Telmaine began to cry. “I meant to help him.”
He drew her against him, tucking her head against his cheek. “I know. So did I. But the wound and the cure were equally mortal.” She could feel his grief, read his memories of the laying-out service. When everyone else had taken shelter at the tolling of the sun bell, he had waited outside by the bier as the sun came up and turned the body of Gil di Maurier to ash.
He seemed to have momentarily forgotten she knew what lay behind his words as he said, “Unfortunately, others feel and will feel as he did. I have already had letters declining my services. So I will think of this envoy post as an extension of my work with the Intercalatory Council—which it is—and know it is something that desperately needs doing. . . . And, Telmaine.” He rested his forehead against hers. “Others lost far more.”
She wanted to cry out the protest that he would not give up so readily, but she sensed, too clearly, that he did not want that. He had changed. He had always been dutiful and intensely civic-minded, but there was a new hardness and purpose to him.
“What will they do to Ishmael if they find him? ” she whispered. “Try him for murder and sorcery?” She heard the edge to her voice as she named the charges, false when they had been laid, but now, in a cruel, twisted way, true.
“Shh,” Balthasar said. “We’ll find a way. The archduke signed a formal pardon for the original charges, and we’re working on preventing any more from being laid. When it’s safe, we’ll find him. Vladimer’s started working on it already.” He kissed her, a light brush of the lips, and she was not displeased to sense the claim in it. “I could use your help with the Lightborn Temple. You’ve at least had some contact with them, and your being a mage is more than a convenient fiction. They regard women differently on the Lightborn side.”
And he had been spending entirely too much time in their company. “I am not a Lightborn woman,” she reminded him, dangerously.
“I know that. But you’re also one of the strongest surviving Darkborn mages. If the Darkborn mages had a representative in the courts—”
“I’d rather have a baby,” she muttered. I’d rather have my ordinary life back. Unlike Merivan, she enjoyed the months in confinement, when it was not proper to be in society—assuming, of course, that society would ever admit her again. It was cowardice—she knew it was cowardice—but she could long. . . . Abruptly, through the touch of his skin on hers, she read his thought and reared back. “Floria?”
His expression was far less penitent than it ought to have been. Alas, surging to her feet and stalking out of the room needed more energy and muscle tone than she had. She started to rise and fell back. “Balthasar,” she protested, detesting the waver in her voice.
“I did hope to wait until later, but yes. Floria has made a request of me, which I am considering honoring.” She snatched her hands pointedly away from his touch; he was lucky her magic was spent. “I love you, Telmaine,” he said. “It tore the heart out of me finding you in Stranhorne, and hearing what you and Ishmael had done. I don’t want you ever to go through that again.”
She pushed down the thought of her and Ishmael’s intimacy. Nagging conscience refuted her argument that it was not the same. “What does your being unfaithful to me have to do with that? ”
That made him flinch, as he deserved. “Perhaps it doesn’t, but a child born across sunrise will be one more tie between Darkborn and Lightborn. I owe her my life, three times over, already. I . . . We’ll have to talk about this. . . . I don’t love Floria, not as I love you; I am sure of that now, but I am, and probably always will be, her friend.” He paused. “You’ll know that I’m telling the truth.”
And you’re still a rat bastard, Balthasar Hearne, she thought. “And what about when we find Ishmael?” she flung back at him. “What if he still loves me? ”
“Telmaine,” he began, and stopped, and for the first time since she had awakened, that composure of his wavered and she realized how tired he was. How much rest had he had, as envoy between Darkborn and Lightborn courts, and then worrying about her? “You know how I feel about you,” he said in a low voice.
Which was true, curse him.
“I will take you on any terms,” he said, softly. “Because, even without magic, I know you. I know that, angry as you are, you wouldn’t do anything that would truly break my heart.”
“But you would break mine.” She growled.
“No . . .”
