Shadowborn

by Alison Sinclair

  And then, blessedly, the archduke’s voice cut through it all. “Hold.”

  The moment teetered; Balthasar sonned the tension in the finger that rested on the trigger. Then one of the men who held him rasped, “Aaron, wait. This is too cursed quick.”

  Balthasar felt, more than heard, a growl of approval from the gathered men.

  Olivede said, breathlessly, “Please, someone give me a hand here—”

  Of Phineas Broome, he could sonn only his booted feet. The archduke gave some quiet orders; someone in the rear ranks dragged him clear.

  “Balthasar Hearne,” the archduke said.

  “My lord archduke.” The expression on the archduke’s face killed his last hope that Sebastien had lied. He could not imagine any other reason why he should sonn shame as well as raw-nerved suspicion on that face.

  At his feet, Sebastien moaned. Revolvers leveled. Balthasar crouched and held the chloroform-soaked rag over Sebastien’s nose until the boy stopped twitching. He could not even say “I’m sorry,” in case regret weakened him fatally. “I’m going to stop the bleeding,” he said, asking no one’s permission.

  “Explain, please,” said the archduke, “how you come to be here? Who is this . . . boy?”

  “I have heard,” Balthasar ground out, “what happened to my wife.” He went on before anyone could speak. “Whether I shall ever”—forgive would have been the honest word, if not the most politic—“reconcile to it is . . . a question for another day. I am still a servant of the state, still your servant. But this boy is my brother’s son, and I claim his life.”

  No one questioned his assertion, but, then, the proof was there in the resemblance. Nor did they respond to his claim. It was enough for the moment that they not interfere. He opened the boy’s jacket and shirt to expose the narrow, childish chest, pulled off his own shirt, and tore strips from it to make a compress and bind it down. It was awkward, clumsy work, but he got it done.

  “Lysander was living among the Shadowborn,” he said as he worked. “He fathered a child by a Shadowborn mage. There are at least two factions of Shadowborn. Lysander and his wife fled from one to the other, but they did not succeed in taking their son. I first met him, though I did not know it, at Strumheller Crosstracks; he arrived in the guise of a member of Mycene’s troop. In Stranhorne . . . do you know that Stranhorne was overrun by Shadowborn?” Stark, and not the way to break such news, but he was past delicacy.

  “We do. The details are scant and we don’t have time; the Lightborn should be here very soon, unless it pleases them to make us wait. Go on.”

  “With the help of another mage who survived the destruction of the manor, he brought me here.”

  “As what? His collaborator or his captive?”

  “His captive.” He paused to wind a strip of bandage around his wrist, and from his pocket fumbled the morphine and syringe. He cleaned his hands as best he could, and with still-tacky fingers he filled the syringe and used his knife to slit Sebastien’s sleeve and expose the thin arm.

  Sebastien moaned and rolled his head weakly. Balthasar placed the tourniquet, braced his arm, slipped the needle into the vein, and injected the drug. He released the tourniquet and hung over the boy until sure his breathing was steady. He could hear men moving past him, three men carrying another, and Olivede giving steady instructions despite the strain in her voice, to the accompanying drone of a prayer from Duke Kalamay.

  “You seem most concerned for someone who has held you captive,” the archduke observed.

  “The boy is sixteen at most, and has been cruelly used,” Balthasar said. “Ill taught—fire and shape-changing seem to be the magic he knows best. The other mage, the one Ishmael di Studier killed at Vladimer’s bedside, was the elder and the dominant partner.”

  “You will have to keep him drugged,” the archduke said, “and if that does not kill him, and he does not die of thirst or hunger, we shall—”

  For almost the first time ever, he heard Sejanus Plantageter fail to complete a sentence. He was glad of it: his desperate accommodation with the ensorcellment would not survive a threat of execution for sorcery. He shuddered, the ensorcellment racking him. “I know,” he gasped, “that this situation cannot pertain indefinitely.”

  “Indeed,” said the archduke, grimly. “The situation will assuredly change, and possibly not for the better. Let me be plain: is your will your own?”

