Shadowborn

by Alison Sinclair

  “Are you . . . safe?” Balthasar asked, stumbling over the words, the question, the conflict between ensorcellment, compassion, dread, and smoldering anger that made such a question a deeply resented obligation.

  “They shouldn’t . . . have been able to . . .” He managed to lift his head, and, with Balthasar’s help, sit up. “They shouldn’t have been able to do that,” he said plaintively.

  “Do what? What were those explosions?” Balthasar asked. He did not think he had ever less wanted to know the answer to a question.

  “The Mages’ Tower. We blew it up.”

  A simple statement, bereft of boast. The Mages’ Tower was, by Floria’s account, the dominant feature of the skyline, a tower occupied by high-rank Lightborn mages, men and women whose healing power granted them life spans four or five times the length of those of ordinary men and women, who could raise storms to their will, transport themselves and others between places . . . as the boy just had then. The dynamite needed—

  Sebastien scowled at his skepticism. “We did it.”

  “You’d never have been able to place enough dynamite—” Not with the vigilance, he wanted to say, not with the city watch. But who knew how many in the city they already held under ensorcellment, to act for the Shadowborn or simply turn their attention away? How many other men and women had been forced into the position he was in?

  “Not dynamite. Guns. Great big guns.”

  Great big guns. Despite his exhaustion, despite his resistance, he made the connections. “That was why you were interested in Tercelle.” The Amberleys’ industrial concerns were munitions and artillery. It was that, not the old love affair between Lysander and Tercelle, that had drawn the Shadowborn to Tercelle Amberley. As Lysander had said—and Floria, more kindly—he was a sentimental fool. “They were the ones who—”

  “No.” A grin peeled back the boy’s lips. “Duke Mycene and Duke Kalamay—they did it. We didn’t even need to ensorcell them. They did it all on their very own. We just had to ensorcell the munitions.” He drew his knees up to his chest and hugged them. “But they shouldn’t have been able to . . . ,” he whispered.

  “Ensorcell the munitions to—”

  “Make them extra lethal,” the boy said. “This way . . .”

  He put his clammy palm on Balthasar’s wrist, and Balthasar’s breath left him, crushed out of him by the pain in his chest, the overwhelming sense of dread and mortality. He could not even cry out.

  Sebastien lifted his hand and released him, leaving him propped on his hands and gasping in shock. “That way.”

  Balthasar could not speak, so profound was his sense of near death and his realization of how much hope he had placed in the Lightborn mages having the will and power to end these atrocities. If even the Lightborn were vulnerable . . . Yet they had retaliated—he had sensed that himself. . . . “They did annul your magic, didn’t they?”

  “No,” the boy said, his voice breaking high. He forced it down to a growl. “Say that again, and I’ll annul you. They can’t annul our magic. They can’t sense it. I just overreached. It was me and Jonquil ensorcelled the munitions, and Jonquil’s dead, so it was just my vitality in there, and I overreached.”

  “What . . . do you mean that the Lightborn cannot sense your magic?”

  “Just what I say—they can’t. They can’t sense us, and they can’t sense our magic. Haven’t been able to do it for centuries, but you can bet they’ve kept that a deep, deep secret. We didn’t even know ourselves until . . . well, until. Lightborn can’t sense Shadowborn magic; only Darkborn can. And Darkborn aren’t that strong.”

  If the Lightborn mages could not sense Shadowborn magic, or if they could sense it but could not counter it, it made terrible sense of their indifference to the Darkborn’s travails. The Lightborn mages had united to call down a rainstorm on the Rivermarch as it burned, but the target had been the fire, not the magic that set the fire.

  “So they were no threat to you, but you still attacked the tower.”

  “We had to. They couldn’t sense our magic, but they could still attack us.”

  “But why?” Balthasar said, angry now. “What is it all for?”

  “I shouldn’t tell you.”

  “Why shouldn’t you tell me? You’ve ensorcelled me. I can’t betray you.”

  “That’s not—” He stopped himself.

  Balthasar waited, shaking slightly with anger and exhaustion. Not what? Not the way it works?

