At his side, Jovance was staring at the Darkborn, squinting slightly. He could see her hand working. Lapaxo had said the ensorcellment on Hearne was Shadowborn, and she was lineage. . . . “Magistra? ” he prompted in a murmur.
Recalled to herself, she put her mouth to his ear. “He’s got the archmage’s touch on him. One mother of an ensorcellment. That’s exactly what they did to Tam.” She sounded angry. He felt angry. But he said, low voiced, “It’s not his fault.”
“If he hadn’t come—” The party was nearly within earshot, and she bit back the rest of the statement. He waited, but she did not finish it, even silently.
Lapaxo muttered something at his other side, and Fejelis angled his head toward the vigilant. “Forgot to tell you,” the captain said, sounding annoyed at himself. “Temple claimed them as one of theirs. Say’s he’s mageborn.”
Says, Fejelis thought. Mages don’t need the Temple to say they’re mageborn. He exchanged glances with Jovance; she shook her head slightly. Now what are they up to? He gestured the new arrivals to wait a moment, and beckoned the dresser with the brushed-down mourning jacket to him, slipped his arms into the sleeves, was briskly tweaked and tugged. Nodded his thanks, and, with a deep breath, turned. With the party’s entrance, the hall had begun to drain of servants, and now was almost empty of them, its hasty grooming and staging, like his, as complete as it was going to be.
He realized he didn’t know the Darkborn’s title, only that he was a physician and—no, he had met the man’s wife already; he was untitled. “Dr. Hearne, I am Fejelis Grey Rapids, styled prince.” He might as well test the man’s mettle. “. . . I understand you have already received a traditional court welcome.”
“Was that what it was? ” Hearne’s voice was a steady tenor.
That boded well. And because this was a Darkborn and Fejelis understood such courtesies were important, he said, “. . . I just recently—a few hours ago, in fact—spoke to your wife.”
He had not realized that a man already so pale could go that much whiter. Floria instantly closed the step between them, but the Darkborn, holding on to his composure, said, “No, I’m all—Excuse me, Prince Fejelis, but when I came here, it was under the impression my wife was dead. Floria told me otherwise, but to hear that you have spoken to her . . . What did she say? ”
“Strictly speaking, though I spoke to her, she did not get a chance to speak to me. But we were introduced, and Magistra Jovance”—he indicated her—“sensed both her presence and her magic. She was in good health.”
“Thank you,” the Darkborn breathed. Poise restored, he said a little hurriedly, “Prince Fejelis, the archduke will be delighted to know you are back. He has high expectations of your help in resolving the difficulties between our peoples.”
Not a professional diplomat, Fejelis thought, but in earnest. And he had the delicacy of phrasing mastered already. Difficulties, indeed. He said, “I have equal hopes of his—”
Floria’s head turned like a cat’s. He hadn’t been aware of the noise from outside, but that was surely his mother’s voice. And then the door of greater privilege burst open before a roil of mages and vigilants. He caught sight of several he recognized as Prasav’s, plus men and women in the dun and ochre of the southern contingent, plus the bright glitter of chains of rank around several throats. He realized he was on the brink of entertaining an unrighteous brawl for precedence.
“Excuse me,” he said to the Darkborn envoy, and started to draw a breath, but stopped as he caught Lapaxo’s headshake. He was glad of that a moment later, and gladder still that Lapaxo had the courtesy to take a step away before he thundered, “Order in the presence of the prince! ”
He could have sworn he could hear the chime of shuddering glass in the silence that followed. The contested doorway cleared. Fejelis sprang onto the dais, which earned him a glower from Lapaxo as the vigilants scrambled to cover him. At his glance of appeal, Jovance tripped up the steps to stand where a contracted mage would be expected to stand.
There was a pause, then Perrin entered, flanked by mages and Temple vigilants, the archmage, Magistra Valetta, and the high masters—seven of them—following so closely on her heels they seemed to be herding her. The change in his sister, since their meeting in the ruins of the tower, was appalling. No twenty-year-old should be that haggard. A sideways glance at Jovance, no partisan of Perrin’s, showed her as disconcerted as he was. She wasn’t close enough to tell him whether this was magical overreach, the burden of her awareness of Shadowborn magic, or the burden of being a usurper princess. At Perrin’s first sight of him, her expression showed only relief, then guilt, and finally unease. He waited for her to draw closer, keeping a slight smile on his face all the time. “Hello, sister,” he said. “Had enough of this job yet? ”
Her breasts rose and fell beneath the thin, red vest and mourning jacket, reminding him how that first time they met after ten years, before he recognized her, she had demanded he mind his eyes. “Mother, yes,” she said, strongly. “You want it back? ”
The depth of his relief told him that he had not been sure that she would yield, or that the Temple would let her. She slipped through her honor guard and swiftly mounted the stairs. She turned toward their gathering brightnesses—Prasav and Helenja’s retinues were in the room, and the rear was filling fast—and paused, and then pulled the blue pins from her hair that held it in its caul-like style, shaking out the braids with a vigor that was near violence. “I renounce all claim on my brother’s title!” She turned to him, and Fejelis did not miss the tensing of the vigilants around him. With a silent apology to them, he held out his hand to her. And Jovance tensed in her turn, until she realized, as he had, that Perrin’s hands were gloved, her touch safe.
