Lightborn (16 page)

“Very well, sir,” Floria said. “I will take you at your word. I need asylum. I’m suspected of being involved in the unrighteous deposition of the prince. I had hoped Balthasar Hearne would be here to speak for me.”

Vladimer’s left hand slid into his pocket and his balance shifted forward. “You did not mention that before.”

“No,” she said. “I wanted to speak to someone with the authority to grant my request for asylum.”

Vladimer weighed the request, while Telmaine stood without breathing. It was a long moment before he settled his spine back against the chair, guarding his arm, and waved Telmaine to sit down in one of the other chairs. “Please tell us what you know of the prince’s death. Consider me Lord Vladimer’s ears.”

He might, Telmaine thought, curb that undertone if he thought to protect himself by denying his identity. Floria White Hand was astute enough to hear it.

After a brief pause, the woman on the far side of the wall said, “The prince retired to his rooms last night, later than his usual hour: the court had been celebrating Fejelis’s coming of age. The usual checks were done on the wards in his rooms by the mages contracted to palace service. The vigilants carried out their usual inspection. With the prince were a secretary, a servant, the captain of vigilants, and the captain of the watch. Sometime late in the night, the lights in his room failed completely. We know that it happened with little warning because of the position of the residues: none of them had made an attempt to escape.”

Telmaine was a moment understanding what she meant: while daylight burned the Darkborn to ash, darkness dissolved the Lightborn away to—To their daughters, Balthasar had said water, and to herself, who had not invited it, not much at all. The Lightborn were too familiar with magic for her to want to know more of them. She preferred—or
had
preferred—to regret ignorance rather than knowledge.

“Go on,” said Vladimer, unmoving. “The lights failed, you said; how?”

“How much do you know about how we make sunlight last through the night, Master—Ears?”

Telmaine stiffened, wondering how the woman dared provoke from her position, but Vladimer’s chancy humor was teased. “By magic, I presume.”

“The lights capture sunlight during the day and reradiate it through the night. Since magic dies with the mage, even the cheapest lights are enspelled by at least two mages. The lights in the prince’s chambers were enspelled by four.”

“So the failure of the lights implies the involvement of a mage.” Vladimer had his chin propped on his sound hand, listening intently.

“Yes,” Floria said, sounding stifled. “We began inquiries—the usual inquiries amongst the earthborn staff—”

“Earthborn being nonmageborn,” Vladimer supplied, in an aside that made Telmaine twitch, exquisitely sensitive as she was to the mention of magic.

“—as to people entering or leaving or seen around the prince’s rooms. What do you know of the—arrangements—between Lightborn mageborn and earthborn?”

Vladimer said, in his didactic tone, “Mageborn cannot use their magic to influence the affairs of nonmages, but they can engage in publicly declared contracts to act in their interests, and in doing so are indemnified under law. The nonmageborn who engages a mage becomes liable for all their acts in his or her interest.”

“That’s—right,” Floria said.

“It seemed an advantageous solution, particularly to the early war-lords and potentates able to hire such mages—who, after all, would hold them accountable to the law but their fellows? I do not believe its developers anticipated a time like the present, when mages would number in the—what, thousands?—and command powers that are, frankly, barely to be imagined by the nonmageborn.”

But someone like you would have
, Telmaine thought.

“The economic consequences have also been significant,” Vladimer observed, “given what amounts to a one-way transfer of wealth from nonmageborn to mageborn—there being few services that the nonmageborn can render that would offset the service of magic. Your system is not sustainable, Mistress White Hand.”

There was a silence. “Might I have the pleasure of addressing Lord Vladimer Plantageter himself?” Floria said.

“The very same.”

Telmaine tensed, extending her senses, but Floria only breathed out, audibly. “My lord, I have heard a great deal about you.”

“Not too unctuously flattering, I trust. What were your initial hypotheses?”

