the baron’s study. Which seemed to have had several more shelves added, though he would have sworn there was no room. In a bunker built of books alone, Stranhorne could hold off a Shadowborn army—but that whimsy was rapidly followed by the sobering awareness of possibility.

  Stranhorne, Laurel, and his younger son, Boris, arrived promptly enough to prevent Ish from nodding off in a soft armchair. Lavender was downstairs, organizing sweeps, knowing that if her father did not tell her everything, her sister or brother would. Stranhorne served Ishmael brandy from a bottle sequestered behind a particularly forbidding tome, and rang for lemonade for his daughter and son.

  “If you hoped,” Stranhorne said, sitting down with his own brandy glass, “I’d shield you, I’m likely to disappoint.”

  Ishmael had hoped that; he could not deny it, at least to himself—hoped for shelter, for time, for help. “I know,” he said, without rancor. “Would have been one matter to have city agents arriving hours or days behind me, but here’s Ferdenzil Mycene hard on my heels. The last you want is t’give him time to take the measure of Stranhorne’s full assets when y’think you might come to need them against him, someday that might be soon.”

  Stranhorne sonned him crisply, but it was no secret that, should the Duke of Mycene and his son act on their ambitions to annex the islands, Stranhorne would support his late wife’s people, in arms, if need be. With the men and women that Ishmael himself had helped train to fight Shadowborn. Ishmael added, “His knowing that you know he’s taken me is some security that he’ll return me to Minhorne for trial, and not just stake me out for th’sunrise.”

  “I think I can make sure of that.”

  “I didn’t murder Tercelle Amberley,” Ishmael said. “Th’appearance was cursed compromising, I’ll admit, but I’d been lured to be discovered with the body still warm. I’d hoped to prevent harm to her, if she’d been blameless, and get some answers if she hadn’t.”

  Stranhorne’s nod said that he accepted that. “We’ve been stockpiling munitions,” he admitted. “And rotating our reserves in for training. We know that Mycene has been building up a presence in the isles. We weren’t sure that this business about the Shadowborn wasn’t a distraction. The city has never taken much interest in Shadowborn before now.”

  “Lord Vladimer has,” Ishmael dissented.

  There was a silence. “Vladimer,” said Stranhorne. “Yes.”

  His opinions of the archduke’s brother and spymaster had to be mixed, Ishmael thought. Vladimer was the best of allies to those whose interests aligned with his brother’s policy. And the worst of enemies to those whose interests did not. The former Baron Strumheller well knew where the archduke’s policies did not entirely serve the Borders. “In this, at least,” Ishmael said, “Vladimer’s our ally.”

  “Ah, and wha
t would ‘this’ be?”

  “You’ll have t’know first that this touches on the matter that you asked me never t’discuss within your halls. There’s no getting away from it.”

  “I somehow thought it might. Go on,” said Stranhorne, no promise of forgiveness in his tone.

  Ishmael waited until the servant had delivered the lemonade. Then he laid out the story: Vladimer’s suspicions that the lack of Shadowborn activity indicated that the Shadowborn might be organizing their forces for the first time in history. The apparently unrelated scandal of bastard twins born to Lady Tercelle Amberley, Ferdenzil’s betrothed, by a father the lady claimed, impossibly, to have been Lightborn, or at least to have been able to move through the day. Attending physician Balthasar Hearne’s suspicion that the twins might be sighted, as no Darkborn had been since the Curse was laid. The murder of Tercelle Amberley, and the attempt to frame Ish for that murder. Lord Vladimer’s sudden, uncanny coma, attributed to sorcery. Ishmael’s arrest on suspicion of murder and sorcery, his imprisonment and escape. Rescue, rather—he skated lightly over his condition at that escape. The reappearance of Lysander Hearne, Balthasar’s long-missing brother, claiming Tercelle Amberley’s children as his own. And Ishmael’s confrontation with a Shadowborn at Lord Vladimer’s bedside, in a ducal summerhouse full of people unconscious under its influence. Alive, the Shadowborn had resembled Lysander Hearne. Dead, it had not.

