Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  Wraith stared at her as if he had never seen her before. “Wait just a moment. I don’t think I quite understand this. You love me. You agree that you and I are wonderful together. But you wouldn’t even consider taking vows with me because I’m not stolti? You aren’t legally obligated to choose someone from the stolti class as your vowmate, and even if you were, my papers and my identity disks and everything else identify me as stolti.”

  “Your papers say you’re stolti. But you aren’t. Not really. You’re a Warrener. That’s even worse than if you were a parvoi, for God’s sake. Beyond your false papers, Wraith, you don’t even exist … legally.”

  “But you love me. I love you. We could spend the rest of our lives together.”

  “Wraith—members of the highest class of families in the Empire can’t just join in the nutevaz with anyone. Vows introduce a contractual obligation into the relationship, and contractual obligations put family fortunes into play. They give both members of the relationship rights in regard to houses and properties, accumulated wealth, businesses, political seats, hereditary seats.”

  Wraith didn’t like what he was hearing at all. It made him feel sick. But he wanted to hear all the lovely little things she’d been keeping inside for all the years that he had known her. “And do you think I’d take your money, Velyn? Try to walk off with a property willed to you by your grandmother, or some such thing?”

  “Wraith, we’d never even get that far. I’d go home, tell my father that you’d asked me to take vows, and he’d say, ‘Have his parents send me their opening contracts. And we’ll have to find a mutually convenient place to meet, and we’ll have to each bring a property appraiser to assess each other’s accounts and standings.’ And then I would say, ‘Well, actually Wraith doesn’t have any parents, or any property.’ And that would be almost the end of the discussion. The end of the discussion would arrive in the form of people coming to take you away to the Southern Hell-hold Greenskeld mines because you are not who you say you are, and have for years been masquerading inside a place you have no business being, taking advantage of the hospitality of the house.”

  Wraith sat there thinking about this for a moment, almost mollified. “So your concern is for my safety. If we presented this issue to your parents, they would …” He closed his eyes, his vision suddenly cleared, and he smiled broadly. “Wait. You’re well past the age where I would have to ask your father’s permission. You and I could simply take an aircar to Falkleris City in Arim, present our papers, and take vows there without any interference with anyone.”

  But Velyn didn’t return his smile. Instead, she looked away from him, but before she did, he saw again the evasion on her face. “We could. But that isn’t what I want.”

  Wraith said, “Then you don’t want me.”

  “I do want you. But I also want the blessing of my parents. A vowmate that won’t be at risk from any too-careful scrutiny of his papers or an in-depth check of his past. Someone who is who he says he is—who doesn’t spend every moment of every day living a lie.” She patted his wrist. “Not that you can help that, Wraith. Obviously you couldn’t have stayed in the Warrens, and you’ll eventually do so much for your people. But …” She wrinkled her nose the tiniest bit. “Your people are not my people. And frankly, I wouldn’t want them to be. You’re unique, but knowing that I had a responsibility not just to you but to those … those creatures within the Warrens …” Her voice trailed off, and she turned her face away from him and closed her eyes. He cringed at the distaste on her face.

  “Velyn, I don’t understand you at all. I mean, I’m understanding you better, but … you’re working alongside me to help free those creatures from their involuntary slavery. If they don’t matter to you, why are you doing this?”

  “It’s the right thing to do. The fact that helping them is the right thing to do, though, doesn’t mean that I want them to be my family.”

  “I see.” He wanted to crawl into a hole and die, but he did see.

  “Wraith—we have wonderful times together. We are closer to each other than any vowmates I know. If it can’t last forever, what does that matter? Nothing lasts forever, and at least now is good.” She put a hand over his and tipped her head in that fashion he had always found so winning.

  This time he found nothing winning about it. Wraith pulled his hand away and said, “You said you hope someday to take vows with the blessing of your parents. But you’ve clearly demonstrated that you’ll never take them with me. Am I correct?”

