“It was Floria—”
“You turned toward me, not Floria,” he said gently. “My ensorcellment is the more recent, and probably the stronger.”
A shiver passed through her; her face changed. “Come with me,” she said, in a voice deeper and more authoritative than before. He had taken a step forward before he recognized that there was magic behind it, magic working on him. In sudden panic, he struggled against it. From the far side of the room, Floria shouted, “Under whose contract do you use magic against us?”
The compulsion stopped. The princess said in her own voice, “The high masters will see you now. Please come with me.”
“Take him,” Prasav said swiftly. Helenja merely gave a sour smile at his preemptive gamesmanship. “We will speak again,” she said to Balthasar, a statement that had the quality of a threat—though against whom, he could not tell. He forced himself to walk steadily forward and not even to turn his head toward Floria. Pride and honor precluded his taking her into danger with him. Then he found her at his side once more, her face showing something of his own panic and resentment at being overpowered so—when she shouted out, she had said “magic against us.” He tried to take her hand, but she shook herself free with a frown and set her hand on the hilt of her rapier.
Three men and two women waited for them in an upstairs suite. The most remarkable of the men was a small, wiry man wearing nothing more than a loincloth and sandals. The less remarkable of the women was a plain, middle-aged woman in a featureless tunic that covered her to midshin.
He dipped a bow to the man in the loincloth, as though to the archduke himself, taking a bold guess at his identity. “Magister Archmage.”
The high masters also regarded him as they might a speaking plant. There was no revulsion in their reaction, despite their far greater strength than that of the second-rank princess, further confirmation that they could not sense the Shadowborn ensorcellment. He felt a movement behind him, and Perrin passed by him, her face working, to stand between the archmage and Valetta. The archmage glanced aside at her, questioning; she gave a jerky nod. And then the nausea and the personality in her face simply drained out, and she stood silent, swaying slightly.
“Balthasar Hearne,” Valetta said, “we wish to examine the magic that Magistra Viola—Princess Perrin—senses on you, through her. We will try to do you no harm, but we cannot promise that harm may not come to you.”
“Magistra, this is what I came for, in expectation”—he stressed the word—“that my presence here, and the ensorcellment on me, would convince you that what the archduke said to you is true. I consent to your examination.”
He had no sooner finished than a great, disorientating surge of magic rolled over him. He was aware of Floria first gripping his arm and then supporting him.
“I’m not,” he gasped out. All he had ever had was the ability to sense concerted, powerful magic—like last night—and a diagnostic acumen that Olivede reckoned was due to a tenuous sense of the inner workings of the body that might, were it stronger, be magic. But otherwise, he could not even touch-read, could certainly not heal, and could anticipate no longer a life than any other earthborn. Conversely, he had been spared the stigma his sister lived under.
He came back to himself lying on a wide, comfortable bed of stretched netting. His sonn picked out a circular relief on the ceiling above him, a stylized sun whose rays extended to each distant corner. Many Lightborn rooms had such a device, and he remembered Floria telling him that it was a potent symbol even to those who did not associate it with any divinity. This one was as molded and detailed as any Darkborn ceiling decoration. He said, vaguely, “That would be painted gold, wouldn’t it?”
Floria leaned over him, her expression anxious. “I’m all right,” he said, and demonstrated so by sitting up. He didn’t realize until he was upright that he had used his sprained wrist without pain, and that the bandage was gone from his other hand. He felt his face; the tenderness from the scoring was also gone; he could no longer feel the seams. And he did not ache. He felt astonishingly well.
They were not in a holding cell—his swift cast around the room showed a large, strangely furnished suite—but he would study his surroundings later. “What happened?” he said, urgently. “What did they say? What did they decide?”
“To me, nothing,” she said, unhappily.
“I’m all right,” he said again. “No more ill effects than a day of very disturbing dreams, and physically, very well. Did I pass out?”
“No,” she said. “You stood, you walked, but you simply—like Perrin—seemed to disappear from inside yourself.”
“Disturbing,” he acknowledged for her; he would examine his own feelings later. “So you noticed a change in me, and then, even if they did not say anything, could you describe what happened? Were you also”—he could not, he found, say the word “ensorcelled,” could not apply it the actions of those he hoped would be, needed to be, allies—“held as I was?”
“No,” she said, frowning. “I was aware throughout. They were much more interested in you.”