  He did not tell them about Lady Telmaine, Balthasar Hearne’s wife and Ishmael’s unexpected ally, a lady of courage and spirit and a mage of considerable strength. The lady had hidden her magic all her life, terrified of social ruin. And who was he to condemn her, he whose father had summarily disinherited him? His feelings for Lady Telmaine were nobody’s business but his own—and hers, admittedly, since they were both mages. And he did not tell the Stranhornes about the price he had paid to save her life. A mage drew upon his own vitality to power his magic, the efficiency of that drawing determining the strength of the mage. Ishmael had been born as weak as mages came, but he had still succeeded in holding back an inferno around Telmaine and her daughter when her magic failed. In doing so, he had permanently damaged the connection between his vitality and his magic. The least use of magic now risked killing him.

  “These Shadowborn have strength,” he said to Stranhorne. “To change one’s form—it’s what underlies magical healing, only we regard it as a perversion of th’use and won’t try it—but to fully change one’s form argues considerable strength. Th’one we met was able to hold an entire household under ensorcellment—though it may be that it was at its limits, which made it vulnerable t’me.” A lie, but he could not tell them that Lady Telmaine had valiantly set her untrained magic against it, distracting it enough to let him in range. “They seem t’like fire as a weapon: the burning of the Rivermarch, the firing of the warehouse where Lady Telmaine found her daughter.”

  “Mmph,” said Stranhorne. Laurel was listening intently, while Boris was sitting very still, obviously thinking rocklike thoughts, to Ishmael’s well-hidden amusement. Boris was seventeen and only lately admitted to his elders’ councils. “You’ll understand,” Stranhorne said at length, “how much I’d like to disbelieve you, but Max sent me an account by courier of Lord Vladimer’s report to the dukes and barons, and it tallies with what you say. The ducal order has been extended to the dukes—they’re allowed to mobilize their own reserves.”

  Ishmael, mindful of tender young ears, did not swear. The Dukes of Mycene had held the archducal seat until two hundred years ago, and that Sachevar Mycene still coveted the seat was common knowledge. Sejanus Plantageter was secure—after forty years as archduke he ought to be so—but still . . . giving his rival leave to bring forces into the city . . . Vladimer would surely have argued with him vigorously, if he were able.

  “Lord Vladimer?” he said. “Was he there? How’d he appear t’Max?”

  Max Stranhorne would never have been able to tell if Vladimer were suffering any ill effects of the ensorcellment, aside from the effects of the experience itself—which could not be discounted. Ish himself had sensed nothing, and Lady Telmaine would surely have said . . .

  “Lord Vladimer gave the report. Max thinks he may have been hurt—possibly ill, but Max thinks hurt. What prompted the extension of the archducal order,” Stranhorne said, distinctly enough that Ishmael knew he was aware of Ishmael’s distraction, “was the death of the Lightborn prince.”

  On the other side of sunrise lived the Lightborn, as utterly dependent on light as the Darkborn were on darkness. Both races had been created together by an eight-hundred-year-old act of magical vengeance. For eight hundred years, Lightborn and Darkborn had shared the land, trading, negotiating through paper walls, but never able to meet face-to-face. For much of the land, Darkborn and Lightborn cities, towns, and villages were separate—the Borders themselves were almost empty of Lightborn, for reasons no one among the Darkborn understood—but Minhorne, the largest city, was held in common, and the seats of Darkborn and Lightborn rule were separated by fewer than five miles.

  The death of a Lightborn prince was not in itself an unusual event: Lightborn custom allowed the ruthless culling of faltering, incompetent, or corrupt leaders. But Isidore was a seasoned, steady statesman of no more than Ishmael’s age, who had for twenty years survived the machinations of his wife’s relations—she was the daughter of one of the potentates of the southwest desert—not to mention the ambitions of his own.

  “How? ” Ish said.

  “Magic,” Stranhorne said. “The lights in his rooms failed.”

  Darkness was as rapidly fatal to Lightborn as sun- or mage light to Darkborn. It left a tacky residue that smelled, distinctively and repugnantly, of old blood.

