“But none of the regular sweeps,” Ishmael said. “Is that what you’re telling me?” He threw back his covers. Balthasar started to lever himself stiffly out of his chair, intending to return to his own room. Ish waved a casual hand at him. “Stay,” he ordered. “I’ve nothing y’haven’t sonned a hundred times before. You understand what power’s needed t’influence th’weather.”
“Yes,” Balthasar said. “That kind of working would take several Lightborn high masters, and is probably beyond the reach of living Darkborn mages.”
“Stranhorne will understand that,” Ishmael said.
“Will he have shared that understanding?” Balthasar said, in sober assessment.
“That is likely, considering. The man’s no fool.”
Ishmael lifted clothes laundered of the odors and grime of the road, and went into the adjacent dressing room to wash and dress. Clad, he padded past Balthasar to the outer wall and lifted the bar and opened the shutter of the narrow, light-sealed window. It was unglazed, since its purpose was defensive. He propped a foot on the low bench on which a rifleman would kneel, and pushed his head through the gap—it would not pass his chest or shoulders—then inhaled deeply and listened. The doubled walls were wide, but the gap widened to the outside, allowing a sniper a better-than-sixty-degree arc. Snow: there was no mistaking the scent of it, but the air was warming and he could smell the grass and scrub of the Borders rising on the wind. The thaw would not be long in coming. Could he console himself that the mages who had called the storm down on them lacked the strength or commitment to keep the cold? Or had it already achieved its purpose, pinning them down, preventing the Stranhornes’ sweeps?
He could hear voices from his left—children, screeching delight at this novelty, and two or three adults—and swung his head to better place them. They would be within the enclosed garden to the east, since there was nowhere else for children to play in time of high alert. It had been the baronelle’s garden before she died. He was fully oriented now, and unnerved by more than the snow. He jerked his head back in, closed and tested the shutter automatically, and turned to face his traveling companion. “Hearne,” he said, “I need your help.”
“Anything,” the physician said.
He would rather, he admitted to himself, be facing down a scavvern with a butter knife. “Y’know the reason we were t’meet in the first place.”
“Lord Vladimer thought my skills might be useful to you,” Balthasar said. “In dealing with the Call.” Balthasar Hearne had a growing reputation in the treatment of addictions and other irrationality; his success with one of Vladimer’s other irregular agents, Gil di Maurier, had attracted Vladimer’s attention.
“Aye. You’ve an interest in the treatment of compulsions.” He passed a hand down his face. “I’ve th’strongest urge to go straight downstairs, out the door, and start walking southwest as fast and far as my feet will take me.”
“That is all?” Balthasar said.
Of course he would miss the significance of the direction, not knowing that for as long as it had ridden Ishmael, the Call had pulled him due south, not southwest. “Yes,” Ishmael said, fighting impatience. “That’s all th’Call is—an urge t’go into the Shadowlands and not come back, even knowing it would be the death of me.”
“Is there any basis to this compulsion—a sense that someone important is waiting for you there, or that you have something to do?”
“No,” Ishmael said. “It’s just th’urge t’go. Southwest.” He almost felt as though he had lurched in that direction, but sonned no reaction in Balthasar’s intent face.
Balthasar said, “Sit down, if you would, Baron.”
He waited until Ishmael had sat down and then said, “Have you ever lost control to the extent that you started to move in that direction without intending to?”
“Not waking,” Ishmael said through a tight jaw. “I’d sleepwalk when it was at its worst. Wanted a guard, sometimes chains.”
Balthasar’s lips compressed, whether at the implications of someone sleepwalking during daylight or at Ishmael’s measures. “And are you close to losing control now?”
“No, but it’s strong, and th’direction’s changed. All these years, it has pulled south. Now it’s pulling southwest.”
“Southwest, but still into the Shadowlands.” He paused. “How do you interpret that?”
“That whatever or whoever is holding th’Call on me is moving. Likely moving north.” Toward Strumheller. He sank his fingertips into the arm of the chair.
“And what have you tried to break the compulsion?” the physician said.
