Lightborn (44 page)

His neck had never had Orlanjis’s enviable bonelessness, precluding slithering down into the chair and sleeping until midwinter. He contemplated the enticing plane of the floor. Except that someone would probably tread on him.

“We’ve pallets for visitors. Not what you’re used to, I’m sure, but”—she glanced down at the sleeping Orlanjis, with a wry smile—“I think you’ll manage.”

To say that he preferred a pallet on the floor amongst friends to luxury amongst enemies would be premature, as well as presumptuous, but he thought it, nonetheless. “Thank you.”

When Telmaine and Vladimer emerged onto the station concourse, an emergence timed to meet the evening rush, they found it unnervingly empty. Vladimer halted and blocked her next step with his outstretched arm, cane in hand. “There’s been trouble,” he muttered.

She thought for a moment he would draw back, but instead, he handed her the cane and unholstered the revolver. “Take it.” She did, setting down the carpetbag that held their few necessities. “Don’t use it unless you’re certain,” he said, a warning with bitter meaning to her ears. She nodded curtly, handed him back the cane, and retrieved the bag.

She followed closely on his heels, closely enough to be aware of his stiffening. The concealing hat and veils he had insisted she wear hampered both her perceptions and her movement, and the muffling of her magical senses unnerved her. She could not help thinking what had happened the last time they passed through this station. Her sleep had been interspersed with wakeful spells of futilely plucking at the binding and dreams of being trapped in a spider’s web, in a cocoon, in yards and yards of winding silk, smothering dreams—the very dreams she had suffered as a sought-after heiress, before she had met Balthasar.

Vladimer had suffered his share of nightmares, too; she had heard him grinding his teeth and muttering. She did not allude to it; nor did he mention whether he had heard her crying. They confined their conversation to practicalities, to gathering a change of clothing and a few necessities into a bag—which was left to her to lug.

Vladimer waylaid a passing engineer to question him about whether the trains would keep their schedule, given the crisis. Telmaine had not thought to wonder how they would find out what had happened outside without betraying that they had not come from outside, but Vladimer did it artfully.

“Sweet Imogene,” Telmaine breathed after the engineer had gone his way, having delivered his pungent observations of the state of the doors after the Lightborn assault.

“Indeed,” said Vladimer, grim. None of the trains were running to schedule; most would not leave until a preliminary inspection of track had been completed, and then they would go only slowly for fear of sabotage. The reports coming out of Stranhorne were few and contradictory, and the coastal Borders Express had been canceled for the day. The inland train itself was in question.

Until this moment, she had thought of this Borders trip with ambivalence; now she was desperate to get down there and find out what had happened to her husband, and to Ishmael. “Can’t you commission a special?”

“Yes. But it will not leave for at least another hour, at the earliest. Maybe we should get a coach.”

Shuddersome notion, since no coach even came close to a train’s comforts, or speed. They would be a day on the road, another day in unwelcome proximity. For Vladimer, with his wound, it would be excruciating. “We should get breakfast,” she said firmly. “It would be the
normal
thing for two delayed travelers. I’m sure you have a lounge you use, where you won’t be pestered.”

He did, a secluded, off-the-concourse bar, where, no doubt, assignations and illicit transactions could pass unobserved. It was not yet open for business, but the waiter recognized Vladimer, and allowed them in. Vladimer waited, standing, while she settled herself into the alcove. Then abruptly he said, “Stay here. I need to make arrangements.” She got halfway to her feet before sense and temper both got the better of the impulse—whether to protect or to cling, she could not have said. He could cursed well mind his own safety, if he insisted. While she waited, she ordered tea for Vladimer, and hot chocolate for herself, and whatever leftovers remained from the night before, since no deliveries had reached the station yet. She hadn’t eaten since the boardinghouse, and before that, at the archducal breakfast. And Vladimer couldn’t keep going on the contents of his little bottles, whatever he fancied.

