Lightborn (31 page)

Tam blinked Fejelis’s face into focus, wondering how long he had been in the tower, that Fejelis, whom he had last seen being bundled into the safer interior, could now be outside. He felt chilled and ill, too aware of the
wrongness
of the night pressing down on him, as though the light of the world itself had been annulled.

Fejelis gripped his shoulder. “. . . Tam, I am so sorry.”

An echo of his own words to Fejelis, after Isidore’s death. How inadequate they were. He focused a small part of a mind roiling with grief and magic on his young charge. “You shouldn’t be out here.”

“. . . I know.” Fejelis was wearing a plain vigilant’s uniform and helmet, though the disguise would not deceive anyone who observed the way the vigilants aligned themselves toward him. “My word was needed for them to bring lights out here.” He gestured, indicating the night, province of Darkborn. “. . . I justified it to myself with the thought that anyone who had been caught outside had found shelter or would already be dead or dying. . . .”

“What . . . happened?”

“. . . As far as I know, the tower was fired upon by cannon—Darkborn cannon—emplaced across the river. We had no prior warning, no prior information. The damage done is—” He gestured upward, up the great flank of the tower above them, dim above the lights except where light shone outward through gaps in the walls, limning broken stone or fractured windows.

A bristle and plush voice said in Tam’s mind,
You’re not done yet.
His head jerked up, his magic, groping toward the vitality that belonged to that voice, finding the points of chill antipathy that were the fragments of Shadowborn magic, strewn across the plaza. He shuddered.

Fejelis squeezed his shoulder again. “. . . I’m going to offer them shelter. . . . It’s the least I can do.” To someone else unseen, “Look after him, please.” Tam’s eyes followed the lanky figure as Fejelis picked his way across the rubble toward a group that Tam recognized as the few surviving high masters. Then Fejelis’s foot brushed a fragment of shell and he stumbled, his vitality flickering. Tam surged to his feet, reaching to crush the ensorcellment and matter both. The captain of vigilants hefted and threw the prince aside from the bursting fragment. They argued briefly, the vigilant gesturing toward the palace, Fejelis toward the mages. Fejelis won.

Tam turned, spreading his awareness out, placing each lethal scrap. He wanted to stamp them to fragments beneath his sandals, and grind the fragments into dust. He wanted to pick each one up and feel its useless assault before he annihilated it. These were luxuries he could not permit himself, knowing that he must deal first and mindfully with those that threatened life.

A woman’s voice said, “What are you doing?”

Perrin’s silver eyes were inflamed with dust, and her right wept steady tears. Her pale hair hung in a tangled mat to the middle of her back, and her gauzy nightdress was caked with dust and clinging to her long, gangly body. Her bare toes curled, wincingly, on rock. “. . . I can feel them. I can feel them sucking the
life
out. . . .” Her voice trembled, and like Fejelis, she held back her next words, lest she show her loss of composure.

He said, hoarsely, “I’ll explain later.”

She nodded and wiped her eyes. “I saw you bring down Magister Lukfer. I’m so sorry. We just met the once. I liked him.”

Her girlish ingenuousness moved him, absurd as it was to express trivial
liking
for that vanished giant of person and magic. He said, “While I’m doing this—will you guard Fejelis?”

“Fejelis?”

“He holds my contract; I’m seconding you while I deal with”—two more shards burst in the rubble—“this. Don’t touch it. I don’t want—” It was simpler for him to share his memory of Fejelis’s life being annulled. She might have the strength to deal with these, but she might not, and he had neither strength nor time to expend in protecting her. She straightened in shock, her head turning toward her brother. “Mother’s Milk,” she breathed.

He watched her stumble on bruised feet toward Fejelis, and then returned to his grim task.

Kingsley—Kip—led them through the old underground streets of Minhorne, once the day and night byways of the Darkborn. As a giggling gaggle on a birthday outing, Telmaine and her small friends had once been herded round one of the most majestic examples of restoration, an underground square as large as Bolingbroke Station concourse. Here, in a much poorer area, the decay would have shocked her had she not heard Ishmael’s account of his underground escape from the Rivermarch fire. In places they had to trudge ankle deep through reeking mud, which made Merivan gag and Telmaine unwillingly remember Balthasar’s terse condemnation of the neglect of sewers in the Rivermarch. In other places, boards had been laid, or even boardwalk built, though the boards were unsteady and the boardwalk ramshackle. Along some stretches, the tunnels had been quartered lengthways with stone, to preserve a dry passage and let the rest go to ruin. And all the way along, they had to step, and in places climb over, the rubble of torn-down stone and brick entryways.