  “As long as I believe that I am acting in his interest”—a desperate belief, held fast, despite accumulating evidence of harm—“then I believe my acts will be my own. I am quite certain that permitting him to continue on his planned course would only lead to his destruction.”

  “So ensorcellment is amenable to solipsism.”

  “He is a boy, Your Grace, uneducated, unsophisticated, abandoned, and abused. He has the emotional maturity of a young child. He demanded first of all that I love him as I love my own children—impossible, but it gave me latitude to act for him as a father would. As his father,” he said harshly, “should have.”

  Sejanus Plantageter pinched the bridge of his nose. “I am under the impression that the Lightborn could not sense this ensorcellment,” he said, slowly. “Thus your acquaintance, Floria White Hand, was able to deliver the ensorcelled talisman to the prince’s room.”

  Balthasar realized a beat too late that the statement had been a test of what he himself knew, and his reaction had betrayed him. “I was not thinking . . . about that, Your Grace. About other things, but not that.”

  “Mistress Floria was, I understand, quite unaware of her own ensorcellment. That was why I permitted your wife to be condemned to death. I had no other way of being certain that my mind was my own.”

  Balthasar said, in a voice that shook with repressed feeling, “You were wrong.”

  There was a silence. “I am truly sorry,” the archduke said, and his face twisted as he heard his own words. “I said that to your wife—”

  “Wait,” said Balthasar, forcing himself to reason through numbing grief. “Sebastien said . . . Sebastien said that none of the Lightborn could sense Shadowborn magic—he believed that no one could. But Ishmael di Studier could. Phineas Broome could—sense it and fight it. And when the attack was launched on the tower, Sebastien reacted as though the Lightborn had somehow counteracted or annulled it—”

  “They demolished the gun emplacements.”

  “But there was also an ensorcellment on the munitions, Sebastien said, to make them . . . to increase their harmfulness. The boy’s vitality had been used to support the magic—”

  “Only that?” said the archduke, very still.

  “I don’t know,” said Balthasar, “but I do know he suffered a seizure immediately after the emplacements were destroyed.”

  “Sejanus.” Claudius Rohan, the archduke’s closest counselor and friend, shouldered through the group of guards. “Sejanus, the Lightborn have arrived.”

  The archduke turned away, paused. “I’ll spare the boy’s life for the moment,” he said, his back to Balthasar. “I will not promise more.”

  Telmaine

  So this is life after the worst has happened, Telmaine Hearne thought, as the Borders-bound train rattled south across an uncertain landscape toward an uncertain end. Across the train compartment from her, an old man sat kindling a taper made of newspaper with the touch of his fingers, a delighted smile on his imp’s face. Even with her inexperience, she could sense his magic delicately eliciting a fine rill of flame along the edge of the paper, like a feather stroking sand.

  A feather plucked from a very dead bird, she amended. Farquhar Broome was himself Darkborn, but the magic he was toying with had originated with the Shadowborn themselves. And though Shadowborn magic did not actually smell, it left her with the unsettled conviction that she had smelled something thoroughly foul.

  “Father,” protested Phoebe Broome, but resignedly.

  Her father quenched the flame with a belch of that nauseating magic, and held out the ta
per to Phoebe. “Try it, dear girl,” he invited. “Just do as I did.”

  Dutifully, Phoebe took it. She was a tall, switch-thin woman several years older than Telmaine, her dress so plain as to be masculine, and her manner awkward and self-conscious—except when she forgot where she was and who her traveling companions were. Her father, too, was tall, of an indeterminate age, with a wizened-apple face that wrinkled into merriment at the least invitation. His suit and coat had to be at least four decades out of date. Had Telmaine encountered them under other circumstances, she would readily have typed them: difficult father with long-suffering daughter; he charming in his disregard of social convention, and she carrying a double burden of it. But had someone been so indelicate as to mention the name Broome to Lady Telmaine, the duke’s daughter, she would have cut the speaker dead. Mages, even the leaders of the largest and best organized commune of mages in Minhorne, were not discussed in polite society.