“They’d have had plenty of time to study your ensorcellment, if they’d wanted.” He frowned in turn, a new thought occurring to him. “If the ensorcellment is still active, then it was not due to the Shadowborn Ishmael killed—Jonquil, they called him—or the one called Midora, who died in Stranhorne Manor.” Was that Sebastien, too? Or one of the others? Was Floria’s connection to his family the reason the Shadowborn had chosen her to carry the talisman to Isidore? A shudder of sheer rage went through him, unattenuated by the ensorcellment.
No, unattenuated by any ensorcellment.
“Balthasar?” she said, her tone wary, almost warning. She had advised him about keeping his composure. But how else should he react to these . . . atrocities now that he no longer needed to warp his own thoughts and emotions simply to survive?
He heard his voice, distorted by the intensity of his emotion. “They’ve annulled the ensorcellment on my will. They’ve left the ensorcellment protecting me against light, or they’ve assumed it—or I’d be dead by now.”
He had to think. Why should they have lifted the ensorcellment? Why might they have assumed his protection? Was he their chance to practice with Shadowborn magic? Could they do so through the princess? Did that trace of magic in him mean that they cared about the ensorcellment on him? That they had healed him suggested it might. He wished he knew whether they had removed the ensorcellment on Floria. “Did you get any sense of what they might do now?” he asked her, desperate for some answer to any question.
She shook her head. “As I said, they exchanged not a word after you spoke.”
But by the set of her shoulders, there was more. He was already learning to read her. “What is it, Floria? You said they mostly concentrated on me. What did they do to you?”
“Raised the memory of my ensorcellment,” she said, rising to stand with her back to him.
He waited. “A lover?” he said, finding the question unexpectedly difficult to ask.
She turned, eyes narrowing.
“You are not the first,” he said, turning his face a little to the side, so that he would not seem to be probing or challenging her. “It seems to have been the way they liked to turn people.”
“Curse him,” he heard her whisper.
Hands upturned on his lap, he sighed. “We can but hope.”
She sat down beside him on the bed, the slump on her shoulders betraying her weariness. He remembered this was night for her and that she would not have shown her vulnerability to anyone. “He was one of the men in the companion house. I’ve always been so careful, as my father insisted. . . .”
It seems a bleak approach to intimacy, he thought, as he had thought befor
e. The promiscuity did not trouble him as much as the lovelessness. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She gave a twisted little smile. “Nothing to do with you, Bal. You always urged me to find a true partner—a husband, in your terms. You could be quite insufferable on the subject.”
He supposed he had been, happy as he himself was then. “You deserve to be loved, Floria,” he said, quietly. “No doubt you will tell me that my Darkborn prejudices are showing, but what was right for a man is not right for a woman. What was right for your father was not right for you.”
She turned her head, a smile gentling that hard, beautiful face. “You’ve said that to me before.”
This close, he could sonn the slight thickening and change in texture of her skin, and realized that her face was bruised badly. Her voice had sounded husky, which he had put down to strain. “You’re hurt,” he said, shocked that he had not realized.
She shrugged. “Met with a mob outside Bolingbroke Station on the way back from the palace. Did something stupid and needed to be fished out of the fountain.”
He touched her face gently, but the pretense that it was a clinician’s touch failed as soon as he felt the silken warmth of her skin. There was no wall between them now. Their weight on the mesh of the bed created a subtle, in-falling force. It took no effort for him to tilt sideways, to close the distance between his lips and hers; the effort would have been in resisting. Her lips were cool and firm at first, then softened as they parted. Her breath stroked against his lip, quickening with her breathing. Her hand caught the back of his neck hard, and her fingers spread in his hair.
Then that moment of abandonment passed, and he pulled back. She held him briefly, and then yielded, her hand sliding away. His sensitized skin remembered the track; his sensitized mouth, her lips.
“I’m sorry, Floria,” he muttered, deeply ashamed of his behavior. “This is not right.”
“You’ll notice,” she said after a moment, “that you are not sitting on the floor, wondering what hit you. Which you would be if I objected.”
He opened his mouth to say “I’m sorry” again, and closed it. Nine years of marriage had taught him that a wise man did not apologize for doing something a woman wanted, no matter how foolish or wrong that thing might be.
“It would have been strange,” she said, “if we had met and this had not happened.”