“Fejelis, I’m so sorry,” she said, so quickly her words slurred. “It happened so fast, and you were barely gone when I realized you’d been right, and the Temple was hiding from the truth—” He squeezed her hand, quieting her. Now to find out the price the Temple would extract for ceding his title back to him . . .
“Where is Orlanjis? ” shouted Sharel from Helenja’s side, and no doubt with Helenja’s leave. His mother, true to nature, looked as disgusted at Perrin’s ready surrender of her pretendership as she had at her assumption of it.
“He’s in the Borders, helping the Darkborn defend themselves,” Fejelis said. “And doing well at it, thanks to your teaching.” She started to shout something else, but he was ready for her. He might not have Lapaxo’s seasoning, but he had healthy lungs and a voice solidly past adolescence, and whether he liked it or not, the blood of generations of southern clan chiefs.
“This ends here! ”
No shivering glass, but a gratifying silence. “This internecine warfare ends here,” he said, less loudly but no less emphatically. “I pardon my sister for her offense against me. I left Orlanjis in the Borders with my full trust, knowing that he would fulfill that trust. I left him with instructions to support the Darkborn in every way he could—because having seen them fight, having spoken to them and heard their preparations, I’d much rather have them as friends than enemies. I know and acknowledge the outrage of the attack on the tower, but until we establish what part magical influence played in the decisions made by Duke Mycene, whom I am told died under magical attack by a Shadowborn”—Hearne, he saw, was surprised he knew that already—“and Kalamay, then by our own law, we cannot retaliate.”
“And the Darkborn leaflets? ” Prasav slipped in.
Darkborn leaflets? Ten minutes was not enough. But this was his court, not Prasav’s. “I will not sign an order of eviction for the Darkborn from Minhorne. This city is theirs as much as it is ours. . . . But all of that is irrelevant. Your brightnesses, mages of the Temple: how much time have you wasted while the enemy—who murdered my father, who threatens all of us—advances? I tried to warn you not a day ago”—truly, was it only that?—“and got deposed for my pains, and nearly shot at the command of a captain of vigilants who had
been suborned by the Shadowborn.”
Prasav’s expression was sweet revenge for those twisted half-truths about Tam and the artisans; he didn’t expect Fejelis already to know.
“But for the actions of Magister Tammorn, my mentor and my friend. Who is not here because he was sent, by his own superiors, the masters of the Temple, to the camps of the enemy. Tell me,” Fejelis fired at the high masters, “that you did not send my friend to treat with the enemy!”
In his peripheral vision, he glimpsed his sister’s horrified face, Jovance’s frozen stance, Lapaxo crouching to lunge, before it came to the captain that the one threat he could not protect his prince from was the prince’s own madness.
“No,” said a voice he had never heard before. “I did not send him to treat with the enemy.”
It was the archmage, who had not been known to speak aloud in the hearing of earthborn—even Temple servants—in living memory. The small man clasped his hands and bowed over them to Fejelis, a gesture of respect from two centuries past.
Several heartbeats went by before Fejelis realized that the archmage was not going to elaborate on that statement. By then he had waited too long and lost the initiative for the obvious question. Then Jovance said from beside him, in a voice that sounded girlish but determined, “Magister Archmage, Tam explained to me before he left what you had asked him to do.”
Magistra Valetta said, “That was what we had asked him to do.” Hitherto the confident mouthpiece of the archmage, the one he spoke through, she suddenly had the air of a woman who no longer knew what would drop out of her mouth.
“Please do us the courtesy of explaining,” Fejelis said, quietly.
“By their deeds,” said the archmage, “we shall know them.”
“You set Tam out,” Fejelis said slowly, “as bait.”
“With Lukfer dead, Tam is the strongest living sport,” said Magistra Valetta, still with that expression of one about to go cross-eyed from watching her own lips. “We had no one better suited. But we could not tell him because we wanted to know . . . what they were.”
They didn’t tell you, either, Fejelis inferred. Plans within plans—he could almost feel sorry for her. He met the archmage’s eyes, experience centuries deep in them. More than three hundred years old, he knew the man was. And the archmage’s father—how old was he? How close was the archmage to a living memory of those who had laid the Curse?
He weighed what he should say next. He had been lucky and inspired to have come this far, but he had done so by outrunning the opposition. Now they were all standing still, listening.
Friendship demanded that he argue that Tam be spared, as he had done not a day ago, without a moment’s thought—charging in to challenge the high masters, throwing himself into Prasav’s trap. He had been lucky to keep his life, lucky to keep his brother, lucky to keep his sister, lucky to regain his caul. Lucky to have remained alive, so far. More than half that luck accrued from the luck of meeting Tam.