  She had the nerve to look hurt. “Someday, Wraith, yes. I want to have a vowmate with whom I can have children—children my parents will be able to accept. Children with two sets of grandparents that are … human. Wraith, I love you. This doesn’t have to affect us right now, maybe not for years. But if you could stand where I am standing, you would see that there are other things besides love that have to be considered.”

  He stood. “So I see.” He started to walk away, then turned and glared at her. The urge to hurt her, to cut her as deeply as she had cut him, overwhelmed him. “Maybe this wouldn’t have to affect us. But consider this: If you don’t start looking for the man you want to keep right away, you’re going to be too old to have children without the help of some very nasty dark magic. I’m betting you’re pretty close to too old already. So why don’t you get going? Start looking for your … your acceptable vowmate.” He turned and walked out of the theater. He’d heard her gasp, and he knew that his dagger had hit its mark. She’d always been sensitive about her age—about the fact that she was not just older than him, but at the outside edge of the age range by which time most men and women had chosen their vowmates.

  Perhaps she did love him, Wraith thought—to some degree, anyway. Perhaps she hadn’t started looking for a vowmate because she wanted to spend every minute—until the time that she could no longer put off her search—with him.

  But he didn’t want her for some brief, pathetic liaison. He wanted her forever—he wanted to be able to say to anyone who might ask that she was his vowmate, the person who had chosen him as much as he had chosen her. He wanted to have a real, tangible claim to her. He’d always thought they were heading toward that.

  Since the first time he saw her, he’d never imagined himself with anyone else. Never.

  He walked, along streets heavy with commercial traffic, past vast buildings that housed impersonal businesses that created wealth of one form or another for the people crouched in the houses they’d built on air like petty and vindictive gods. He had hidden himself within their ranks for too long. He needed to move away from the Aboves for good. He needed to keep his feet on solid ground from now on.

  She would be gone when he finally got back to his rooms, he thought. He doubted that he would ever see her again—no need to, really. If he never went back to Artis House, they would have no mutual point of contact. He could send for the few things that belonged to him. If he made good with his theater, he’d have enough money to get by on his own. Solander wouldn’t have to keep pouring money at him as if he were trying to fill a bottomless well.

  He glanced around the neighborhood, trying to get his bearings. He was lost. Well and truly lost. Good. Maybe, if he tried hard, he could lose himself for good.

  When Wraith killed Shina with his stupid attempt to take her out of the Warrens, he’d wanted to die. He’d wished that he could simply summon the rage of the gods to devour him in one mighty blast of fire. But the gods had been cruel and he had lived. He’d never let himself invest too much in his hopes and expectations for people after that, though. He’d learned that the person who cared deeply was simply asking to have everything he loved crushed and destroyed—the best thing to do was to never love.

  And then, fool that he was, he had broken his cardinal guideline. He had let himself truly love Velyn. He had let himself care about the outcome of their relationship. He had let himself hope, and dream, and want.

  And for a second time, life had demonstrated that l
ove was rewarded only by hideous, excruciating pain.

  So. He wanted to die, but he wouldn’t. This time he wouldn’t because he still had something to do that only he could do. He had to free the Warreners—not just the Warreners of Oel Artis, but Warreners from every city in the Empire.

  He had to write his plays that would show the dark side of magic, that would present to audiences the price paid for taking the easy road; he had to plant the seeds of doubt about the benevolent Empire of the Hars Ticlarim and its guiding Dragons; he had to make people understand that by moving away from unthinking magic use, they could save lives. He would live without love because he had no choice—but his life would still matter. He would still exist for a reason.

