Lightborn (19 page)

Telmaine, trembling, gripped her hands in each other. If either tried to force a name out of Balthasar . . . Her magic had healed him physically, but his helplessness, suffering, and near death had left raw wounds in his spirit.

“Ah, yes, the husband of Telmaine Stott. Can you press him, given the family’s interest?”

“The family don’t much care for him,” Mycene said. “It was a misalliance. Anaxamander Stott was a dying man when he gave consent.”

“Ferdenzil had an interest there, didn’t he?” Kalamay bestirred himself to say, not without malice. “Though all she’s thrown are daughters, and only two of those, so there’s little to regret there.”

Telmaine’s face burned. Matrons and dowagers discussed breeding prowess in terms every bit as frank, but to hear those two
men
. . .

“Are you going to wait out the mourning year?” Kalamay continued. “Your son’s past thirty, already.”

“For my own name’s sake, I’ll show the proper respect to the faithless . . .” Whatever epithet he would have applied, he withheld; Kalamay was renowned for not only his piety but his propriety. “It’s as well it was Vladimer who brought the charge; enough men hate him to make loud with their disbelief.”

“If Ferdenzil were to wed one of the other Amberley daughters, you might shorten the waiting. I doubt they’d plead finer sensibilities, and you’d keep the marriage portion.”

“The sisters!” That provocation cracked the other man’s mask of indifference. “The younger is as near to a whore as makes no difference, and the older is a plain-faced shrew with intellectual pretensions. The Amberleys will deliver the marriage portion anyway—or I
shall
ruin her name and theirs.”

“As long as you can keep the details out of the broadsheets,” Kalamay observed.

“Men come cheap who claim first allegiance to the truth. I can keep her name out of the broadsheets.” He shifted in his chair with a creak of chair and breech leather. “Sejanus must have pressing business.”

There was a brief, knowing silence. “The youngest Stott girl is due to be presented next year,” Kalamay observed. “She seems healthy and biddable enough, though no great beauty, and a late bloomer. She’s still growing.”

Telmaine stiffened in dismay. They were talking of her youngest sister, Anarysinde, sixteen and aching to be presented to society and become eligible for courtship and marriage. A girl had only a little grace period before being relegated to hopeless spinsterhood, whereas Ferdenzil Mycene could still be a prime bachelor at thirty. Telmaine’s brother the duke, Anarys’s official guardian, would be as flattered at the thought of Anarys marrying the heir to one of the four major dukedoms as he had been appalled at Telmaine’s refusal. To think of blithe, romantic Anarys . . .

Mycene said, irritably, “Height’s not something to be let matter.” He was, like his son, sensitive about his own height, Telmaine thought. “I hardly know the girl. Biddable, you say. I’d insist on assurance of her virtue. I’ll have no repetition of this.”

You arrogant—hypocritical—
, Telmaine thought furiously, the thought broken off when Mycene said suddenly, “Do you smell smoke?” She stifled a gasp, and reached out with magic and fingers to quench a smoldering edge of wallpaper.

Kalamay said, “It’s from the Rivermarch.”

Telmaine pressed her fists to her temples, deeply shaken. She could not—she
would not
—let her temper be her undoing, no matter how provoked. But they
would not
barter her sister in this way.

At that moment, the door opened; a footman’s voice advised the men that the archduke would see them. With a rustle of heavy fabrics and a scratching of leather, the two men rose. She thought,
They
cannot
go now; I need to know. . . .
Vladimer forgotten, her refusal forgotten, compelled by anger and fear for Balthasar and her sister, she reached out and swept her magic across Mycene’s mind.

Several minutes after the men had gone, Kingsley came to free her and escort her back to Lord Vladimer. Her first impulse, and still her prevailing impulse, had been to
run
to her sister’s house, snatch up her daughters, and carry them far away from this cursed city.

“Lady Telmaine?” said the apothecary, more than a simple question in his voice.

She pulled her wits together before Kingsley could start reaching his own conclusions as to why, for instance, Lord Vladimer should have set
her
to this task. “They were talking about my
sister
,” she said, her voice unsteady. “About a marriage between her and Ferdenzil Mycene.” Even as she said that, she wondered if he could possibly understand her not wanting her sister married to a major ducal heir.

