“The Temple staged a coup,” Helenja said, bluntly. “They have set Perrin up as princess—a mage princess, against seven hundred years of compact. Fejelis and Orlanjis were removed by Magister Tammorn. His motivations are obscure and his destination even more so. None of my mages”—a cold glance in their direction—“claim to be able to locate them.”
“And what are you doing here?” Sharel demanded of Floria. “You’re Isidore’s.”
“And, ironically,” Helenja said, with a smile that told Floria all their old antagonism was merely suspended, “the instrument of Isidore’s destruction.” She paused, letting Floria fully appreciate that statement.
“So that rumor about the talisman is true?” Tam believed that, under ensorcellment, Floria had carried to the prince’s rooms a talisman enspelled to annul the magic of the lights on which he depended to survive the night.
Floria did not answer. The downward flicker of Sharel’s gaze alerted her to her right hand, working on the pommel of her rapier. “Do you believe in the Shadowborn?”
For eighteen years she had guarded Isidore, as her father had Isidore’s father and uncle before him, and her grandmother, Isidore’s grandfather, unmoved by attempts at assassination, threats, seduction, and bribes. Nothing but magic could have made her part of the murder of her prince—yes, she believed in the Shadowborn.
Law might exonerate her of anything done under ensorcellment, yet she had murdered her prince and forfeited her honor, and she would do anything—make any alliance—to make and take recompense for that.
“Yes,” she said. “I believe in the Shadowborn.”
“And what do they say?” Sharel said, head turning toward the mage.
“The boys are not within the city; of that my mages are certain. Beyond that, they need a direction and distance, or time, to find them.”
“If they are caught outside at sunset—”
Helenja glanced toward the window, at the slant of light and depth of shadows. “They won’t be,” she said.
“How can you possibly know?” Sharel said.
“Fejelis is levelheaded. If he has survived the lift, he will ensure they survive the landing.”
She could not know. Tam’s feat—lifting himself, Fejelis, and Orlanjis—should have been beyond a mage of his official rank, even before he had endured the the high master’s questioning. Misjudgment in such extremity was likely.
“Whatever,” said Sharel, “got into Orlanjis?”
“The boy is fourteen, a bundle of emotions,” Helenja said. “That mage won’t have dropped them at random; it’ll be a place he knows. Floria,” Helenja said without turning, “you know this mage, I believe. Where would he go?”
Floria drew close the calm she had learned as a courtier in a mageridden court. “Magister Tam was born in the foothills of the Gyrheights—the Cloudherds,” she explained, giving them their southern name. Tam would never return there, even in mortal danger, but Sharel need not know that. The southerners romanticized their origins. “I know he likes the west coast.” It was not precisely a lie; he had visited the west coast once, but talked of it often.
Tam had not gone back, though, after he had met his artisan lady, Beatrice. They had a three-year-old son and a six-month-old daughter, and if Helenja did not already know about Tam’s family, then Sharel’s inquiries need not progress far before she came across them.
She would deal with Helenja to safeguard Fejelis’s rightful position as Isidore’s heir. Isidore had made her promise the night Fejelis came of age—the night Isidore died. But she also owed Tam her life; his magic had deflected those quarrels from her own heart, as well as her prince’s. She had a blood debt to repay.
“No matter,” said Helenja, when Floria said no more. “Start looking; I am expected in an audience with the ‘princess.’ Floria, with me.”
If Helenja and Floria made for strange bedmates, Floria found herself thinking some minutes later, then whatever would Isidore have made of this orgy of the peculiar?
She stood at ease, back to a wall, gaze shifting around the room, clashing and glancing off the gazes of the other guards and witnesses ranked around the wall. Across the room, her former friends and colleagues in the prince’s vigilance eyed her suspiciously, questioningly, or speculatively, according to their natures.
