Lightborn (36 page)

“. . . Do you know,” he asked, “how is Magister Tam?”

“I don’t,” she said, obviously startled that that was his first question.

They looked at each other across the desk, nearly eye to eye. Her face was both familiar and strange; he wondered if she found his likewise. He wished he had the opportunity to learn more about her, for simple—kinship—as well as the need to decide whether to trust her.

He sat down instead, by far the easier decision. “. . . Magistra Valetta seemed to hesitate when I asked her if there was magic behind the attack on the tower.”

Her expression became wary, and stayed so. “She said there was none.”

“Was that your sense as well?”

“. . . I sensed . . . something. But I am not very strong.”

Fejelis laid his hands fingertip to fingertip in front of him. “. . . How many of you died, Perrin?”

She flinched. “Do the numbers
matter
?”

To the mages, it seemed so.

“. . . Tam—Magister Tammorn—brought down the body of Magister Lukfer. I am finding it a little . . . difficult to understand how Darkborn shells could kill a mage so highly ranked, and although no one will tell me numbers, I am certain he is not the only one.”

“Magister Lukfer wasn’t highly ranked, but he was—very strong.” She blinked rapidly, her inflamed eyes bright with tears. “Fejelis, I’m not
contracted
to you. I did this because Magister Tammorn asked me to, because he—had something else to do. I didn’t expect to still be doing it now. It’s allowed, but it’s limited.”

Her flickering glances toward the mages vigilant made him dearly wish for a private place, a corridor, a balcony . . . though look how that last had turned out.

“. . . And I’m very grateful to you,” he said. “Would you like to stand down, then? I won’t need you, I don’t think, unless I need to go back outside.”

Her wordless gratitude confirmed her dread of incurring the Temple’s displeasure. He felt a moment’s regret—the sister he remembered would not have yielded to
anyone’s
displeasure. Very conscious of being heir, she was, even arrogant. How bitter it have must been to her to lose such a place for second-rank magic.

He could not, he realized, thank her for her service in the conventional terms, which would seem to her as condescending. “When everything is close to normal again”—assuming that they both survived—“will you join me for a beer?”

“A
beer
?” she said, widening her eyes. “My princely little brother likes
beer
.”

“Or wine, if you prefer.” Consorting with the artisans had given him low tastes, indeed, but he much preferred artisans’ bitter to anything sweet or fruity. He might explain that to her, over that beer.

At the door, there seemed to be a quiet stirring, his secretary gesturing to one of the Vigilance, the vigilant gesturing to Lapaxo. What new crisis was upon him?

“Fejelis,” she said, suddenly leaning forward, “
ask Tammorn your questions
.”

Then she was gone, and Lapaxo was coming forward to tell him that protests had begun in Darkborn areas of the city, and that mobs were gathering outside the archducal palace and Bolingbroke Station.

Sejanus Plantageter arrived alone, in midmorning. He was dressed as elaborately as she had ever seen him, with all the elegance and artistry of his class and talents. There were no marks about him of his injuries, but his face was weary and strained.

“Lady Telmaine,” the archduke said. And then, quietly, “I am so sorry.”

Her sonn caught him as he drew back a chair and sat down. There was a guardedness about his movements, a constraint that set distance between them and that attested to his fear of her. But there was also a somber resolution.

“I have spoken to Vladimer and my dukes. Now I would like to hear what you have to say.”

I am so sorry
, he had said, as if a physician announcing a death, or a father a punishment. “Will it make any difference?” she whispered.

She held back her sonn; she did not want to know the expression on his face.

“No,” he said, at last. “If I did not believe you at some level blameless, I would not have entered this room.” Her lips parted, but to what purpose? “By your confession, you did not intend to injure me or the others; nor, I believe, did your Lightborn companion. Is he with you now?”

“No,” she said. “I think—I think something has happened to him. Maybe in the attack on the tower . . .”

There was a silence.

“Will I be tried for sorcery?” she asked quietly.

“No,” the archduke said, quietly. “You already have been.”

Her panicked stroke of sonn made him flinch; the flinch angered him, but at himself, not her, she realized as, deliberately, pointedly, he leaned forward in his chair, toward her.