  The cold of the air bit through him, and suddenly he realized that full darkness had fallen, and he’d reached a part of the city unlit by anything save fire. He would have thought such a place could not exist in the closely watched, minutely controlled Empire, but it did. So odd, so impossible was the look and feel and even the shape of this place, that he stopped and stared. He heard laughter in the distance, and the sounds of music—drumming and chanting and singing, and deep harsh bells and something stringed and bowed that sounded like cats fighting. He looked around him—the street seemed safe enough. The inhabitants of this place lit their streets by flames—enclosed lanterns hung on posts that cast an oddly comforting blue-gold light. He did not see anyone lurking, and the area was clean and pleasant-smelling—wood fires and food cooking and incense burning, a rich and wondrous sweetness in the air.

  He knew he should try to find his way back to the theater. Or to his suite in the Materan Ground School. Or …

  Laughter, and singing, and wood fires. Something about the place, about the scene, proved more compelling than his wish to nurse his pain and revel in his own misery. What in the hells where people doing burning wood for heat? Burning oil or some other liquid for light? Why were their houses built of what looked like common rocks stacked one atop another, instead of the beautiful, almost weightless, translucent, nearly indestructible whitestone that was the product of Dragon magic and that was the ubiquitous building material of the Empire? Who were these people?

  He found his feet again, and with them his curiosity. And he set off toward the sound of music and laughter.

  The houses in this odd neighborhood had been built around a central circle of open ground, and in the center of the circle, he found the source of light and noise, laughter and music. A whole tribe of people dressed in clothing as different as their houses stood or sat around a fire as tall as a man. Some of them sang, some played instruments, some danced, many just clapped their hands and laughed as they watched.

  Wraith stood in the darkness at the very edge of the circle, hidden in the shadows of the houses, and watched them. A girl in a pale green tunic and matching tights, with heavy cloth boots that tied just beneath her knees, stood up and began to spin and leap and kick her feet high into the air. With each kick, her foot went higher than her head. Wraith found himself holding his breath against the inevitable disaster when she lost track of the positions of the other dancers and her foot went into someone’s nose—but she was fast and agile and she never even grazed any of the rest. Nonetheless, many of the dancers moved to the edges of the circle to give the girl room. When she had it, her movements became even more incredible. She ran on her toes, launched herself into the air, right leg pointing an arrow in the direction she sailed, her left leg trailing behind like a flame in a high wind. Her arms arched over her head, and at the highest point in her leap she let out a shout that would have woken the armies of the dead and stirred the warriors of old to bloodlust lust and magnificent feats of daring. She leaped again, and spun in the air this time, her body a living impossibility. Wraith tried to understand how she could be doing what she was doing. He would have suspected magic, but this place bore no artifacts of magical origin; it seemed a place built in defiance of magic. Wraith could not think that in this place the girl’s tremendous feats of agility and strength were anything but her own skill.

  He simply had never seen such skill before.

  She made two circles of the fire, and at the end of it retired to stand to one side, and a young man, who seemed to be waiting for her to clear the makeshift stage, took her place. His dancing was as wondrous as hers. He was shirtless in the cold night air, and his baggy pants and soft cloth boots only emphasized the perfection of his movements. He seemed to Wraith to be not a man, but a creature of energy and light, as if he cast the light in the circle and the fire was merely his reflection or his shadow. His muscles stood out as he spun and stamped and jumped, sweat-slicked and shining, and Wraith felt a stab of pure envy. He tried to imagine himself in that circle, dancing, and groaned as he thought of his skinny, pale, weak chest and arms, his thin legs, his big clumsy feet.

  “You really shouldn’t be here, you know,” someone said at his back.

  He thought for an instant that his heart had stopped beating, so sharp was the pain of his fear in his chest. He turned and looked at the woman who had come up behind him. Plain-faced, of middling years, lean and muscular as any of the young women dancers, she stood watching him with an expression cast between wariness and curiosity.

  “I … hadn’t intended to,” he said. “I got lost.”

  “Lost?” She looked at his clothes, his shoes, his face, and said, “I would have thought, stolti, that such a thing would be impossible for you. A simple question asked to the air should set you right and take you to your destination.”

  “I don’t use magic,” he said before he’d had a chance to think that perhaps he should not be confiding in strangers.