There was a long silence. “Do you realize,” he said, slowly, “that as a sixth-rank mage you might outlive me by one or two centuries? And Ishmael by even more. Isolde and Emeya were eight hundred years old when they died.”
“I don’t care about centuries.” What mattered was the here and now. If she could learn how to turn him into a—a cat, then she need never worry about Floria White Hand again. But what use would he be as a husband then? If she could turn Floria into a lizard, now . . . Poor Farquhar Broome would have been appalled. Or maybe not, if he had all the experience he claimed.
“Telmaine? ” he said, sounding uncertain.
She didn’t have to explain what she was thinking, or what she felt, or why she had stifled a giggle, or why she was now starting to cry. She did not want to think about living without Balthasar. When he gathered her against him, she let him.
Eventually he said, “That young man who was working for you and Vladimer, Kip—”
“Kingsley,” she muttered, rubbing her cheek against his collar. She would not permit the ex–prison apothecary to flaunt his dubious birth in her service.
“I think I can use him as a secretary. He’s very sharp.”
He was that. And impertinent, telling her that the Rivermarch would receive her, if society turned her out. “He’s not trained as a secretary.”
“I’m not trained as an envoy,” Balthasar pointed out. “And I do need someone who is, even if they won’t take the ensorcellment. I thought about speaking to Daniver di Reuther—I know he has been looking for a post—but given the circumstances of Sylvide’s death, I don’t know.”
She would have to visit Sylvide’s widower, express her regrets, try to explain if she could, let him hate her if he must. She remembered Sylvide at the archduke’s breakfast, talking about visiting an aviary with her young son, spending the day there, to the horror of Daniver’s dictatorial mother. She remembered Sylvide throwing her arms around her, understanding nothing except that Vladimer was threatening her dearest friend.
Others had lost more, Balthasar said. Sylvide, Gil di Maurier, Farquhar Broome, Tammorn, the Lightborn high masters she had never met, Tercelle Amberley . . . Ishmael. She had her life and her magic, and the loss of her reputation was a much smaller thing than she had ever imagined it would be, when she was desperately trying to protect it. She had her children and her husband. As he said, she could be sure of that, even if he was no longer as entirely hers as he had been. She would learn how to maintain that ensorcellment on him herself; she was not leaving it to the Lightborn. She would help him with the Lightborn mages. And she probably wouldn’t turn Floria White Hand into a lizard, no matter the temptation.
But she wouldn’t tell Balthasar that quite yet.
Epilogue
Ishmael
No relief map carried the island, or none that he had ever laid hand or sonn on. It was a crumb of rock dropped from the land’s table and forgotten, far to the southeast of the mainland. He supposed, when he regained enough of his reason to do so, that Isolde must once have visited here. Or perhaps one of the others. He must have taken the knowledge from someone.
He did not remember how he found the cave. It was deep enough to escape the sun, had he needed to. From an unknown predecessor he inherited a battered cooking pot and a bent ladle, a small poke of coin, and a blanket gone mildewed and rotten in the damp. The coin suggested that the previous tenant had not simply moved on. He turned it over in his fingers, trying to remember why he would think it at once insignificant and of great importance.
He had not much time for wondering, that first year. He had to survive, which he did by foraging, hunting for anything edible on the scrubby hillsides, under the rocks, and amongst the tide pools. He improvised a hook and a line and he fished, with admittedly mixed success. With a strip torn from his increasingly ragged clothes, he fashioned a slingshot and taught the greedy seagulls to be wary of him.
He knew from the first that there were Darkborn on the island, a village saved from dire inbreeding by the sea and its well-traveled pathways. When the wind was right, he could hear the bells on the buoys rocking in the swell outside the bay, and in the stillness around sunset and dawn, he could hear the sour note of their cracked warning bell. Sometimes he heard their voices as they emerged for their night’s fishing. He did not realize they knew about him until, returning from the rocky beach with his thin pickings, he found a wrapped parcel laid across his threshold: a new-caught fish. Subsequent gifts contained more fish, potatoes, better fishhooks and twine, a knife, a rusty ax, a length of cloth, and even an unsigned note telling him where he could find a derelict dory, his for the mending. The kindness, the knowledge that he was not completely outcast, was the greatest gift of all. There was nothing he could give his benefactors in return but his thanks, not even a name.
