“I now appreciate,” said Vladimer, slowly, “why the Stranhornes have earned the respect of such very different connoisseurs of warfare as Ishmael di Studier and Lord Sachevar Mycene. What of Ishmael? Is he . . . ?”
She shook her head quickly, sparing Vladimer the word at which he had balked. “He left the manor with us, but he went back to try to find Father, and he has not returned.”
Vladimer’s expression turned bleak; if he called anyone friend, it was Ishmael.
“I wouldn’t give up hope,” Noellene di Studier said. “I’ve learned not to.”
“Lord Mycene and his men are still at the Crosstracks. With Lavender—my sister. People are still filtering into the Crosstracks from the surrounding areas. You know how extensive the underground complex is, so now that we have reinforcements from Strumheller, we hope we can hold. But, not knowing the extent of the Shadowborn forces, we cannot promise.”
“These reinforcements—I trust they do not represent a substantial portion of Strumheller’s own defense.” He sonned Noellene di Studier’s scowl. “I have no wish to insult your brother, but by Ishmael’s account, he does not have the experience—”
“His troop commanders do,” the baronette said. “My brother—both my brothers—are the quintessence of Borders stubbornness when it comes to each other, but they know their duty to their people and they are neither of them fools.”
“Please,” Telmaine interrupted. “Where is my husband, Dr. Balthasar Hearne? Is he back in the Crosstracks?” She could not imagine, if he were already in Strumheller itself, he would not have come to find her. “Or did he . . . ?” She could not voice the thought that he might have stayed behind in Stranhorne. Or died in the manor. Hopeless as he was with a firearm, he would put himself between any patient, woman, or child, and the Shadowborn. He might even have volunteered—
“I am sorry, Lady Telmaine,” Baronette Stranhorne said. “I am truly sorry. We don’t know what happened to your husband.”
She lies, Telmaine thought. “That is not—”
With an edge of desperation, the baronette said, to Vladimer, “Ishmael said that you knew about the Shadowborn, Lord Vladimer, that they can, apparently, change their form—”
“Yes, we know about them,” Telmaine said, beyond courtesy. “Tell me about my husband!”
Vladimer, too, must have sensed something in Laurel’s manner. He said, “Baronette, if you would.”
“We had one of those Shadowborn in Stranhorne Manor,” she said, slowly and unhappily. “We think it arrived with Lord Mycene, as one of his men. Dr. Hearne had been helping our surgeon, quite capably, so I didn’t suspect him, but I caught him, or something in his shape, opening a side entrance to let in the Shadowborn.”
“No!” Telmaine cried out. “Balthasar would never do that.”
“Not willingly,” said Vladimer in a tone that made Phoebe’s head turn toward him.
“Whether it was or wasn’t, your husband did not escape with us. I’m terribly sorry, Lady Telmaine.”
Her ears were roaring. She heard Noellene di Studier say, “Put her head down.” She would have welcomed fainting, welcomed escape from the terrible choice between Balthasar as betrayer, ensorcelled by the Shadowborn, and Balthasar left behind, living or dead, in the ruins of Stranhorne Manor. But someone—Vladimer?—pushed her head down to her knees and held it there.
Slowly her head cleared, and her wits and resolve returned. She would not believe it until she had sensed for herself that Balthasar was gone, that his essence was no longer in the world. She need not rely on others’ reports or wait, perhaps in vain, for some relics of him to be returned to her. She could thank magic for that.
And she could thank it for something else, too: if Balthasar were dead, she would be able to do more about his death than weep for him. Unlike other wives, she would not have to beg others to punish or avenge his death . . . or beg them to do nothing, for their own lives’ sake. She had power; she could deal with his murderers.
“Lady Telmaine!” hissed Magistra Broome. Farquhar Broome’s softly scolding,
“Yes,” Vladimer said. “There is that.” He let a beat pass, but neither of the Stranhornes challenged that cryptic statement. “Thank you, Baronette Stranhorne; that was most succinct. Your father is a great loss, to Stranhorne and to the archdukedom as a whole. I will ask for further details in a moment, but first I owe you, I think, a summary of events in the city.”
Telmaine realized he was going to begin with Balthasar’s opening the door to Tercelle Amberley. He certainly would not begin with his own encounter with the Shadowborn. She did not want to hear her part of it again; she would surely scream or weep. She stood up. “Please excuse me. Hearing it again would only distress me.”
The threat of magical vapors was even more potent than the threat of the ordinary kind. The door was well closed behind her before Vladimer said another word.