  Sebastien buried his face in his knees. “It’s been happening a long time,” he mumbled. “I don’t know what it’s all about—it’s best not to ask—but there are two of them. Lady Emeya and another one. They fight each other, but they want the lands, the whole lands.”

  “And they hold you—and others—ensorcelled.”

  Sebastien lifted a face that held in it the same hopeless exhaustion Balthasar had sonned in child factory workers. “Some want to stay. I wanted to stay.”

  There was a time to ask, And now? But it was not now, and not because of the boy’s readiness or uneasiness. Balthasar himself was not ready to hear. “But your will is your own,” he said.

  A silence. “My head really hurts.”

  “You’ve had a seizure,” Balthasar said. “Had you had them before?”

  The boy did not answer, his lower lip set sullenly.

  “Let’s get you upstairs,” Balthasar said. “You’ll feel better when you’re warm and lying down.” He helped Sebastien to his feet and steered him toward and up the stairs. In the first-floor master bedroom, he helped the boy out of his soaked clothes—the trousers soaked with urine as well as rainwater, he realized—and toweled him down, got him into a clean nightshirt, and coaxed a dose of chloral hydrate down him. The seizure, or the uncertainty about his magic, had left the boy dazed. Balthasar spread quilts over him, smelling the fragrant must of old herbal sachets, and started to turn away.

  The quilts rustled. “Don’t go.” A child’s voice, a child’s plea.

  “I need to change out of those wet clothes. I’ll become ill otherwise.” It was obvious that healing was not amongst the boy’s skills.

  “Come back quickly.”

  Balthasar obeyed, rummaging in the spare-room wardrobe for a heavy, smoky-smelling sweater and coarse trousers that were too large for him but would be warm. One of Tercelle’s male relations, he presumed; they could not belong to either Lysander or Mycene, both of whom were slight. He stripped, washed the blood off his side, wincing at the tenderness of the closed wound, dried himself, and quickly rinsed and wrung out his clothing as best he could. Then he dressed, drawing the waistband tight to hold it up on his hips.

  Sebastien was still awake when he returned, fighting sleep like a child. Balthasar found himself straightening the covers, as he would for one of his daughters. Sebastien’s eyes shifted—watching him?

  “It’s strange,” he said. “Having you here. It’s like having . . . him.”

  “My brother?” Wiser to say that than try “your father.”

  “He was . . . He looked after me. But then . . .” A long silence. “He wanted to take her away. He said he had to take her away. And if I wouldn’t go, then he’d leave me behind. He said if it was her or me, he would take her.”

  The words were childish, the anguish was that of a young child’s abandonment, and Balthasar could well imagine Lysander saying that to a child. He reminded himself that he could not imagine what Lysander had experienced among the Shadowborn. “Was she in that much danger?”

  “Yes. No!” A long pause. “Emeya would have killed her.”

  “But you didn’t know that at the time,” Bal said. Because people seldom do, even when it is there before them.

  “No,” he said. He turned on his side, away from Balthasar. “I don’t want to talk anymore. Be quiet. Stay.”

  Balthasar sat listening to the tolling of the warning bell, a sound he had heard only once before in his time in the city, when the collapse of an ill-built tenement h
ad spilled light into the night. But those were poor artisans, with only enough light to last out the night, and though scores of Darkborn had been burned, few had died outright. The breached walls of the Mages’ Tower would have blazed out like a beacon, and the Lightborn would have surely laid claim to the last hours of the night in a bid to rescue survivors. He could not escape and live, even if he had not been bound by the ensorcellment.

  He heard a snuffling snore; the boy had rolled over to sprawl on his back. In sleep, he might have been one of the waifs Balthasar had treated in Olivede’s Rivermarch clinic: half starved, half wild, street bred and street reared, neglected and abused. He could not hate the boy—and was that ensorcellment or pity? Pity, he thought, and rejected the thought—and then brought it back to reexamine it. His thoughts limped with exhaustion, but even in his weariness, he had a sense that he was close to something important. Love me, the boy demanded. An adult might thwart the wishes of a child out of love; as the father of two lively little girls, he found himself doing that more often than he ever wanted. For him to juxtapose his feelings for his daughters with his feelings toward this boy seemed an obscenity, but . . . if he had an escape, he sensed it lay there.