Until early in the second year, when he heard the village bell ringing an alarm. He was running down the path toward the village before he knew it, knife on belt and ax in hand. The villagers gathered on the beach were too distraught to notice his sudden arrival among them, a gaunt figure with knife-barbered hair and beard, and ragged clothes covered by a length of plaid. Something had come from the sea and seized two of the children collecting crabs and clams on the water’s edge. Something . . .
He strode to the edge of the sea, hand coming across to unsling his rifle, sonn hammering the water . . . but only the waves moved, and he had no rifle. . . . He felt some new force spread out from him, vastly more powerful than sonn, thrusting across the waves, down through the water, along the bed of the bay, finding the fading vitality of a child, and beside it, something hungry. Not all Shadowborn were sustained by magic and had died with their makers. He raised his ax and brought it down to cleave sand, and felt the magic cleave water and bone. The smell of brine and blood rolled in with the wind, and with a heave of its skin, like an obedient dog, the sea laid two small bodies onto the packed sand at his feet.
After a few weeks, the rumors died down, the village sages agreeing that the children’s lives were a gift of the Mother. But now when the children foraged, one or more of the women or old men stood guard; they knew not to presume on the Mother’s generosity. It was a pitifully weak guard, had there been anything dangerous in the bay—which he knew there was not—but he did not interfere. He was too busy. The islanders might give charity to a hapless madman washed up on their shores, but a grown man with some of his wits come home must make shift to feed himself. So he was busy learning how to make his dory watertight, how to braid a line that would not break, how to choose bait, how to weave and repair a net, and how to cast the net from a boat without following it into the water. And how to put up with being teased for getting seasick on waves gentle enough—so they said—to soothe a baby in its cradle. He found their mockery as welcome as their kindness. He also found a name to give them: Ish.
He did not leave his cave to move into the village. He trusted himself to work around them, but not to sleep, not to dream. He took to storing his supplies and provisions outside after once too often finding them strewn around him when he woke. He had too little to break it carelessly. He refused all offers to help him make the cave more livable, to enclose it, for instance, or build furniture. He would not be able to explain a splintered wall, shattered furniture—or, rather, he would not have wanted to find an explanation for such violence. And he needed time alone for the exercises that, years ago, he had learned to focus his small strength, and now had to find a way to apply to the mastery of more power than any sane man could want. The magic seemed bent on emerging, no matter how firmly he tried to sit on it.
Though he supposed he would not be considered sane by most measures, while scratching out an existence on a crumb of rock on the borders of the known world, learning to fish and taking lessons in magic from dead men, bringing to mind everything that the archmages of Darkborn and Lightborn had tried to gift him as they died. If he did not master this strength of his, he would be the one breeding monsters and sending out his Call.
In the third year, during the quiet seas of midsummer, he let himself be talked into crewing for a visit to the mainland. By then he rarely woke in a shambles, and he had been able to equip his cave with a bed and a table and a chair, build a fireplace and chimney, and start on a curved stone wall to enclose the mouth of his cave before winter. He thought he dared risk leaving the island. He needed to risk leaving the island. He was half delirious with island fever. Since his sixteenth year, he had been constantly on the move, and now his world was circumscribed by the shores of one small island and the unfriendly sea. He needed off the island, whose every crack and crevice he knew, and he needed to taste and smell something other than fish. He needed news from the north, needed to know that those who had fought and lived had won what they deserved. He wanted to buy spice seeds, remembering how far to the north and long ago, he had sat in a prison cell and told Lady Telmaine that he wished to retire and grow spices on a remote island.
He needed to know that he had not killed her, too.