Merivan noted aloud that a number of the changes appeared to be recent, the rubble new and the boards still free of rot.

“Yes, m’lady,” Kip said. “Since the—since the fire over to th’west of here, everyone’s thinking to have an escape route.”

They were now no longer alone, encountering people spilling in fours or eights or more from the underground doors into the passageway, to accost others as they tried to pass with demands or appeals for information, or speculations about noises heard outside. Kip deflected their queries in the dense cant of the Rivermarch. On they went, turn after turn, tunnel after tunnel, and when they stopped, it was in one of the half-closed tunnels against a crumbled underground entrance no different from any of the dozens they’d passed.

“This is the boardinghouse where I was t’live after the Rivermarch was burned out,” she heard Kip say. “It’s not—the place for ladies of your quality. It’s not really the place for ladies at all, if you get my meaning—”

“I’m sure I don’t,” said Merivan, so briskly as to give the lie. “But the saying is ‘any port in a storm,’ is it not?”

“If half of what I hear’s true,” Kip said, “that’s not t’be said of parts of the Scallon Isles.”

Merivan huffed, not unappreciatively. “Kindly show us in and introduce us.”

It was a lodging house where, Telmaine shortly understood, Ishmael di Studier had lately kept rooms, rooms that he had turned over to the displaced apothecary. The tall, effete old man who greeted them made haste to inform them that, in his prime, he had been the toast of the theaters and promised to show them his memorabilia. But for all his languishing manner and theatrical flourishes, he briskly reordered his household around their needs, opened a vacant suite to the sisters, and assigned the coachman a room. Only Kip’s guarded, “Ruther, where’s Seigfried?” perturbed his voluble poise. “Dear one, I do not know. He went out. We can but hope.”

And so Telmaine found herself alone with her sister, in an upstairs, interior sitting room with the same cluttered shabby splendor of the rest. Through the walls she could hear the incessant tolling of the warning bell, but otherwise little else—no voices outside, no rattle of coaches on the uneven flagstones, no sound of horses. Merivan sluiced tea into a surprisingly dainty cup and set it down before Telmaine. The smell of the tea wrenched her heart: it was the same cheap, tarry brew that Bal preferred. She cradled the cup and the warmth to her. Merivan sipped, grimaced, and set her cup away. “
Now
, Telmaine,” she said.

“Do you really want to hear?” Telmaine said. Her voice creaked as though it had gone unused for more than a night.

Merivan’s expression turned disconcerted, as though she was recognizing that she had insisted out of habit. Bored, stifled, and imperious, she had long tried to rule her sisters as she did her children.

“Merivan,” Telmaine said, slowly. “My clever sister. If only you’d been able to do what your talents fitted you for. You had to marry the man you wanted to be. To aspire for more means being the object of caricature and cruel jokes. So you fight boredom with society by staying pregnant, though you loathe the tedium of confinement more than you dread the lying-in.”

“Telmaine,” Merivan said, “whatever has got into you?”

“What do you think happened,” she floated her question softly, so as not to rouse the terror, “there at breakfast?”

“The Lightborn—,” Merivan said, and stopped. The haughty social mask was gone, and in its place was a fierce gratification at a puzzle coming together, and horror at the solution it showed. That gratification Telmaine remembered from the schoolroom, before Merivan’s presentation year and the lessons taken from it. The horror was something new, something surely rare in Merivan’s pugnaciously ordered life. Merivan breathed, “
Uncle Artos.
”

“What?” Telmaine said, nerves too taut-strung for a moderated tone.

With a trace of her maddening elder-sister superiority, “Of course you wouldn’t know.”

“Uncle Artos died when we were small, I knew that,” Telmaine said, piqued. “He was caught outside by accident.”

“No,” Merivan said. “Not accident.”