  He would need his wits intact to know his way when it opened before him. Rather than strain against the ensorcellment by trying to leave the room, he found a spare quilt and a pillow, laid down the pillow, wrapped himself in the quilt, and stretched out on the rug in front of the cold grate.

  Balthasar

  Balthasar woke to the muted crackle of an untidily laid fire in the grate, and his brother kicking at his bare feet. “Up,” Lysander said. “I’m having visitors. You get to play butler.”

  “Sebastien?” Balthasar said tentatively.

  “Yes—oh, the shape.” He smirked. “You like it?”

  He did not like it. His memories of his brother were of taunting and torment shading to outright cruelty, ending in coercion to conceal Lysander’s capital crime, but nevertheless he rebelled at the thought of his brother’s living likeness being passed back and forth amongst these Shadowborn like an old sock. “No,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

  Sebastien scowled down at him. He was wearing a slightly outdated, formal suit that would have suited a lord’s heir. It might have been Lysander’s, since Lysander liked to dress expensively and above his station. The young mage seemed recovered after last night’s collapse, but there was a hectic energy about him that Balthasar had seen in young addicts and young gamecocks intoxicated by their own recklessness. The first, he had treated; the second, he had, generally, outplayed. “I need to be older,” Sebastien said. “Or they won’t listen.” He kicked Balthasar’s feet again. “Get up. And dress decently. There’s clothes in the wardrobe.”

  He left. Balthasar crawled out of his bedding. He could not tell what time it was; his watch, soaked once too often, had stopped. There were no familiar sounds to cue him. In his and Telmaine’s home, the staff’s routines demarcated night and day as crisply as the bells outside. In the old, narrow house he had inherited from his parents, he could tell the hour from the mutterings of the walls and roof as they warmed with the sun, and from the sound of Floria White Hand’s movements next door.

  His own clothing had barely begun to dry; he could still wring water out of the cuffs. Groping in the wardrobe, he found a shirt, pressed trousers—loose at the waist and slightly long in the leg—and a formal jacket and coat, both decently plain and smelling of tired lavender and long storage. He washed and dressed, wincing as he stretched the scar in his side, found a comb and pulled it through his unwashed hair, and decided not to bother to search for a razor. Despite his sleep, he was draggingly tired, but he knew his tiredness was as much of the spirit as the body, that it was despair that sapped him.

  Sebastien was standing in the vestibule as he came down the stairs, toying with a large, ornate door key. “You look awful,” he said, as though Balthasar’s haggard aspect gave him personal offense.

  “I can do what’s needed,” Balthasar said quietly. Sebastien would not hear the other meaning and the prayer in that.

  Sebastien’s response was interrupted by the doorbell. Key in hand, he crossed to the door. His smirk back over his shoulder, his expectant pause before he turned the key, jolted Balthasar to full understanding. Protest jammed in his throat at the realization that Sebastien knew precisely what he was doing—as Lysander knew what he was doing—and panic rendered him mute.

  He had only enough time for a single step back, as Sebastien turned the handle and threw open the door on daylight.

  Six

  Floria

  Politics made for strange bedmates, Prince Isidore used to say, though Floria White Hand had never foreseen it applying to her. She was a vigilant; her prince’s allies were her allies, and her prince’s enemies her enemies. This she had learned when head-high to her father’s belt, as he had learned from his father, and he from his, and so on, back ten generations.

  How, then, did she come to be standing—albeit with her back to a solid wall—in a gathering of the very people she had spent eighteen years protecting her prince from?

  In the center of the room, the dowager consort Helenja glowered at her sister. Helenja was a heavy woman, deceptively so, given how quickly she could move when inclined. She had a southerner’s coloring, and the ornate construction of her dull auburn hair was in the southern mode. Her usual dress, southern in its earth-hued simplicity, was decorated with ribbons and a sash in bright red, in scant acknowledgment of her mourning.