Out in the hall, she had nowhere to go; if she had been given a room, she did not know where it was. She did not want to join the mages; they might be her kind, but the train journey had amply demonstrated that they were not her class. She simply let her feet take her where they would, and when they led her through an unobtrusive door into a small library that smelled disquietingly familiar, she realized then that she had been guided by Ishmael’s memory.
Centerpiece to the library was a molded relief of the region as large as a dinner table and surely as heavy. When she was much younger, her brothers had had such a relief in their part of the nursery, across which model huntsmen, soldiers, and rogues skirmished on those nights when winter weather barred them from outdoor make-believe. This had a far more serious purpose.
She paused before it. She could not imagine Ishmael being careless in the placement and orientation of something so essential to his planning. So if she stood thus, then Stranhorne should be . . . Cautiously, she extended her mage sense outward, seeking her husband’s familiar vitality. It had never been a vibrant vitality—Balthasar lacked the brawny energy of her brothers and Ishmael—but it had a distinctive constancy and sweetness.
And then, out there, she brushed up against something potent and vile—Shadowborn magic, but so concentrated that she crumpled her magic back into her skin with such violence that, between the action and the Shadowborn magic, she found herself leaning over the table, fighting dry heaves.
She nearly screamed, but the mental contact was not Shadowborn; it had a ground-glass abrasiveness that she had learned to associate with one Lightborn mage.
His exhaustion was even greater than his irritation, but she did not sense the excruciating pain she had sensed from Ishmael, or that terrifying sense of his life draining away. Cautiously, she assumed the burden of the contact. Immediately, he demanded,
The binding that he had imposed on her as the price of his help when she went to save the archduke.
—she gagged, and managed—
“Mother of All,” he muttered aloud.
Control, she urged herself. Feeling her way, she moved hesitantly to the hearth and sat down on it, drawing her legs up beneath her. The slate was cold under her hips, even through the layers of fabric, but it was not combustible
.
“Shadowborn,” Tam said, to whoever was with him. “Yes, I know we knew that, but she says strong mages. No, I promise, I won’t try—”
And the door to the library burst open, reminding her, terrifyingly, of the moment when the Duke of Mycene and his men invaded the archduke’s bedroom with revolvers drawn and took her prisoner. Magistra Broome led with skirts flaring, Vladimer several limping strides behind her. Farquhar Broome followed, that familiar expression of impish fascination on his face.
“Lady Telmaine,” demanded Phoebe, “what are you doing?”
“Speaking to Magister Tammorn,” Telmaine said. Etiquette as taught a duke’s daughter had no protocol for providing introductions by magic and across distance and sunrise. “He’s . . . not an enemy.” Which was as accurately as she could characterize him.
“Magister Tammorn?” said Vladimer sharply, thrusting past Phoebe Broome with little care either for propriety or his wounded arm. “Can you interpret for me?”
“You want to talk to him?”
Vladimer propped the cane against the hearth and gripped the mantel, standing over her. “I most certainly do.”
“He didn’t do it himself !” she blurted in defense, not only of Vladimer, but of herself.
At Tammorn’s end, someone had a hard grip on his shoulders. Someone was speaking to him in a tone of urgent concern, but no words penetrated through the mage’s anger.
Tam said, savagely.
“Telmaine,” said Vladimer, looming over her.
“He’s angry,” she said up to him. “He’s—He says he can’t possibly think what you have to say to him.”
Vladimer drew a sharp breath. “Please tell him . . . tell him that my failure to take action was the worst misjudgment—the worst mistake—of my life. It cost me my place at my brother’s side, and his trust and high regard.”
She relayed the message. And was promptly clubbed by the mage’s rage, grief, and more memories, as by a wave that knocked her off balance, bowled her over, sucked her down. She was gasping, drowning in the undertow of his grief and her own. Vladimer suddenly released the mantel, seized her arm in a bruising grip, and shook her, an exertion more punitive to him than to her. “Tell the man he can have my life if he wants,” he said into her face. “Tell him he can do with me whatever he cursed well wants—after he has listened to me.”
She did. There was a long silence. Tammorn’s anger receded, sinking in exhaustion. The someone with him—by the mage’s emotional response, it was the young Lightborn prince himself. But what was the prince of the Lightborn doing in the Borders?—was supporting and steadying him.
“He wants to know what you want,” she said to Vladimer.
Vladimer released her, set his hand on the hearth, and buckled down onto the stone beside her. “An alliance,” he rasped. “Between our mages and theirs.”
“But the Lightborn cannot sense Shadowborn magic,” Telmaine protested.
“Lightborn can speak to Darkborn using magic,” Vladimer said, tersely. “As you are demonstrating right now. Darkborn can sense Shadowborn with magic. And Lightborn can destroy with magic. Darkborn perceptions can direct Lightborn force. Together, we can fight them.” He paused. “Tell him, Telmaine.”