In the center of the room, beneath a rose skylight, was a round table, its edge and legs carved with ornate geometric scrollwork, decorated with silver, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory. On the far side sat Perrin, two hours’ princess of the Lightborn, and aged a month for every minute of it. Whose idea was it that she sat in that chair, the high, flaring back of which diminished her to a child’s proportions? She wore a prince’s red-and-blue morning jacket, and her light hair had been hastily caught up in a style suggesting a prince’s caul, with deep blue beads threaded through. No one dared re-create the true prince’s caul, lost with Fejelis. By her height, her sandy hair, and her light gray eyes, she was Isidore’s daughter, but Floria had never seen that hunted expression in Isidore’s eyes, or even in Fejelis’s.
On either side of Perrin sat the two whose alliance had pitched her into power. On her right was a solid, unremarkable-looking woman in crimson jacket and trousers. The crimson was higher necked and more opaque than any ordinary Lightborn should have been comfortable wearing, which meant its opacity was magical. Her glittering chains of rank showed her to be one of the surviving high masters, the leaders of the Lightborn Mages’ Temple, and spokesperson for the archmage—definitely not unremarkable, was Magistra Valetta.
On Perrin’s left sat Prasav, dressed as politic in crimson mourning and the green caul that marked his rulership of several northwest provinces. Beside him, sleek and predatory, was his daughter, Ember, in the guise of her father’s secretary. She watched Perrin as a well-fed cat might a caged bird, idly considering possibilities for later.
Closest to Floria, Helenja laid her hand down on the table with a soft click of gold filigree rings. “So, Magistra,” she said to Valetta. “Are you able to tell me yet where are my sons?”
“Regardless of whether we complete his deposition,” Prasav added smoothly, “Fejelis is a disruptive influence.”
“Nobody,” Perrin said, “is completing Fejelis’s deposition. I told you both,” she emphasized, with a look at each of her power brokers, “I am not taking the caul stained with Fejelis’s blood.”
Floria had to appreciate her courage, if not her sense. A princess who refused the caul was no safer than a prince who had lost it.
“We are not interested in contracting to locate the princes, but we will find Tammorn, and we expect the princes will be with him.”
Her use of “princes” could not be anything but designing. While Fejelis lived, only he was entitled to the address, but it was to the mages’ advantage to have their brightnesses at each other’s throats, not least because of the lucrative contracts protecting them against each other.
“When you do,” Perrin said, firmly, “since my brothers are earthborn, not mageborn, they should be placed in the custody of the vigilance.”
Where they will last only as long as it takes the first suborned vigilant to reach them, Floria thought. By chance—for it surely could not be the thought—Perrin’s gaze intersected hers. The princess’s face tightened, as though she had just tasted something unpleasant. The fading—Floria hoped—ensorcellment that lingered around Floria? Perrin, like Tam, was a sport mage. And sports, Fejelis had asserted, could sense Shadowborn magic.
“Well,” she heard Prasav say, “shall we talk about the Darkborn? We’ve two hours before we meet with Sejanus Plantageter.”
He and others cast an eye toward the sunlight shining in the west-facing window, low, slanting, and yellowing. Since the Darkborn archduke and his retinue could not travel by day, they would arrive at the meeting place after dark and cede the second hour of the night onward to the Lightborn.
“That assumes,” Helenja said, “that he lives t
o reach the Council Chambers.”
The meeting was to take place in the Intercalatory Council Chambers, the only space designed for such encounters, though it was hardly the environment their brightnesses—or the Darkborn aristocracy—were accustomed to. The council was of relatively low status, and its representatives not aristocratic. Floria’s neighbor and close friend Balthasar Hearne had been serving intermittent terms on the council since he was of age to do so. He had described the chambers to her, the several rooms of various dimensions, to suit different-sized groups, each one bisected by an opaque paper wall supported and reinforced by heavy mesh. Darkborn and Lightborn could hear each other perfectly through the wall—as she could attest, having spoken to Balthasar through such a wall for most of the days of their lives.
Prasav stared across the table at Helenja, open distaste in his expression. “If you mean anything in particular by that, Helenja, may I suggest you think again, now. We want reparations from the Darkborn, not war with them.”