So he took ship to the mainland. The port was a third the size of Stranhorne Seaport, but still seemed so crowded to senses and magic after the island that he spent the first day in the fisherman’s inn, sleepless, afraid he had made a serious mistake. The second night he forced himself into the market to bargain for seeds, and for the herbs for a recipe against seasickness he’d learned years ago. No surplus of magical strength seemed to suppress his body’s conviction that it did not belong on water. After that, he found his way to a sailors’ bar and used some of the small stash of coin to order a plate of lamb stew and start a round of drinks and gossip. The north was at peace, he learned as he nursed his beer. The mages had gone south into exile, like the archduke’s half brother. Always trouble when two brothers shared the same dam but not the same sire . . . Heads nodded complacently—as if all the men in the room were the sons of the fathers they claimed. There was talk of a railway line running all the way from north to south, crossing the Shadowlands, to terminate a mere two hundred miles along the coast. A new type of steam-driven ship was being built in Minhorne. Ishmael sighed, regretting the want of sailors’ wives. The one accomplishment Vladimer had ever conceded women as a sex was their effectiveness as gossips. If Ishmael wanted to know more, know about the people, he would have to go north.
He was not ready. He went back to the island instead, to fish and plant spices in the salt-soaked, barren earth, and then to learn to read the soil and change it. That autumn, the island had its best-ever potato crop, and Ishmael his first meal of seasoned sole. He wondered if he could grow lemons.
The following year, he went again to the mainland, though his purse could not produce lemon trees, and he had greater concerns than farming. The coast had suffered a summer of raids by a lawless band that had established itself in a village to the west. Ishmael, listening with a veteran’s ear to the accounts of their atrocities, agreed that the raiders needed to be cleaned out before their numbers and ambition swelled further, but was appalled at the proposed tactics. With considerable bellowing and a show of his marksmanship, rusty as it was, he gained a hearing, and more roaring and storming got him time to start training the scratch troop they mustered. Not to mention to recover some of his old form. But if he could win arguments with men, he could not win them with the seasons; the onset of winter forced their attack long before he felt prepared. Fighting men was grisly, sickening work, and they took far too many casualties for him to call their success a victory. The worst was that he could neither
help the wounded nor escape their pain. He stayed awake three days and nights straight, until he was staggering with exhaustion and could sleep like the dead.
The next summer he kept to the island, fished, planted spices and potatoes, guarded the bay, and built the wall that might eventually enclose an orchard. He told himself he might be wise to be circumspect, in case a report had traveled up the coast. He remembered Vladimer saying, “If a man truly intends to disappear, he must give up his old habits.” He healed a seagull’s broken wing, and then the gashes to his hands from the bird’s beak, and stroked away a cancer that was slowly killing the village-hall cat. Sheep, he thought. He should keep sheep. If the shepherds in Strumheller were to be believed, sheep were susceptible to every ailment known. Sheep would give him practice.
He was sitting on a barrel outside his cave one night in late summer, mending a net. Though the night was still clear, a gale was rising in the west, and only the hardy and hungry had gone far beyond the bay. He was neither, but he was keeping vigil over those flecks of vitality in the cold sea. So it was that he sensed the ship running before the wind, even before he heard its passing bell. Sensed the ship, its living crew, and its two passengers, and that familiar, magical touch, gloriously matured and refined.
He stood up, the net sliding unnoticed from his hands. He drew a deep breath of the storm-heavy wind, aware of the sudden cessation of pain from a wound that had not closed until now.
About the Author
ALISON SINCLAIR is the author of the science fiction novels Legacies, Blueheart, and Cavalcade (which was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke award), and the fantasy novels Darkborn, Lightborn, and Shadowborn. The Darkborn trilogy began with a meditation on the light-dark motif as it is used in fantasy, met up with years of eclectic reading and cities remembered and imagined, and took flight in directions almost as unexpected to the writer as to the characters. Alison Sinclair presently lives in Montréal.
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