  But those four words seemed to cast a form of magic of their own. “Who are you?” she asked, but she smiled when she asked it, and took him by the arm and dragged him toward the circle, toward the beautiful dancers, toward the fire.

  Chapter 9

  What do you mean, he told you to get out of his life?” Solander stared at the sobbing Velyn, and then around the darkened theater. Jess sat on one of the benches, pretending she wasn’t listening. Pretending she wasn’t gloating.

  “He told me I ought to start looking for my perfect vowmate immediately, before I was too old to have children normally.”

  Solander glanced over Velyn’s shoulder at Jess. She clearly loved every new detail in this confession.

  “Why would he do that?” Solander asked. “Or did he find out about your … um, other interests?”

  Velyn looked startled. “You mean the other men I see? I don’t think they had anything to do with it. He’s never asked about them, and I’ve never mentioned them in so many words, but certainly he’s known that I’ve had other men in my life all along.”

  Solander was shaking his head. “I’m rather sure he believes he was the only man in your life. You were the only woman in his. Ever.”

  Velyn looked like she’d just fallen from a roof in the Aboves and was on her way to the Belows with a clear view of where she would land. “No. That’s nonsense.”

  Jess laughed softly. “Not nonsense at all. I happen to know that he’s never been with anyone but you in his life.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Why couldn’t I? He told me about it. I have no reason not to believe him. It isn’t like he had anything to lose by telling me the truth, or anything to gain by lying. He just told me, as part of a conversation we were having.”

  “Oh … gods …” Velyn whispered. “But then, that makes the way he acted make a little more sense, anyway.”

  “Why?” Solander asked. “All you’ve said so far was that he told you to get out of his life and tore out of here like a crazy person.”

  “He asked me to take vows with him. I told him I couldn’t—the thing about me being stolti and him not, and how someday I wanted to have a vowmate with whom I could raise stolti children—but I told him I wasn’t considering this anytime soon. I thought he would understand. But if I
’m the only woman in his life—the only woman he’s ever had in his life …” She closed her eyes, and Solander saw the tears starting to fall again. “I thought he understood all along that we could never be a permanent pair. I thought he realized that.”

  “I would say he didn’t. In fact, if you had ever asked me, I would have told you that he had more plans for you than just a few years of spending time together.” Solander sighed. “So … he proposed, you turned him down in the worst possible way, he got his feelings hurt, said some things he’s going to regret tomorrow, and left. By any chance did you see which way he went?”

  Velyn shook her head. “Out the front door. That’s it. I … I was still in shock from what he’d said to me.”

  “We ought to try to find him,” Jess said.

  Solander considered how Wraith would react to him and Jess and Velyn going out and tracking him down by shouting. He’d be embarrassed and humiliated and angry, and Solander figured Wraith didn’t need to get any angrier. And shouting would be about the only way they could hope to locate him, assuming he wanted to be found. They couldn’t track Wraith with magical devices—he simply didn’t show up on them. He was very possibly the only man in the Empire who could disappear in plain sight without the use of magic.

  “We’re going to have to wait for him to get over his hurt and come home. One of us can wait here, one of us can wait at the Materan.”

  Velyn said, “I’ll wait here, I suppose. At least I can still work on backdrops and scenery until he gets back.”

  Solander stared at her. She really didn’t understand how much Wraith loved her—or how much he had been sure that the two of them were going to be together forever. She was going to sit here painting scenery while Wraith crawled around the city with a broken heart, and when Wraith came back, he would see that she was so little hurt by what had happened that she’d just kept working. “I think Jess had better wait in Wraith’s rooms in the Materan School, Velyn,” Solander said. “And I’ll wait in here. And I think you probably need to go someplace else for a while. I’ll talk to him—tell him that you didn’t mean to hurt him, try to smooth over the rough edges. But I don’t think that you’re going to be the first face he wants to see when he comes through the door.”