Vladimer returned before the food, easing himself down onto the bench seat, and laid his cane on the table between them with casual purpose, tip toward the door. “The railway officials have agreed to provide a special train, with a crew and guards,” he said, in a low voice. “It will also carry a crew for the inspection of the tracks and the telegraph. We will be going first to Strumheller, then across to Stranhorne. It won’t be the safest journey.” Her expression conveyed her option of that useless and decidedly hypocritical concern. The corner of his mouth twitched in amusement, the rat bastard. “They’ll tell us when it is ready. We may have company by then. If not, it is again you and I.”

The steward arrived with their tea and hot chocolate, preventing any unwise comment on her part. The hot chocolate was a painful reminder of her and Balthasar’s flight to the coast, where they had fortified themselves with hot chocolate for the final confrontation. Her throat tightened so that she could hardly swallow; she choked it, and a roll, down. Vladimer was doing the same, with equal resolution and lack of appetite.

There was one thing to be said for this. Life could not contain many social encounters more fraught and awkward than breakfast with a disgraced and possibly erstwhile spymaster who had saved one from death and killed one’s best friend. She said, with a certain morbid curiosity, “I presume they’re going to announce my passing at some point. And from what?”

“If it is left up to Kalamay and Mycene, it will be sooner rather than later. It will probably be put out as a sudden illness. There will be no mention of magic.”

“Merivan—won’t let it rest until she’s satisfied she has had the truth.”

“She would regret that,” Vladimer noted. “I expect your mother to exert a restraining influence.”

“You know my mother?” Telmaine said, startled out of her cynical pose, but remembering the dowager duchess speaking of Vladimer as a
poor boy
.

“She was always very gracious to me.”

“Mama—is a kind person,” Telmaine said, translating. “I hope she—” She could not finish. Her mother could not possibly know she had fulfilled her whispered promise to escape if she could, given such convincing evidence of Telmaine’s destruction as she and Vladimer had left behind. She swallowed down a threatened sob.

“I must admit,” Vladimer said, almost conversationally, “I was surprised by that deception your mother was party to, the first time you escaped the palace.”

Was he asking who was responsible, or what had motivated her mother? There was nothing to be lost in concealing that now; the consequences to the family of that decades-old scandal were entirely outweighed by Telmaine’s own. “Did you know about my uncle Artos?”

“The one who exposed himself, with no gambling debts, no unwise speculations, and—despite the gossip—no thwarted or shameful entanglements. I had presumed it was inborn melancholia. . . .” And then he sonned her. “Ah.”

She lowered her head, in acquiescence. “You, my lady,” he said, his voice not quite as harsh, “are made of sterner stuff.”

“Why, Lord Vladimer, a compliment.”

Another twitch of the lips, at her acerbic tone. “If you will. It is not, I assure you from personal experience, consolation.”

She knew she did not want to interpret that remark. She heard with relief the sudden commotion at the entrance to the bar, Phoebe Broome’s clear voice saying, “Yes, I know he’s there; he told me to meet him here, and he is very reliable. A tall, lean gentlemen, with a limp and a cane, and a bad right arm.”

Vladimer was not pleased with the mention of the last, but he mustered his manners and confirmed to the waiter that he was indeed expecting another lady and possible company. Phoebe Broome in person was taller than most men, dressed for practicality rather than fashion in a long, plain coat worn open over a divided skirt, and jacket, the attire of a modern city woman. On her small, dainty head, she wore a cloche hat, not unbecomingly. And on her hands, gloves. Her companion this time was an equally tall old man in a similar coat over a suit that was at least four decades out of fashion. He had the shriveled, puckish face of some forest sprite depicted in the legends as ancient, crazed, and full of mischief. He poked his head over Phoebe’s shoulder, sonned Telmaine, and
tsk
ed like a tutor over a miscreant pupil. “My dear, you must have been quite wicked, though maybe not entirely so; either that or someone was careless, leaving that big hole.”

“
Father
—,” said Phoebe Broome, though Telmaine was aware of her fascinated and perhaps appalled attention to herself and presumably the binding.

Vladimer recalled their attention to himself. “Magistra Broome. This, I deduce, is Magister Farquhar Broome himself.”

“I’m sorry to intrude upon you this way, Lord Vladimer,” Phoebe said, a little diffidently, “but you did indicate it was urgent, and—it was easiest to follow my sense of your vitality than start asking. It’s—becoming quite busy out there. A lot of people trying to get out of the city, before things get worse.”