He surprised her. “That’s no family for your sister to marry into, from what I hear. But,” hesitantly warning, “but Lord V.won’t care about that, likely.”

“I will
make
him care.”

He drew a shallow breath, but did not argue further. He preceded her toward the door, carefully opened it, and listened for the sound of passing footsteps. Impatient, she swept her mage sense before her, and pressed closer to his back. “Let’s
go
.”

They returned to Vladimer’s private rooms, finding him sitting in the same chair, in almost the same posture. The cane had slipped down and now lay beside his foot. The untrained Kingsley missed Vladimer’s prompting gesture toward it. Vladimer sighed and said, “Please hand me up my cane, and consider yourself dismissed.” Kip lifted the cane, set it in Vladimer’s hand, frowning. Vladimer sonned the frown and shook his head, sharply. “Later.”

Kingsley nodded to Telmaine—another solecism—and left.

“Did you know,” she said, before he could ask her, “did you even
suspect
—what they would talk about?”

“I admit,” he said, “I had assumed it would be innocuous.” He paused. “I assume from your manner that it was not so.”

“Mycene thinks Balthasar might know the name of Tercelle’s lover. He does not believe in the Shadowborn. We have to get Balthasar released from Ferdenzil Mycene’s hands
before
Mycene tries to force a name out of him!”

“As I have said before,” Vladimer said, “my options are limited.”

They would see about that. “My sister’s name was mooted, in the most degrading terms, as a possible bride to Ferdenzil Mycene.”

“And you are not delighted at your sister’s potential elevation,” he said. “Tush, Lady Telmaine, such jealousy does not become you.”

She fought down the heat of temper. “I
refused
Ferdenzil Mycene’s suit myself, Lord Vladimer, of my own free will, and for good reason.”

“Lady Telmaine, frankly I would be delighted if Ferdenzil Mycene were to marry your sister. Your family, illustrious as it is, possesses no assets—not blood, or land, or resources, or talents—that Sachevar Mycene does not already possess a surfeit of. The marriage to Tercelle Amberley, on the other hand—”

“The Amberleys are supplying him with munitions.”

There was a beat. “And what,” Vladimer said, pulling himself forward, “does he plan to do with those munitions?”

This was the moment—this was the moment to insist that he should do as she wanted, ensure Balthasar’s immunity, her sister’s freedom. “Lord Vladimer, I want—”

“No,” he interrupted her, like a guillotine blade dropping. Her voice stalled, against her volition and determination. “Do not attempt to dictate to me. Either tell me or do not tell me, but should you withhold what you know, and harm comes to my brother, the state, or even myself, you will have me for an enemy, woman or no.”

She recognized that she was finally meeting the Vladimer his enemies knew, devoid of the defensive shell of suspicion and mockery. This Vladimer had no need for either.

“They’re going to destroy the Lightborn Mages’ Tower,” she whispered, with no more volition than had been involved in her falling silent a moment before.

“They’re going to do
what
?”

She had finally shocked him, and his reaction left her as terrified as she had been when he had caught her as a child trespassing in his private study. She sat as mute as that child, expecting at any moment to be struck or shaken. But mastery seemed to lend him patience. “Tell me,” he said quietly. “Tell me everything.”

She said, “I—I—” and blurted sonn at him as she heard him struggle to his feet and retrieve a decanter and glass from the side cabinet. He uncorked the decanter with a clumsy one- handed motion, sluiced the drink into a glass, and, abandoning the cane on the cabinet top, limped to thrust the glass in front of her. “If I must get you drunk to loosen your tongue, I will, whatever the cost to your precious reputation.”

The smell of brandy rasped her nose. She drank as he demanded, coughing at the strength of it. He gave the lie to his threat when he snatched the glass away unfinished, spilling brandy on her bodice. “Enough. I need you coherent.” He limped back to his chair and, standing, drained the last of the brandy himself. Then he simply let the glass fall. To her befogged wonder, it bounced gently on the thick carpet, unbroken. “
Now
,” he rasped, lowering himself into the chair again, “something about what they said overset you sufficiently to forget your most vehement refusal.”