She did. The connection popped like a soap bubble under harsh sonn.
“He’s gone,” she said.
“What do you mean gone? By the Sole God, woman, can’t you use words properly, without all this genteel circumlocution?”
If the carpet ignited underfoot, it would be all his fault. “I mean gone. Broke the connection. Is not talking to me anymore.”
“Contact him,” Vladimer ordered.
“No,” she said, more forcefully than she had ever spoken to him. “He heard. He understood.” Vladimer drew breath, and she twisted to brace a hand on his chest, shocking herself more than she did him. “Lord Vladimer, listen. He’s not in Minhorne; he’s down in the Borders. He is badly overspent in his magic—bad enough to be ill with it. He says he’s with friends in a railway hut. He needs transport out. When he speaks to me again, if I can say that a train will stop and collect them, I think it would help.”
“This is more important than—”
“I think one of the people with him is the Lightborn prince himself.” Deliberately, she said, “He did not tell me, but it’s the way he feels. He thinks of Prince Fejelis as a beloved younger brother. When he tried to bind me, back in the city”—a circumlocution, if ever there was one—“it was because he thought I was Shadowborn and had hurt Fejelis.”
His drawn face set in his old, calculating expression. “I’ll order a train to pick them up. They can bring lights with them and ride in a closed carriage. I need those Lightborn here. I need that mage to listen to me. Unless—,” he sonned Phoebe Broome, who had been standing very still, “unless you have a mental telegraph line to any other high-ranked Lightborn mage that I do not know about.” His head turned slightly to expand his challenge to Farquhar, who shook his head soberly. “They’re refusing to have anything to do with us, dear boy.”
“Lord Vladimer,” Phoebe Broome said, “before we take this any further . . . Did you know of the attack on the Lightborn Mages’ Tower before it happened? Because that is what that sounded like.”
The silence was long, and Vladimer’s breathing quick and shallow.
“You referred to a misjudgment. A mistake that cost you your position and your brother’s regard. May I know—as the person responsible for my people being here, as your ally in this, or so I believed—whether you knew, and, if so, why you chose not to warn the Temple or us?”
“Magistra Broome,” Vladimer said, “you heard my offer to the Lightborn. It was meant. If he leaves any part of me, it’s yours.”
“What use is your life to me?” Her voice shook with distress. “Do you have any idea what this plan of yours will mean for us? We are mages, Lord Vladimer, and the one characteristic that is common to the lowest and highest of mages is that we sense vitality, which means we sense life, we sense death, and we sense suffering. And there are times when that pain is unbearable.”
“Magistra,” Vladimer said, coming to his feet. “The creatures that slaughtered us also appear to have magic, and no such fine sentiments as these.”
“They are not fine sentiments to us, Lord Vladimer. They are the truths we live by. Before we accept your orders to do anything, did you stand by and permit the slaughter of the Lightborn mages? If so, why?” There was a long silence. “That’s right, your life is easy for you to give up. But the truth, no.”
Telmaine, rising, thought she had never seen Vladimer look so sick, not even when he learned of Casamir Blondell’s death. She said, almost in a whisper, “There was more to his ensorcellment than coma.”
“How so? The Shadowborn died; any ensorcellment was broken.”
She wished Phoebe Broome were a woman of her own class, because there were ways of communicating the unsayable to those who u
nderstood the code.
“If it makes any difference to you,” Vladimer said, starkly, “I realized my error when the relic of my loyal lieutenant, Casamir Blondell, was laid in my hands. He denounced my decision—in fact, he accused me of treason—and went on his own to investigate. He was caught and killed, or incapacitated and left for sunrise. But between my receiving his relic”—an amulet Blondell had worn to protect himself against magic—“and being rendered unable to act, was a span of minutes. I was on my way back to ask for my brother’s ear when Magister Tammorn attempted to bind Lady Telmaine. In attempting to stop Telmaine’s magical outburst, I shot the blameless Lady Sylvide, and was promptly overpowered and drugged into a stupor on the excuse of insanity.”
“I thought . . .” Phoebe’s hand moved slightly, the gesture as stillborn as her initial thought. “No matter the shunning, the denunciations from pulpits, the expulsion from work, from families, from society—no matter all of that—I thought there must come a time when we would by our virtue prove ourselves, prove that magic was not what the Sole God’s Church said it was, what history said it was, what the slander in the broadsheets said it was. I thought there would come a time when you—all of you—would understand that all we wanted was to live and do our work as well as we were able. . . .” Her voice trailed away.
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