“I have had no trial. No defense. My husband—” And then she pressed her hand to her lips in shame. Law might hold Balthasar as her husband responsible for her deeds, as under it he and she were one. Should she try to shelter behind him, she might drag him to her fate. “You
can’t
,” she blurted, through her fingers. “Balthasar didn’t even know. You cannot condemn him. This is all my fault.”

“I don’t,” said the archduke. “I don’t condemn your husband. I don’t even condemn you.” He smiled, strangely. “Arthritis of the joints is a family weakness. Even at my age, I no longer knew what it was to leap out of bed. Now my knees feel as though they belong to a man of twenty. And as for this being all your fault—dear lady, this one took a committee.”

“But I am the one condemned,” she murmured.

“I will deal with the rest in good time,” the archduke said. “Even, the Sole God help me, with my brother, who told me the truth at last. But if I am to do that, there must be no question whatsoever that my will is my own.” A pause. “Do you understand me, Lady Telmaine?”

Oh, God. Sorcery, the very charge that pursued Ishmael, carried a penalty of death—for magic died with the mage and only thus could sorcery assuredly be lifted. “I did not ensorcell you!” she whispered.

“Can you prove it? Can I prove it? Can I even
know
it?” In that last question, in that raw undertone, she heard her fate. It was his own fear of magic that condemned her, as it had condemned Ishmael.

He said, steady again, “What Mycene and Kalamay have done, what Vladimer permitted them to do, could start a civil war with the Lightborn. I do not know whether the mages are satisfied with their retribution, or whether there will be more. But if I am to deal with the Lightborn, and Mycene and Kalamay, I must have the unequivocal support of all my remaining dukes and barons, and of most of the lesser nobility. And I will not have that if there is any question of a magical influence.”

She was utterly numb, insensitive to either feeling or heat, the dreadful power of her fires as remote as the never-felt sun.

“A trial for sorcery,” the archduke said, “would allow unacceptable publicity. Because you are Anaxamander Stott’s daughter, the law allows for an in-camera judgment of your peers in a case prejudicial to the interests of the archdukedom. Which this surely is. Of his own volition, and bravely so, Claudius spoke in your defense.”

He did not state what the judgment had been. He did not need to. “Balthasar?” she whispered.

“You have my personal guarantee that any charges against him arising from this will be stricken. He will, however, remain responsible for his own actions; I cannot spare him that.”

“Amerdale? Florilinde?” She would not pray to the Sole God, who had renounced all bonds of family. And she could not pray to the Mother, patroness of Lightborn and mages. So who would watch over her children?

“I will do everything I can for them,” he said. Perhaps he might be thinking of his own children, younger than her daughters when their mother died.

“Mama . . . ? Merivan . . . ?”

“I doubt,” the archduke said slowly, “they will be blamed.”

Ensorcellment, she understood. She would be blamed for ensorcelling them to help her escape. Once she was dead, so, too, was their guilt.

Her brothers? Her sisters—Anarysinde . . . ? Surely Anarys would have no appeal as a bride to Ferdenzil Mycene now. Except that his father . . . but she could not think of that. Sylvide—but Sylvide was dead. The people she had known, well and less well, liked and disliked, in society . . . to whom else did she owe a plea for the archduke’s mercy?

Ishmael?
She whispered, “You’re wrong about him.”

“About whom?”

“Baron Strumheller.”

The archduke said nothing. He did not agree; he would offer neither hope nor forgiveness there. Perhaps he even blamed Ishmael for her disaster.

Could she go well to her death, and hope he would think better of her, and spare Ishmael and Balthasar on her behalf? She was not sure she knew how. Death, as she knew it in life, had been sudden and savage, the wrenching loss of a friend from a sickness in the blood when she was a child, the death of one of her young suitors in a hunting accident, the shocking death in childbirth of a girl from her presentation year, not a year after her wedding. Her father’s sudden death, unexpected to her, not to him. She had touched death in others, chance-brushed soft old skin and felt the pain of tumors, the failing of heart or lungs or kidneys. She had sensed, over and over again, the fear of death in her female friends, for themselves and their children, and the grief of death in her grandparents’ peers. During her long labor with Florilinde she had been convinced she would die. A moment before Ishmael had shot the Shadowborn, she had felt her life being uprooted, with her magic, from her flesh; when he had shot it, she had felt
its
death.