Helenja snorted. “Ever the mercenary, Prasav. Do you really think that what they did last night—last night—can be paid for in money alone? If you have any doubt, look out there.” She stabbed two fingers toward the window.
Magistra Valetta’s was the only head that did not turn. Rumors ran through the palace of high masters crushed in their beds or quenched as their lights were buried.
Helenja leaned forward slightly. “Magistra, how are we supposed to decide on our demand for reparations from the Darkborn if we do not know what lives were lost?”
“The value of even one life is incalculable,” the mage said without expression.
“Yet we are going into negotiations with the archduke of the Darkborn and the men who were directly responsible for this atrocity,” Prasav said. “We will demand justice for your murdered people, but we will also demand reparations. And it will not come cheap.”
“The city,” Helenja said.
The others looked at her, Prasav frowning, Ember with eyes narrowed in speculation, Perrin with pale, parted lips.
Valetta blinked.
“Tell them we want Minhorne,” Helenja repeated.
“I very much doubt they’d agree to that,” Prasav said. “No matter what we held over them.”
Helenja’s fist closed. “The Darkborn live here on our sufferance. They depend on our goodwill. Our light is more deadly to them than their darkness is to us: any light kills them, but only complete darkness does us. Minhorne’s the only city of any size where we have to live like this. It’s unnatural.”
“I refuse to put my name to—,” Perrin said.
“Minhorne’s the largest, most prosperous city in the Sundered Lands.” Ember’s voice glided smoothly over the princess’s objection. “Arguably, it is this way because Lightborn and Darkborn economic interests have become intertwined to their mutual advantage, at least among the earthborn. Losing their industry and innovation at this time would cost us more than we could afford.”
Prasav’s daughter, indeed. Where the entire Lightborn realm was impoverished by hundreds of years of contracts with the mages, Prasav’s scrupulous—plenty said “ruthless”—economies had let him husband his wealth.
“Then let them live underground,” Helenja growled, “the way they used to. There’s a whole network of underground streets.”
The buried streets linking the older parts of the city were hundreds of years old, and Floria had heard Balthasar’s description of their condition—most damp, some collapsed, others more sewer than thoroughfare.
“What about you, Magistra Valetta?” Ember said. “What do the mages want from the Darkborn?” She leaned back into the sunlight to regard the mage, her face grave and concerned. The only death Magistra Valetta would acknowledge was that of Lukfer, a reclusive mage of strong but uncontrolled magic whom the mages accused, with his student Tammorn, of spreading false rumors about the Shadowborn.
“We have yet to measure our injury,” the mage said at last. “But we wish to hear what the Darkborn have to say. The streets will be safe for them.”
Magic kept those lights burning. Magic—particularly high-rank magic—could quench them.
Perrin spoke softly. “We, too, must live to reach the council chambers.”
Prasav said, with distinct impatience, “We have it taken care of, Princess.”
Perrin turned her silvery eyes on him, and for a moment Floria saw her father in her.
“My daughter,” Helenja said, before she could speak, “has a point. Please describe how exactly we are to avoid Isidore’s fate.”
“When the bell sounds, runners will leave the palace, carrying lights. They will string the route so that it is as brightly lit as the corridors of the palace. We will not travel together, and we will carry lights of our own. If there were”—a cut of the eyes sideways toward Magistra Valetta—“such a thing as Shadowborn, I doubt they would be able to swallow the magic in that many lights.” He folded his hands and said to Helenja, “I am satisfied with the arrangements; whether you are is up to you.”
Helenja acquiesced with a tilt of her head.
“Shall I suggest,” Ember said, evenly, “that we hear what the archduke has to say—how, for instance, he plans to deal with those responsible—and assess our injuries further before specifying the reparations we seek?”
Prasav said, “I think not. I am in a mood to demand.” He smiled coldly across the table. “So let us demand the city, and let them take the proper measure of our outrage.”
Ember dipped her head slightly in acknowledgment.
Magistra Valetta said, “Agreed.”