“They were so vile,” she whispered, “speaking of Balthasar and Anarysinde as though they were no more than—pawns—in their games.”

“Ah,” Vladimer said, tautly ironic. “They would have thought that when their conversation was reported to me, I would think it of no account. But you, it fatally provoked.”

“The footman called them away. I
had
to know what Mycene meant to do about Balthasar, about Anarysinde. But he had already stopped thinking of them—he didn’t care—he was thinking what he meant to say to the archduke, how to get certain streets evacuated that run close to the tower. He was wondering if it were worth the risk of arousing your suspicions, when those areas contained no one of real importance.”

Vladimer made a soft sound in his throat, almost a growl. He had the reputation of holding the city in his mind as clearly as a game board. For herself, there was only one street and only one house adjacent to Lightborn territory that she cared about: Balthasar’s narrow town house that stood back- to-back with Floria White Hand’s. He had been born in that house, he had inherited it with his parents’ deaths, and while she wished he would part with it, it was not in this way.

She gulped. “That was his clearest thought, that and satisfaction at ridding the state of such a threat. He—hates the notion that there should be a greater power than the state—than himself—that is not his. He—he
envies
mages their power.” She shuddered at the memory of the envy, a voracious envy that would destroy what it could not have.

“How is it to be done?”

“I’m not—I don’t know. It came to me mostly as impressions. Ishmael—” But she could not speak of Ishmael, having so utterly violated the principles he had tried to share with her. He had violated them himself once, in venturing to touch-read Tercelle Amberley, but that was for Florilinde.

“If you cannot give me sufficient information to work with,” Vladimer said, dispassionately, “I will give you further opportunity to find out.”

She gulped in air, but refusal would merely have been bluster.

He resumed, patiently, “Will they attempt it during the daytime or the nighttime?”

“I think—just before sunset. So that the Darkborn are not yet out in the streets.”

“Ah, some vestige of social responsibility,” Vladimer said, with his old mordant humor. “Or tactical polish, since the Lightborn will be at their most helpless if their walls are breached after dark. Though how, if they plan to do it by day, shall they accomplish it?”

“It has—something to do with Duke Kalamay’s estate on the other side of the river.”

“The munitions are stored there?”

“No, I think—I think the guns are there.” That was not derived from any explicit thought, but from a cluster of impressions and sensations: a stone crypt, smelling of gunpowder and metal. And an anticipation of the first salvo that was almost sexual in quality, a stone-shattering challenge to the power of the mages.

“I did wonder,” Vladimer said slowly, “how they proposed to approach the tower through Lightborn areas, and with mages inside.”

“They think the Lightborn mages do not pay attention to— nonmageborn Darkborn. They look upon our machinery and munitions as children’s toys.”

“The mageborn in the tower, perhaps, but the Prince’s Vigilance concerns itself with more secular threats. . . .”

She swallowed. “Mycene also has a contact amongst the Darkborn mages, who has been helping him.”

“Ah,” said Vladimer, slowly. His sonn swept over her, but what he was probing for, she did not know. “And the name?”

“He does not know it, though he has tried hard to find out.”

“Darkborn,” Vladimer said thoughtfully, “or Shadowborn; would he know the difference? Is there any Lightborn collusion in this?”

“I don’t know,” she said, again in trepidation.

“But the munitions are in emplacements in Kalamay’s grounds on the far side of the river, within reach by shell of the tower. They have the range, and angle and inclination of fire, and the precision machinery to control. They will have tested them elsewhere. . . . They will have to hit with the first salvos; with mages, they will have no second chance.” He stopped suddenly, and shuddered. With fear or fever, she did not know.

“Lord Vladimer,” she said, half rising.

“Let it be,” he said harshly, gripping his right elbow.

“I wish I had not done it,” she whispered. “I feel—foul.”

“Such an attitude reeks of self- indulgence,” he rasped. “Would you have us not learn of this conspiracy until the first salvo was fired?”

“But where—does one stop, Lord Vladimer?” she said, in anguish, knowing the futility of asking for consolation of this man, especially.