“What haven’t I tried, Hearne? Magic, of course; overspent myself often enough to drive th’futility through my thick skull. Phoebe Broome tried. She’d have asked her father, but her brother Phineas tried t’send me off the first months I was in their commune, and wound up taking a mild case of it himself. She was afraid her father’d get in too deep and suffer worse. The mage who’d had me as student tried. I downed various potions and medicines, too, though it was as well I’m hard t’poison, or some of your colleagues would have done for me.”
“Did you ever approach a Lightborn mage?” Bal said.
“Had some correspondence with one, but we’d never th’intimacy for me to raise the question with him. Darkborn mages tend not to want t’attract their attention that way—they’ve the greater power and they think to rule magic on both sides of sunrise. I’ve always wondered if they weren’t the more vulnerable to th’Call, though if Lightborn were lost in numbers in the past, we’ve no record of it.”
“Floria never seemed to have any difficulty talking about Shadowborn.”
“Mistress Floria’s not a mage,” Ishmael said flatly.
A thoughtful pause. “What do you know about therapeutic hypnosis?”
Ish shrugged. “Not so much.”
“Most important, in this instance, is that it has nothing to do with ensorcellment or subordination of the will. I am not a mage—as you well know—not a fairground magician, and definitely not the hypnotist in a sixpenny melodrama.” That emphasis suggested past trying experiences. “I could not induce you to do anything that you might not wish to do.” He paused. “If you wish to touch-read me to know the truth of that, you may.”
Ishmael did not move. It was a generous offer, given that Ishmael’s presence, as well as Telmaine’s confession of magic, for which Ishmael was also responsible, had perturbed Balthasar’s happy marriage. Ishmael and Telmaine had at no point acted improperly, but there was a warm, mutual attraction between them. “I’ve got many wishes best not acted on,” Ishmael said, truthfully.
“I’ve never known anyone who didn’t. But I’m not talking about impulses, although hypnotism can be very useful in subduing impulses, even quite compelling ones. Will you let me attempt to hypnotize you, Baron? It may be that I can augment your resistance to the Call.”
“Aye,” Ishmael said. “Have at it.”
But now, as years ago, when he was trying to elicit the fullest strength from his magic, Ishmael was hampered by his hyperacute senses and keen, worldly awareness, the consequences of years of vagabondage and Shadowhunting. He knew there was danger outside; he knew danger had to be attended to. Every voice or closing door, familiar or otherwise, snapped him from his trance.
“Hold,” he said at last, and leaned forward, rubbing his temples to coax away an incipient headache. Balthasar sat silent, his expression a professional mask.
“Maybe I should have said t’you that I was not that good at th’exercises that mages use. The mage who took me on when I couldn’t stick in the Broomes’ commune had th’idea t’overwhelm my vigilance. He had me down at the fish market when the barges docked.” Balthasar’s grimace proved that he, too, had visited the fish market at that time—probably as a cash-strapped young student after cheap, fresh fish. Ishmael grinned. “It seemed t’work, Hearne. So maybe—”
Telmaine’s silent scream, the sear of magic across his awar
eness, caught him completely unguarded. He felt his body spasm with the shock of it, and then he lost all sense of himself as the reverberations shuddered along his nerves. Their passing left him in a state of desperate uncertainty. He willed a silent voice to speak, longed for a whisper or even a wisp of vitality that would tell him if she prevailed, whether that was a shriek of mortal injury or a battle cry. He could not endure—He must—He must not try to—The crushing pain in his chest nearly caused him to black out, and left him sweating and shaking and afraid he had groaned aloud. His teeth were locked, hard enough for his jaw muscles to spasm, and he felt chilled and nauseated. Balthasar’s fingers probed his pulses, felt for his stuttering heart; through his touch, he felt the physician’s recognition and concern at this second episode. He lifted his head groggily, finding himself propped half in, half out of the armchair. “Cursed . . . habits,” he managed, and, struggling to think, let his head fall back.
He had sensed Shadowborn—he could not mistake them. Sweet Imogene, had another Shadowborn found her? They knew there were at least two in the city. If so, had Vladimer been there? Judging by what she said of her encounter with the first Shadowborn, her best chance—perhaps even her only chance—of survival was to have someone present with a ready hand and a revolver, and Vladimer was as good as Ishmael at close quarters. But there had been Lightborn magic in that sear, too. Had she run afoul of the Lightborn mages, despite his best hopes that his warnings and her own aversion would restrain her from contravening their laws on the use of magic? Or were the Lightborn in league with the Shadowborn , as Stranhorne had suggested? It would explain the magical taints, and why she fell under attack.