“I’m not myself,” he said, inadequately. “Everything that has happened . . . Telmaine . . .” Remorse mingled with his grief now, that he had come so near to betraying both the women he cared most for. “It’s too soon. Maybe . . .”
“Yes,” she said, in a tone he could not interpret. “Telmaine. I had a conversation with her just before I left the palace. She told me it was very important that I tell you we had spoken.”
“Thank you,” he whispered. “But I’m not . . . sure I’m up to hearing her message at the moment.”
“That was the message. When Telmaine returned to the palace and was taken prisoner, it was night. When she spoke to me, it was daylight. Why would her jailors let her speak to me? Why would they let her release me when they’d shown no sign of caring that I’d have been dead when my light failed? Balthasar, she’s a mage—a strong mage. Unless she wanted to stay in that cell and die, it would not hold her.” She paused. “All she said was that it was very important that I tell you she and I had spoken, not what I should tell you. I did not make the connection immediately myself, and then I waited to tell you because I needed you to hold together before the court.” She waited, stoically, for his response, her face like a carved mask.
So stupidly simple a chain of reasoning. He had held most of the links himself—he knew what Ishmael had told him about Telmaine’s strength as a mage, and he knew she would not submit tamely to death. He should have connected them, would have connected him, but for the abomination of the ensorcellment. In a raw whisper, he said, “Floria, even if you’d told me before, I couldn’t have believed you.”
A moment for understanding to come, and then she swore, softly.
He put a hand over his face, dislodging the spectacles. If his loss of composure disturbed her, he was going to shock her now. “Could you please . . . give me a few minutes to myself?”
He felt her rise, the netting release. She touched his cheek, her fingertips callused, scratchy, and warm—except for the warmth, unlike Telmaine’s. To his lowered head, she said, “I would lie with you, Balthasar, for the asking. All these years demand more than a kiss. I would never have made you my enemy by deceiving you on something that important. . . . But I’ll leave you now.”
Eight
Tammorn
He had known this contact would come ever since he spoke to Lady Telmaine. Indeed, he had known it would come since he recovered enough to think clearly. Though he had not expected the archmage himself, there was no mistaking that immense strength. The archmage’s replenishing touch across distance had the healing warmth of sunlight. Tam all but groaned in relief as his pain and leaden exhaustion dissipated. He sat up: one did not address the master of the Temple while supine in bed.
He put force of feeling, if not force of magic, into the statement. He showed the archmage a swift succession of impressions: waking to the reports of bullets, hearing talons scrape the metal roof overhead, sensing that vile aura, hearing Orlanjis cry out and Jovance shout, and then the painfully intense burst of matter manipulation. He was aware of the archduke’s gratification at the last, but he could not have concealed Jovance’s presence, even if he had tried.
He felt a moment’s base relief that he could not conceal the information that Vladimer had known about Mycene’s and Kalamay’s plans, and done nothing to prevent it. He was glad not to be tempted.
Were they really going to pretend that this had been done according to compact, to pretend that the Shadowborn had been working under the orders of the Darkborn and so were indemnified, even for this?
He sensed the calculation in that thought, but even so, Lukfer had been born a sport, and his strength had been immense but dangerously uncontrolled. Ever since he had been received into the Temple’s care as a young child, he had been the high masters’ ward. He had used pain—mostly the pain of living in poor light—to bleed his energies in healing effort. Tam had assumed that he had achieved his final act of mastery because of his mortal injuries, but he remembered how even before, Lukfer had cast fire and effortlessly an
nulled an ensorcelled crossbow bolt that was killing Fejelis. If the high masters were right, there could be no crueler irony—
He had had neither the time nor the heart to examine that gift yet. It was the gift of the master to his or her favored student—a distillation of the master’s essential knowledge of magic, imparted magically as a nucleus of insight and memory. It was a precious, perilous gift. Given too soon, it could overwhelm the student and distort his maturation. Given maliciously, as the Shadowborn had done to Lady Telmaine, it could induce possession. She should be grateful for Ishmael di Studier’s steady hand.
But given at the right time, the gift could accelerate a mage’s realization of his full capacities. And that, he knew, was what Lukfer would have wished for him.
That was rich of her. The high masters would have burned out his magic, Lukfer’s precious gift or no, for the impertinence of exposing their weaknesses.
What he had sensed, facedown on the floor within the circle of high masters, was not theater. He told them so.
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