  In Sharel, Floria could see the young Helenja, despite the slight physical resemblance between them: Sharel was lean, dark, and straight nosed, where Helenja was bulky, auburn, and had a nose that had been broken by a fractious horse. Nevertheless, Sharel’s arrogance and swift certainty of judgment evoked the arrogant young consort who had thought to conquer Isidore’s court.

  “Of course he’s a hostage!” Sharel was saying. “You said Fejelis grabbed him just before they all disappeared. Orlanjis would never have gone willingly.”

  The dowager consort looked past Sharel, toward Floria. She was squinting slightly, as though looking at a bright horizon or suffering from a headache. “Orlanjis,” Helenja said, grittily, “couldn’t have made his support for Fejelis more plain. Mistress White Hand, come here.”

  Floria did not want to expose her back in this company, but she and Helenja had established a sketch of an alliance around their desire to find Prince Fejelis and his brother. Moreover, she’d never fight her way out. She obeyed.

  “Tell my sister what you saw,” Helenja said.

  Why Sharel should believe Floria’s account of the disappearance of Fejelis and Orlanjis, she had no idea. For eighteen years, Floria had been vigilant and food taster to Fejelis’s father, Isidore, on account of the magical asset that protected her against poisons—most of which had been plied by the southerners.

  Perhaps, she thought bitterly, I have become credible because of the part I played in Isidore’s death.

  Stonily, she reported, “The prince’s sister”—to refer to her by either her birth name or the name given her by the mages was equally fraught—“came running up to Prince Fejelis and Captain Rupertis in the vestibule of the palace, to tell them that the high masters had Magister Tammorn, who had been working for the prince, and were planning to burn out his magic—”

  “Why?” Sharel interrupted. “He’s a mage.”

  “Magister Tammorn is a sport,” Floria said. No need to explain what else the Mages’ Temple had to hold against Tam, aside from his birth outside the Temple’s carefully cultivated lineages. “Prince Fejelis went to the high masters and attempted to persuade them to release Magister Tam and to join with him in dealing with the Shadowborn.”

  In defiance of centuries of protocol shielding the archmage from earthborn contact, the young prince had appealed directly to the archmage for an alliance. His appeal had been bold and moving and might have worked, except that Fejelis had
made a tactical error. “He let it be known that he believed that lineage mages could not detect Shadowborn magic.”

  “Was he mad?” said Sharel.

  “Look out the window,” Helenja said. “And tell me.”

  Out of the window was the Mages’ Tower, that thrusting assertion of the mages’ ambition, wealth, and power, which had shadowed the palace and streets beneath it for two hundred years. Its upper dome was gone, its upper stories collapsed in on themselves and fallen in slabs over the streets and buildings below, its middle and lower stories punctuated with jagged holes. The bright dust of its ruin was still settling out of the late-afternoon sunlight. That the destruction had been wreaked by material means—explosive shells from Darkborn emplacements on the far side of the river—everyone knew, but it was already widely rumored that the lethality had been magically augmented. And surely no enemy the mages sensed could have struck against them so preemptively.

  “Mad, no,” Helenja said, judiciously. “But unwise to have said so outright.” She inclined her head toward Floria. “Continue.”

  Floria believed the silent archmage might have been weighing Fejelis’s appeal, but her interpretation was unasked for. “Prasav”—that was Fejelis’s oldest cousin on his father’s side—“stepped forward to accuse Magister Tam of having been responsible for the prince’s—Prince Isidore’s—death, under Prince Fejelis’s instigation. He suggested that the prince and Magister Tam were lovers.”

  Sharel snorted at this expression of northern bigotry.

  “Fejelis asked the high masters to confirm that he and Tam were innocent of the prince’s death. They made no move to do so. Vigilants under Prasav’s command”—some of them suborned members of Fejelis’s own guard, Rupertis among them, and she owed him an accounting at her first opportunity—“took aim at Fejelis. The mages raised no objection, though there was no formal rescinding of contracts.”

  That made Sharel’s eyes widen: the system of contracts by which earthborn secured the services of mages were sacrosanct. “Orlanjis tried to push Fejelis out of the line of fire. Magister Tam deflected the bolts, and then he, the prince, and Orlanjis disappeared.”