He remembered sharing breakfast with his father in the prince’s private chambers, having one of their rare conversations about the costs and burdens of being prince. They rarely dwelt on it, as there seemed no purpose: as night followed day, as summer followed spring, Fejelis would be prince. But he remembered his father saying, eyes half closed against the early sun, “And then there will be the first time you must sacrifice a friend. . . .”
He could feel the quiet in the room, the expectation. He wondered what Jovance would think of him—but if she chose to remain with him, she would see him do worse than this, to try to make something of his reign, salvage earthborn and mage.
“And do you know yet? ” Fejelis said, quietly.
The archmage said, “Not yet.”
Telmaine
She heard Ishmael’s growled “No,” and felt magic grapple with magic, his great, unformed seething rising against the woman’s. The lift suddenly released her and she swayed on her stool, and then reached down to grip it with both hands through the folds of her skirts. Sonn and magic intersected on her from her companions. The young Borders mage, Bryse, had come to his feet, inspired by an impulse of chivalry.
“Should I—? ” she gasped to Farquhar Broome, though did not know what she wanted to ask. In the end, it was not for him or for anyone else to say. I walked through the fire to rescue my daughter, and Ishmael went with me. And when in distraction and weariness her concentration failed her, he had held back the inferno, though it had cost him his magic and nearly his life.
Now Ishmael was the one standing in the inferno, and she the one who must hold it back.
She felt their surprise, Ishmael’s and the woman’s, at her touch, and from him the same emotions he had felt as she went to rescue Florilinde: admiration and dismay and protectiveness. Whatever the Shadowborn had done to him, he was still Ishmael. They had no chance for any further exchange. Through him, she heard the woman say,
No matter her power, Telmaine would not cower before her.
She rose to elbows and knees, then hands and knees, in the billows of her skirts. A lady did not fight; that was one of the earliest lessons of the nursery. Any instinct for it she had as a small, unruly girl was whipped and shamed out of her. Denied the means to protect herself—physically, legally, or magically—she shied from dominant or cruel men, and so never learned how to fight as she had learned other things secondhand. She would have lost against the Shadowborn—lost magic, mind, and life—were it not for Ishmael. She would not abandon him.
But she could not fight his warder, and could not last against that terrible draining of vitality. She reached instead but for Ishmael’s adversaries, the ones she had sensed beyond the ruined manor of Stranhorne. One, as monstrous as the ones preying on Ishmael, two, three; the third the boy she had met—and bested—in Minhorne. Let that give her hope. She could sense the weaker presence—weaker in comparison to them—of the Lightborn Tammorn, and sense his despair. What price the Temple’s solicitations now?
None of them were paying attention to lesser beings. She knew about that as a great lady among servants. Crouching, grinning savagely, she gathered her will, gathered her magic, and aimed it at the distant trio.
Burn, Telmaine willed. BURN.
She poured her magic across the miles between them, poured it into the place where he and his mistress were, igniting mats and drapes and clothing. The boy screamed in terror. She sensed the woman’s magic welling up inexorably to quench the fires, stoke them though Telmaine might with vitality and will. In doing so, the woman was killing Tammorn. Strong as he was by himself, in this company, he was the weakest of them all. She must not waver, for Ishmael’s sake.
Then the Lightborn mages stooped upon them, seizing Isolde, Ishmael, Ariadne, and Telmaine.
Her skirts ignited and flame leaped up her bodice; she threw out arms and magic, trying to push away the flames from her shriveling flesh. Across her awareness came a great gust of magic—Ishmael’s magic—snuffing them out and sending her to the floor again. She curled up there, clad only in rags and cobwebs of burned lace, and choking on smoke and ash.
Phoebe Broome screamed,
It would not be enough. She pushed herself up on shaking arms and dragged a rag of skirt around her body, a scant but necessary gesture toward decency. Sweet Imogene, but it hurt to reach outward, hurt as much as it had bearing her children, hurt as much as it had those last dozen steps carrying Florilinde out of the inferno. Yet she pushed away the storm of magic around her, moved in a self-created void through it, toward the inferno that had Ishmael in the heart of it. This time she would not falter; this time there could be no lapse. She reached out her hand and touched not the chilled metal of a doorknob, but a broad, fever-hot hand.
Had this been the living world, clothes and skin and their own solidity would have constrained their embrace, but this was some domain of magic alone. She passed through and into him like vapor mingling with vapor. She could feel the beat of his heart behind her own ribs, the heave of his breathing in her own chest, the ache of his effort behind her own forehead. She—he—they were sitting in a small room, the warm wind from the open doors to a balcony on Ishmael’s sweating face. Seated to their left was a small old woman whose magic was one of sickly, draining cold. Behind them she could sense another woman, his warder, Ariadne, leaning with her hands on Ishmael’s shoulders, her magic caging him. The magic of the Lightborn wheeled around them, swift striking and merciless—still air turned suddenly to gales, bare tile raged with flame, bone cracked, scars split, flesh turned to rot. . . . She found herself suddenly, urgently, called to heal as Ishmael’s lungs began to bleed.
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