And now it was Telmaine’s turn to sense pieces falling into a pattern. Fragments of conversations overheard in the nursery and halls, feelings and thoughts sensed when she was still too young to shirk all touch. The grief and shame and guilt and worry were the first such adult emotions she knew. She hardly remembered now whether they were from her mother or her father. But they had centered around her mother’s brother, Artos.

From the moment she knew she was pregnant with Florilinde, she had promised herself that magic could not be inherited. But Vladimer had said that the Lightborn bred their lineages to strengthen them.

“If—,” she started. Stopped, gathered strength. “If you mean what I think you mean, yes, I am like Uncle Artos.”

“Imposs—,” Merivan began, a reflexive bark, but she didn’t even complete the word. “No,” Telmaine blurted. “I
am
a mage.”

She heard her sister lurch forward; sonn caught Merivan’s descending hand. The emotion conveyed through the touch was as much slap as the blow itself. “How
dare
you!”

“I was born this way!” Telmaine cried. Merivan did not answer, still standing over her, her breathing quick and harsh. Telmaine splashed her with sonn, a slap in turn.

“Keep your voice down!” Merivan said, hands to her head, in a rare dramatic gesture. “Let me
think
. I feel so
sick
. This wretched indisposition—and now
this
. Mama—poor Mama, how
dare
you suggest—does she—no,
don’t answer that
.”

“I don’t know if she knows. I never knew to—to touch—but after what happened—I don’t
know
.”

“Who else knows?” Merivan said, calming.

“Balthasar. Baron Strumheller,” Telmaine said. “Lord Vladimer. And Kip suspects, I am sure of it.”

Merivan gathered her skirts and sat down. “Strumheller is discredited. Vladimer is mad. Kip will stay silent, or go to jail; Theophile will make sure of that. And your husband had better hold his tongue.”

“Merivan!” Telmaine cried out, “I
can’t
—” But what it was—which of
can’t go back
,
can’t do this
,
can’t bear it
, she meant—she did not know, maybe all together. She bent forward and put her face in her hands.

Merivan said, harshly, “If you are to have any hope of a decent life, you shall.”

“A decent life!” said Telmaine, through her fingers. She wanted to laugh; she wanted to shriek. “All hope of a decent life died when I—”
When I first sensed another’s thoughts? Why should a five-year-old child be condemned? When I chose to keep my secret, though I scarcely knew what being a mage meant, except that my one confession shocked my nanny to tears? When I used my touch-sense to find a man who could cherish me, rather than treat me as a step for his ambition and a vessel for his children? When I danced with the notorious Baron Strumheller, despite his gloved hands and his reputation? When I let Ishmael teach me how to save Balthasar from dying? When I walked into the heart of flame to retrieve my daughter? When I fought, magic to magic, against the Shadowborn? Agreed to guard Vladimer? Let Vladimer exploit my love, my loyalty, and my fear of being known for what I am? When I told him what Kalamay and Mycene planned, and failed to guess what he would do with it?

What would Merivan have done, if she had been born a mage? Which of the two choices, Ishmael’s or her own, would Merivan have made? Or—would she have taken the third, Uncle Artos’s?

“You
are
my sister,” Merivan said, her voice brittle. “I have known you since you were an infant in your cradle. Whatever you are, you are still my sister.”

“Merivan,” said Telmaine, into her hands, “I burned the archduke.” If Sejanus Plantageter died, what would she do then? Sit outside and wait for the sunrise, as Artos had done. Balthasar would be furious at her, Ishmael equally so. Neither of them would do less than their all to set things right. And she had assumed they could do so, and that Vladimer would do so, and she could go on as she had always been. Go back to her parties, as Bal’s sister had accused.

“There was a Lightborn mage, there in my mind. And I had been—I had been trying to understand, trying to do something with, with Shadowborn magic. So when the Lightborn mage—stabbed at me, I—the fires—burst out. It was an
accident
. Lord Vladimer tried to stop me, because—because the magic dies with the mage—and he
shot
Sylvide.” A tremor went through her at the remembered bubbling of blood in her throat, of Sylvide’s arms sliding away, of the spark of her
life
drowning. “I had found out—by magic—that Kalamay and Mycene planned to use artillery to attack the Lightborn Temple. I thought Vladimer would stop it, but he didn’t. I don’t know why.”