Sweet Imogene, what was happening in the city?
He roused himself at the rattle of small bottles as Balthasar unrolled his medicine pouch. “No need to dose me,” he said. “It’s just th’effects of overreach again.”
Balthasar paused and said, firmly, “You have to stop trying to use your magic.”
“Th’head knows; it’s just slow t’reach the reflexes.” He pushed himself up too soon; he had to lean forward, head in his hands, until his heart rate steadied and the pain in his chest eased.
When he raised his head, Balthasar was waiting for him. “Was it Telmaine?”
The man was no mage, but he had witnessed Ishmael’s previous spasm while talking to Telmaine, and she would be foremost in his mind. In a few words, not sparing either of them, Ishmael sketched what he had sensed.
Balthasar’s shoulders bowed with guilt. “How could we do this to her?” he whispered. “How could we put her in such danger?”
“Th’job needed done, and she’s the best we have.” His choice of tense was deliberate.
“I’m her husband, Strumheller,” Balthasar said. “I promised when I married her to cherish and protect her, and I sent her into danger.”
There was not much Ishmael could say; Balthasar knew what they faced, knew what it had already cost them. And Ishmael knew how he felt—indeed, he envied the other man his right to express it. “We’ll be bound north before sunrise,” he said, half prayerfully. “If Mycene has his way.”
They ate breakfast in near silence, having exhausted speculation as to what might be happening in the city or outside in the snow. Mycene would not release either of them, though they heard Lavender arguing with him in the hall. Nor would Mycene permit the twins to visit them. He was convinced that the young women were plotting Ishmael’s escape, whatever their father said. He was quite right, if Ishmael knew his baronettes. And who was to say Lavender had not been right when she had urged him to ride out before Mycene arrived? If he had, he would have been out in the snow—or beyond the snow, with whatever might be out there.
He persuaded Balthasar to dose himself out of his medical bag to relieve the aches of the previous night’s ride. The dose, breakfast, and lingering fatigue made him drowsy, sparing Ishmael his too-sharp attention and his too-imaginative worrying about Telmaine and what had happened in Minhorne. Like Vladimer and Stranhorne, Balthasar could imagine disasters that might never have occurred to Ishmael. That left Ishmael to listen to the snowmelt running in the gutters and feel the Call dragging on him.
Stranhorne himself arrived while they were eating lunch. His face told them the news was bad. “Roads have cleared enough that a post rider made it through. I’ve had a telegram from my elder son in Minhorne. The archduke and several others were injured this morning in a magical attack. The archduke suffered severe burns; he may not live. A regency council will be instituted for the emergency, and the heir will be recalled from their summer estate. At present, the main suspicion falls on the Lightborn.”
That was what I felt from Telmaine, Ishmael thought in horror. The Shadowborn’s cursed fire raising again. Were Lightborn involved as allies or agents of the Shadowborn? Or had they, too, opposed the Shadowborn attack, finally involving themselves against these rogue mages? It would be a bitter irony if the Lightborn had been trying to protect the archduke and now were blamed—but that was the way the world worked. And Telmaine—was she alive or dead? If the archduke had been attacked, she would have done what she could to stop it; he could not imagine her doing otherwise. . . . She had abundant power but precious little experience, and what he had sensed suggested her situation had been desperate. All that beauty, refinement, and strength, of personality and magic, burned, perhaps dead—because he was not there. . . . “Vladimer?” Ishmael asked, because he could not ask first about Telmaine—he had no reason to ask about Telmaine—and she should have been close to Vladimer.
“Lord Vladimer appears to have suffered a mental collapse, having shot and killed a lady guest.”
“Who?” whispered Balthasar, and then in a near shout, “Who was she?” He controlled his voice; it shook with the effort. “My wife . . . was a guest at the palace.” His thoughts would have followed the same course Ishmael’s had, likely more swiftly.