Worse than—Telmaine wished she could ask. Farquhar Broome had slipped into place beside her, and like an idiot child entranced by a soft fur jacket was moving his hand up and down her arm, lingering over her wrist.

At that moment Broome made a small motion with his hand and Telmaine felt the binding unravel. Her mage sense bloomed with shocking, revelatory suddenness. She sensed the serene, quixotic personality of the odd old man beside her, a personality that overlaid a power like a vast lake. She sensed the narrower river of power, swift and disciplined, running through the woman, and Vladimer’s familiar vitality, shot through with pain and stimulants. A little farther away she jolted up against a cluster of mages, twenty- five or thirty of them, including a vitality with an oddly familiar sense to it: Balthasar’s sister—her sister in marriage—Olivede.

Telmaine snatched back her awareness with dizzying force, and sat trembling slightly, waiting for repercussions. But Olivede was not a woman given to flying into rooms and ready confrontations. And Tammorn was silent. Dead?

“Now that’s much better,” Farquhar Broome approved. “Now, about that nasty thing—”

“Father, what have you done?” Phoebe said. Vladimer brought his cane up and over, not violently, but decisively, setting the deadly tip on Farquhar Broome’s wrist. “This woman’s magic is uncontrolled and dangerous,” he said, in a harsh voice.

Farquhar Broome reached over and gently set aside the cane. “My dear lady, my noble lord, I do apologize. It is so rare that I have a chance to examine novel magic, and it was a fascinating binding. I would—”

“No, Father, whatever it is,” Phoebe said.

“But there is no need to worry. She is untrained, of course, and she has a nasty and rather powerful magical impression in her, but I am well able to manage that.” He sounded now like one of Balthasar’s older colleagues, briskly reassuring an anxious and difficult family member. “And you, young man, ought not to be stressing your system the way you are; you shall be ill if you go on like this—” He waved his hand. “Yes, yes, I know, the young; they are all immortal and invulnerable. . . . But we shall be traveling together, won’t we, so we will have leisure to get to know each other.” He smiled benignly over them all. “Let me go and reassure the rest of our party—hot chocolate seems an excellent idea—and let you have a chance to talk.”

He sallied blithely forth, moving lightly for a man of his apparent age. Phoebe Broome’s mouth opened, closed. “Please have . . . a seat, Magistra Broome,” said Vladimer, at his most bland.

Self-consciously, she took the seat beside Telmaine her father had just vacated, facing Vladimer. Let out her breath, waiting for his reaction. “Well,” she said at last. “You’ve now met my father. At his worst.”

“Being myself widely considered my family’s difficult member, I would not presume to comment.”

“That is . . . gentlemanly of you,” Magistra Broome murmured, and straightened, seeming at last to believe him. “You did ask me to bring the strongest mages amongst us, and he is the very strongest.”

Telmaine, remembering her impression of vastness, nodded involuntarily, the motion catching both Vladimer’s and Phoebe Broome’s attention. Phoebe left anything she would have said unsaid for the moment. Bracing herself, she said, “Lord Vladimer, my brother . . .”

“Is, as far as I know, still at the palace. He took care to reassure me that you knew nothing of his activities.”

She shook her head, denying the importance of that, but said, “I didn’t. Until he left me a decidedly peculiar note. What . . . has he done?”

“I believe,” Vladimer said, “he chose to warn Duke Mycene that I was consorting with a dangerous mage.”

Phoebe’s head twitched toward Telmaine, though she did not sonn. “Is he under arrest?”

“Not yet, at least not by my agents. I exchanged my silence for his silence on a matter essential to the state. Unfortunately, he has placed himself in the position where he may be implicated, amongst Darkborn at least, in last night’s murder of the Lightborn mages. There was, apparently, a mage involved in the planning of it.”

“If he enabled that slaughter in any way, he deserves to die,” Phoebe said harshly. Vladimer’s silence was reassessing.

“Lord Vladimer, you could only imagine what happened the night before last; we
lived through it
. We sensed the deaths, and we sensed the magic that slaughtered them.”