  And yet here she was, sharing a train compartment with Farquhar Broome, said to be the strongest living Darkborn mage, and his daughter. Here she was, a condemned sorceress, spared execution by the archduke’s last-minute, secret orders, carried out by Vladimer with imaginative scrupulousness. Would anyone, even the archduke, know that that heap of ash in the execution room was not hers, with her own wedding rings and Balthasar’s silver love knot cushioned on it?

  She imagined some footman or courtier laying the jewelry in Balthasar’s hand. She imagined her husband’s face—imagined what she would sense if she touched him—and bit her gloved index finger until it hurt. She had not even dared leave Balthasar a message—save an oblique word to Floria White Hand, of all people, safe on the other side of sunrise and accomplished in keeping secrets—for fear she might compromise the ruse. But when would Floria be able to pass the word on, if she even would? How long would Balthasar think her dead, and what would he do in the meantime?

  Phoebe Broome slipped her gloves from her long hands and laid the gloves aside, and then unwound a thin, controlled ribbon of magic, quenching the flame almost as soon as it came into being. Farquhar Broome beamed approval. “Not nearly as unpleasant when you do it yourself, is it, now?”

  Phoebe smiled back, reluctantly. “No, Father.”

  Telmaine sank a little deeper into her seat, determined not to attract their attention. Earlier, she had demonstrated Shadowborn fire setting to them—having learned it, entirely against her will, from the Shadowborn themselves—but even her most tentative and careful coaxing had created a burst of flame that had instantly burned the taper to a strip of ash. She had just managed to quench it, leaving their compartment reeking with smoke.

  That was not the worst. Across from her, Lord Vladimer had jolted upright in his seat, snatching at his revolver. She had gone utterly still, terrified, knowing what he remembered: that catastrophic breakfast, Telmaine’s uncontrolled fires blazing up around Vladimer’s brother, the archduke. She herself remembered her dear friend Sylvide crying, “Lord Vladimer, no!” and throwing her arms around Telmaine just as Vladimer fired. He had been aiming at Telmaine—aiming to kill her magic with her—but with his right arm wounded and his aim unsteady, he had mortally wounded Sylvide instead.

  After a moment, Vladimer deliberately removed his hand from his holster, his bony face a sick mask, pulse beating hard in his temple. He apologized to the Broomes for alarming them, and excused himself—to rest, he said, completely ignoring Phoebe Broome’s efforts to ease the atmosphere or mind his comfort. The mage was as gauche as a provincial sixteen-year-old. But, then, Telmaine thought, how should Miss Broome, mage and social outcast, know how to behave around a duke’s daughter and the archduke’s half brother?

  She heard Farquhar Broome tear another strip from the broadsheet and fold it, and sensed another pulse of Shadowborn magic. “Now, my dear”—Telmaine sonned him holding out the unlit taper to Phoebe—“try to set it off. No, don’t take it; I’m not quite sure how vigorous—” The taper burst forth with a jet of flame several inches high; Farquhar Broome promptly dropped it. Magic leaped out from father and daughter and the taper was snuffed, leaving a scorched ring in the broadsheet. Farquhar Broome shook his fingers, then lifted the sheet and explored the hole.

  “I wonder that they have not refined it,” he said. “It should be possible. It’s an intriguing approach to latency. I’m sure it could be applied in other areas.”

  It already has been, Telmaine thought. The murder of the Lightborn prince had been carried out with a talisman, spelled to annul the magical lights Lightborn needed to survive the night.

  She sensed, passing between father and daughter, a ripple of magic, such as she had sensed passing between Phoebe and her brother, Phineas, when she had listened to—spied on—their conversation with Lord Vladimer. Then Phoebe got to her feet, politely excusing herself so she might check on the well-being of the fifteen or so mages who comprised the rest of their party. As though the group was not well able to communicate even through walls. Telmaine repressed a sour little smile. She could recognize an engineered opportunity.

  Farquhar Broome turned his face toward her, his smile now only a memory in the lines of his face, though his expression was gentle. He was as circumspect in his use of sonn as Ish, she had noticed; perhaps magic substituted, or perhaps he was simply accustomed to other people taking care of him. “Dear lady,” he said, “what a shock this must be to you.”