“It was not your wife,” said Stranhorne with compassion. “The lady’s name was Lady Sylvide di Reuther. My son made no mention of Lady Telmaine.”
Ishmael remembered the lady, a sweet-faced featherhead, gossiping with Telmaine at the archducal ball—about Ishmael’s reputation, as he recalled. Why Vladimer would have had cause to shoot her, he could not imagine. Was this some residual effect of the ensorcellment? Had the Shadowborn ensnared him anew? Balthasar had surmised that Vladimer had not told them everything about his encounter with the Shadowborn, and Ishmael was certain he was correct.
“Did your son say anything about whether . . . Lady Sylvide’s form changed in death?” Balthasar said.
“He did not,” Stranhorne said, slowly. “Is that possible?”
“Aye,” Ishmael said, grimly.
“It has to be Shadowborn,” Balthasar said. “If the archduke dies—”
The archduke’s heir, being his youngest child, was only twelve, little older than Sejanus Plantageter himself had been when he succeeded his own father. “The regency council’ll be Imbré, Rohan, Mycene, and Kalamay,” Ish said slowly, thinking aloud. The three other major dukes, and Claudius Rohan, who had sat on the regency council for Sejanus’s own long-ago minority and was Sejanus’s closest friend; no one would deny him that service for Sejanus’s son. Imbré was the only other one of that long-ago council still alive.
Balthasar Hearne understood the political implications as well as either baron, perhaps better, for he had served several terms on the council mediating Lightborn-Darkborn affairs and understood the stress points intimately. Neither Mycene nor Kalamay had any tolerance for Lightborn. Sachevar Mycene—Ferdenzil’s father—coveted the land they held, and Xerxes Kalamay found them and their magic to be an offense to the Sole God.
If their neighbors had turned against them, the Darkborn were terribly vulnerable. As they had been a hundred years back, when the genocidal Lightborn Odon, styled Odon the Breaker, set out to rid his lands of Darkborn.
Stranhorne said, “I’ve commissioned a special train t
o take Lord Mycene and his men to Strumheller, now the thaw is well advanced. It’ll be faster than the coastal express, but you’ll likely have an overday stay in Strumheller or some point north—with Lightborn unrest, the railways won’t want to risk day trains.”
Ishmael agreed. Balthasar’s face was grim. Likely recalling the abortive attack on the day train taking Telmaine and him to the coast to save Lord Vladimer. Lightborn, Telmaine had said. “We need to go north as soon as we can now,” Bal said.
“Father,” Lavender’s voice came from outside. “Get out of my way, you knucklehead. This is an emergency. Father!”
Stranhorne himself crossed over and opened the door. “Let my daughter pass,” he told the guard. “If she says it is an emergency, it is.”
Lavender half fell through the door, muttering not entirely under her breath about the guard’s habits and antecedents. “The inbound post coach just arrived,” she said, anticipating her father’s reproach at her language. “The post riders from Upper Eastbridge and the Heights didn’t make their rendezvous. Several carts of wool were due into Lower Eastbridge from the Heights; they didn’t arrive. A midwife who went out in that direction last night to attend a childbed hasn’t been heard from, and no one who lives in that direction has made it to work or market. Dyan’s mustering and mounting a double squad to take the road to Lower Eastbridge, to scout. Post coach is going on to the Crosstracks—”
“Under escort,” Stranhorne said.
“Yes, a squad—Carlann’s taking them. Laurel’s writing the telegrams to send t’Strumheller and points south along the wires.”
“Strumheller Manor and Crosstracks, both,” Ishmael said. His brother had to get the word, with no dithering. If Stranhorne weren’t so obdurate, they’d be able to send the telegrams from here. Ishmael had had Strumheller Manor wired the month he inherited, although nine years later, his engineers were still working against skeptical villagers, distance, gales, rain, and frost in their efforts to string and maintain a working network along the hill roads. “The railway head office, too: they’ll need to decide on th’trains.” Which likely meant that he would not be heading north under guard tonight, if the trains were stopped and Stranhorne could not spare fifteen horses. “And Lord Vladimer in Minhorne. Plain text; no cipher.” If Vladimer were incapacitated and couldn’t read it, others would; it might push them into action.
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