But none of the deaths she had felt or observed, none of the deaths she had enacted as a child making believe in the nursery, none of the deaths she had even feared, included being shackled to a post before sunrise, or placed in a box with slits in it—the traditional death by blades of light.

“How will it be done?” she heard herself say, in the cool tones of a lady forced to discuss a most disagreeable subject.

He made a sound in his throat, as though he had choked back an involuntary protest.

She had no sense of whether it was light or dark outside, whether she must linger one hour or twelve in this condemned but not yet dead state. “Is it light outside yet?”

“It is,” he said, in a half-strangled voice. “But—there is an execution room within the palace.” She remembered Vladimer’s grisly tour of the palace’s halls and history and that room that could be opened to sunlight, for the discreet disposal of the condemned. That was what Vladimer had meant, about protections not available to the common-born: in the interests of the state, she would be denied a trial.

The archduke came to his feet. She did not need magic to feel the effort it took for him to do so without rushing. “I can give you—I
will
give you time to say good-bye to your mother, write your letters, set your affairs in order. If you need a physician, one will be called. If you need a priest, there is one in the palace. I give you my word that inasmuch as it is in my power, your family will not suffer for your being condemned as a sorceress.”

But it is not in your power
, she thought.
You already said so. Nor is it in your power to grant me what I most wish, the chance to say farewell to my husband and daughters. I wonder if you tried to persuade each other it is a kindness that I not speak to them, or they to me. Or a kindness that you have treated me to a swift execution, and not slow death by blades of light.

“Your Grace,” she said, more firmly, lowering her hands from her face. “Would you please tell me one thing? What was your vote?”

“I . . . abstained,” he said, his voice very quiet.

S
he wrote no letters of farewell, but entrusted messages to Balthasar and the children to her mother. Had they been alone, she would have left a message for Ishmael, too, but Mycene’s guards would not leave them.

They did not touch until the last, until the archduke’s guards came to take her to the execution room. Then Telmaine kissed her mother, and her mother laid her hand along Telmaine’s face, although the turmoil in her mother’s heart and thoughts, and her memories of her brother—all of which perhaps she meant to conceal with her thoughts of love—were nearly unbearable. “Take good care of my children, Mama,” she said huskily. “And Balthasar.”

Her mother’s brave smile trembled. “Of course, my dear girl. Though I cannot help but
wish
that he had not opened his door to that woman.”

“Oh, I, too,” Telmaine said. “But had he not, he would not have been my Balthasar. Do take care of him, please. Don’t let anyone blame him. He has made me very happy, all my married life.”

Her mother pulled her into her arms, embracing her with a ferocity Telmaine had not expected to find in that small, placid body. “This is so
unjust
,” she said, not troubling to lower her voice.

“Pray for me, Mama,” Telmaine said, just loud enough to carry, and then, as though her voice had failed her, breathed, “I mean to escape if I can.”

In the long walk through the corridors to her place of execution, she discovered for herself what Ishmael already knew, that while the determination to resist required courage, it also lent courage.

The room to which they led her was the one Vladimer had pointed out. The air inside it was warm, warm with the sun on the outer walls. It had a bare wooden floor and a single wooden chair with no padding or covering—the easier to sweep away the remains, Telmaine realized. She gasped shallowly for air, and nearly shied as the guards told her to sit down. But her faintness decided for her, and probably sensibly so, though her skin crept away from contact with the wood. The guards might have forced and shackled her otherwise. She had hardly noticed them until now; now, listening to them, she wondered what made them so willing to conduct a woman, even a mage, to such a death. Phineas Broome had been noticeably absent during these last hours. Had
he
objected that she, an outrage to his pride but a mage nonetheless, had been sentenced outright to death? Or was it delicacy of feeling on his part? Or cowardice, pure and simple?