Perrin, the princess, licked her pallid lips and said nothing.
Balthasar
I should, Balthasar told himself, have realized what Sebastien was capable of. Given what Tercelle Amberley had said, given what Sebastien had said about his parentage. But first there was that moment of sheer, abject terror to pass through, before he realized that he should already have been dead, if he were going to die. Sebastien was half-Darkborn, half-Shadowborn, and perhaps immune to the Curse—he had at least wondered about that possibility. But he, Balthasar, was not immune. . . . Yet here he stood, before a door open on daylight. Sebastien had been mage enough to bring them here; now the boy had proven himself mage enough to shield them both from daylight. Not even the Lightborn high masters had achieved that.
How can we fight these people, Balthasar thought, Telmaine, Ishmael, Vladimer, and me? He swayed where he stood.
Sebastien thought it a fine jape and greeted the newcomers with suppressed glee more suited to the boy he was than the man he was pretending to be. “Welcome, Captain, Johannes. Come in; bring your lights. Don’t mind my brother; he’s a little nervous about the sun.”
A gust of heated air swept around the two men standing on the doorstep. Balthasar reached out with a shaky burst of sonn. The younger had the build of a man who labored for a living and the clothing of one who did no more than subsist by it: his vest was sleeveless and his trousers ended in a ragged hem. He wore thick-soled sandals with heavy, close lacing. His only adornment was a knot-work bracelet on one wrist. The older man was lean and supple, and Bal’s sonn picked out the indistinct texture of fine, soft lace in his sleeves and leggings. He carried a rapier and a pistol on his belt, and the fluid balance of his movements reminded Bal of one of the Rivermarch enforcers who was also a fencing master; it was how he imagined Floria would move.
“Balthasar,” Sebastien said airily, “fetch us some of that excellent beer.”
“None for me,” said the older man, gravel in his voice. Lightborn would not accept food and drink from those they distrusted.
“Nor me,” said the younger.
“Then come through to the sitting room.”
“I’d as soon speak here,” the older man said.
With the door open? Balthasar wondered. His mind was beginning to clear of the panic inspired by the threat of sunlight. He took in more details of their stance, their
position—close to, within lunging reach of, the door. Their distrust could not have been plainer if they had shouted it.
“Balthasar, these gentlemen represent two of our allies, Captain Rupertis of the Palace Vigilance, and stonemason Johannes of the artisan’s progressive movement. Gentlemen, my brother, Balthasar Hearne, Darkborn.”
Heads turned toward him for a long moment. Was he so obviously Darkborn to sight? It must be so; Sebastien appeared pleased by their reactions. Then the older man turned his attention back to Sebastien, while the other continued to face Balthasar. The self-styled progressive movement demanded revolution and the formation of a republic, and simultaneously rejected all forms of technological innovation, especially Darkborn. They were marginal, but not as marginal as Balthasar would have preferred. But Rupertis . . . He knew Rupertis by name, as one of the several watch captains of the Palace Vigilance. A captain of the Prince’s Vigilance, suborned or ensorcelled . . . What did that mean for Floria?
“Now,” said Sebastien, with Lysander’s smile, “what have you to tell me?”
“Why didn’t you tell us that you planned an attack on the tower itself?” Rupertis said.
“Why should we?” Sebastien said, folding his arms. “You didn’t need to know.”
The man’s jaw tightened. “Well, here’s something you need to know. Isidore’s dead. Fejelis has disappeared. And the Lightborn now have a princess—Princess Perrin, ruling with the backing of the mages. Your shells didn’t kill the archmage or the head of the Temple Vigilance. And they’ve taken over. Is that what you wanted?”
Sebastien’s smile had faded. “Who’s Perrin?”
“Isidore’s and Helenja’s eldest daughter. She showed at ten as a mage and was taken into the Temple.”
Sebastien shrugged. “Not a problem, as we’ve told you before.”
“Are you sure? Perrin’s a sport—born outside the Temple lineages. Fejelis claimed that lineage mages can’t sense your type of magic, but sports can.”
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