  Statements of the obvious were not confined merely to vapid society matrons, apparently. She said tightly, “I have lost my reputation, my place in society, and but for the archduke’s clemency”—belated, secret, and ambivalent clemency—“I would have lost my life. I am well aware that with another man”—Duke Mycene, perhaps, or, Mother of All avert it, Duke Kalamay—“I would have lost my life. I don’t deny what I did. I don’t deny my responsibility.”

  He nodded, as though none of that took him by surprise. “It was a serious thing you did, and a brave thing in coming back. Your sureness in healing is remarkable, for a young woman who has kept down her magic for most of her life. With your strength, my dear, someone should have recognized what you are.”

  “I was always careful to stay away from mages,” she said. Until Ishmael, who had guessed within minutes of meeting her. But, then, Ishmael did not allow prejudice to interfere with his perceptions, and he could hardly reject outright the notion of a nobly born mage. “My husband is a physician, and I had Ishmael’s—Baron Strumheller’s—guidance, too,” she said, challengingly. Phoebe Broome had come close to expressing the sentiment that Ishmael was not a suitable preceptor for her.

  “You do understand, dear girl, that you cannot go on in this fashion. Your magic—well, it is like a ball gown. Once it is out of its box, then it will not be pushed back in again, not without violence to its fine fabric.”

  And what could a seventh-rank mage and a man know about ball gowns? But she understood. The magic she had kept tucked well within her skin was restive now. “I know I need to learn how to control it,” she said.

  He smiled his imp’s grin. “And I believe you will do well.”

  Assuming, she thought, we survive what we find in the Borders.

  As though one of his threads of ambient magic had snagged the thought, he said, “There is another painful matter I must bring up, dear lady. That nasty thing in your mind will give you no trouble in and of itself now, although had Ishmael been less timely and sure with those firearms of his, you would likely not be sitting here.”

  “That nasty thing” was a legacy of her battle with the first Shadowborn that had tried to kill Lord Vladimer. She had come away from that encounter with a cyst of Shadowborn presence in her, an infection or parasite of magic forced on her by the Shadowborn. With the Shadowborn’s death at Ishmael di Studier’s hands, the magic in it was extinguished and it could no longer ensorcell her, except that the Shadowborn had also given her its knowledge. Her experiments with that knowledge had awakened her magic in dangerous ways.

  �
��I will not use it again,” she said, a heartfelt wish.

  “Dear lady, you must. Or, rather, you may have no choice. Why do you think we have been amusing ourselves with tapers and fire? It is because we must understand this magic before we meet it. We are already under strength—I am quite sure of that. You have not sensed ahead, have you? I thought not.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. In the last few sentences, the fey manner had slipped away. “We may have right on our side, but we simply do not have the numbers or might to match the Shadowborn. We are fortunate in Lord Vladimer, who is certain to favor an oblique approach—he is renowned for it. But he will be the first to insist that we need all the information we can get if we are not to blunder into a confrontation we cannot win.”

  “I will tell you everything I can,” she said.

  “Though it pains me to say, that may not be nearly enough, because your understanding of magic is a novice’s, strong as you are. It would be of immeasurable help to us if you would permit me or my daughter, Phoebe, to examine the Shadowborn’s gift directly.”

  For a moment, she resisted understanding that he wished to touch the thing in her mind, magic to mind. Through stiffened lips, she said, “I cannot believe you are making such a suggestion to me, sir.”

  She hoped—she fervently hoped—that she was convincing in her outrage.

  His smile was very sweet. “I am,” he said, without apology.

  Should she leave the compartment in umbrage? Order him out? She had a distinct feeling that he would not oblige. He could sweep the knowledge from her mind with the barest effort, as she had the knowledge of his plans against the tower from Duke Kalamay, and then he would know. . . . Frantically, she pushed down the thought.

  “I know this is far too soon,” he said, as though, she thought dizzily, he were an impulsive suitor offering a premature proposal, “but please give it some thought. Neither Phoebe nor I would ever force you, especially now that we face a living demonstration of violation of our principles. Compose yourself, dear lady; we do not want to alarm the good people on this train, or disturb young Lord Vladimer’s rest.”