  Even as a student, Stranhorne would never have lived in the areas that Ishmael had; he would never have smelled that odor for himself.

  “I understand that the lights are magical talismans enspelled to absorb and reradiate sunlight,” Stranhorne said.

  He understood correctly, as Ishmael would expect. Though they had never discussed it, he knew from other directions that Stranhorne had as much theoretical knowledge of magic as any man who was not a mage. “The prince is protected—layers deep—by mages,” Ishmael said. “Anyone tried t’annul the magic on the lights, they’d know; they’d warn th’prince and they’d stop it.”

  In the aftermath of the laying of the Curse, the last remaining Lightborn mages had begged protection from the most powerful of the emerging warlords; out of that had come the compact ruling magic on the other side of sunrise. A mage could not use magic against a nonmage except by publicly declared contract with another nonmage. Mages were indemnified against all harm done by law of contract.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Ishmael said slowly, “that the mages—the Mages’ Temple—would have lifted its protection from Isidore.”

  “Yes, but—” Running footsteps outside, the snap of a floorboard, and Lavender threw open the door. She shut it hard and stood with her back to it, as though pursued. “He’s here,” she said in breathless anger.

  “Mycene?” said her father, calmly.

  “Ishmael has to get away now. He can leave by the east gate, through Mother’s garden.”

  “And go where?” said Stranhorne, but to Ishmael, not his daughter.

  Ishmael said nothing. Vladimer had sent him south to make sure the Borders were prepared to defend themselves, and then if no invasion materialized, to scout the Shadowlands personally. And he had come south to make sure that the Borders—Stranhorne and his own barony of Strumheller—knew what they might be facing. He had done that.

  And now . . . Stranhorne had it right. Ishmael could keep running and be nothing but a trouble and a distraction to men and women who needed to keep their minds on the true enemy—and possibly get himself mistakenly shot by one of Stranhorne’s own patrols, in this time of high tension. He could demand sanctuary, and divide Stranhorne’s family, setting the twins against the
ir father. Or he could surrender, let Mycene take him north, and trust to the law and events proving his innocence. He had no doubt Vladimer had turned his own formidable resources to the task, though Vladimer would have troubles of his own—Sejanus extending that ducal order, for one. And, Ish thought ruefully, Vladimer has perhaps a little too much confidence in my ability to survive.

  At least if Mycene took him back to Minhorne, he would be near Vladimer and Lady Telmaine. He was worried about them both; Vladimer because he had already been ensorcelled once, and Telmaine because he and her husband had left her to guard Lord Vladimer’s back. Her strength, coupled with her inexperience, had its hazards.

  “Laurel,” Stranhorne said, after a moment. “Go downstairs; greet Lord Mycene. Settle him down if he needs settling—tell him ten minutes.”

  “Ishmael,” Lavender appealed to him.

  “There’s no point t’it,” Ishmael said, projecting calm. “I could go pelting about the countryside, but he’d likely find me within two or three days—the man’s a good soldier, a good leader, whatever else we may think of him—and I’d be two or three days more weary. This way’s safer for me.” And all of you, he thought. “It’s not as though I think I’ll get left out of th’fight somehow.”

  Laurel, passing, rested her hand on her sister’s arm and said something to her, too quietly for even Ishmael to hear. Lavender’s shoulders slumped. Laurel slipped out and closed the door behind her.

  “Did you get it all moved?” Lavender said to her father, her tone flat.

  “I think so, but I’d like you and Boris to go down and make sure that it is—and that it’s well concealed, or at least well disguised. There’s no reason for Mycene or his men to go into the cellars, and we’ll keep people on them, but I’d not put it past them to try.”

  “Nor I,” Lavender growled. She opened the door and stalked out, her younger brother trailing her.

  They listened for a moment as the footsteps receded. Stranhorne rose, took Ishmael’s glass from him, and refilled it. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” he said, passing it into Ishmael’s gloved hand. Hospitality or anethesia, Ishmael wondered.