Her tone was distinctly crisper, as though reporting to a superior. “A light that is nearly discharged changes color, conspicuously. The prince, or anyone else in the room, would have noticed. There was no evidence that they did.”

“Mm,” Vladimer prompted her to continue.

“Next, the possibility that the lights were faulty. In the rare event that the enspelling itself is flawed, the light fails within minutes of first use.”

“Without—fail? As it were?”

“Always. However, any magic can be annulled by a stronger mage. But the activities of higher- rank mages are of great interest to other mages, and the mages have admitted no such activity.”

Vladimer collected Telmaine’s attention with a curl of his hand and pointed a finger at the wall. Calling her attention to the statement.

“So we come to talismanic magic, magic cast on inanimate objects and maintained by the vitality of the mage—lights are talismans themselves. Talismans can be created that annul magic. One need only be given to an individual—mage or nonmage—with access to the prince’s quarters.”

Vladimer tapped his fingertips lightly on the desk. “And is that what you are accused of?”

Floria’s indrawn breath was audible.

“It is a not-unwarranted deduction, is it not?” Vladimer said. “Did you?”

“Lord Vladimer, I would have said—not. But I have—I remember—or I dreamed—going to my prince’s rooms during the night. I would never willingly have harmed the prince.” Her voice had thickened with tears, extraordinary to hear in this woman.

“Ensorcellment,” Vladimer said, in a voice utterly without inflection.

“The palace mages would have sensed it on me. That was another reason why I wanted to speak to Balthasar: I know there are nonmagical means of subverting the will.”

Telmaine drew her breath to make Balthasar’s argument that such means could not make people do things that were completely against their will, and let it out unused.

“What had your palace mages to say?”

“The mages contracted to the palace sensed, or say they sensed,
nothing
untoward. I was not satisfied; I decided to contract a mage I knew personally, a sport—a mage who—” She hesitated.

“I know what a sport is,” Vladimer said. “Continue.”

But
I
do not
, Telmaine thought, perversely piqued. She cleared her throat softly, drawing Vladimer’s attention. Vladimer said, not without malice, “The Lightborn masters of lineage breed mages, Lady Telmaine, as horse breeders do prize stock, to strengthen certain traits. A sport is a mage whose powers have arisen without benefit of such pedigree; all Darkborn mages might thus be considered sports.”

Her face heated with embarrassment at the reminder of Lightborn immorality, and the even more pointed reminder of her magic.

“I thought—though Tam would not say—he seemed to sense something in the room the prince had died in. He seemed troubled. He said he must make inquiries of the Temple. Almost the next I knew was the vigilants coming for me with a warrant from the prince.”

“Ah,” said Vladimer. He thought, briefly. “Mistress Floria, it is not unknown, is it, that a sufficiently powerful mage may take the form of another?”

“Such magic around the prince would have been sensed.
Any
ensorcellment—they should have sensed.”

“And so we come back, once again, to what may or may not have been sensed,” Vladimer said, half to himself. “What part might the prince’s son, or the mother, have had in Isidore’s death?”

Telmaine shivered at the casual allusion to assassination and patricide.

“The timing is simply wrong. Fejelis said he would not be so stupid as to arrange his father’s deposition the very day he came of age, and, Mother of All help me, I believe him. And if Helenja meant to elevate one of her sons, it would be Orlanjis, but he is only fourteen—and Helenja would
not
be chosen regent.”

Vladimer considered that in silence, his skepticism palpable.

Floria said, a little desperately, “I’m asking not only for succor from the night but also for asylum. This is the one place that the mages cannot lawfully harm me, or the Vigilance reach me.”

“Your safety is conditional,” Vladimer noted, “assuming you are right about the existence of a talisman that can annul light, and mages lawless enough to use it.”

“That did occur to me, yes,” she said, quite steadily.

“That said, I will grant you asylum, and we will—see—as you would say, what manner of petitions arrive for your surrender.” He pushed himself to his feet, bracing himself with his cane.

“Thank you, Lord Vladimer.”

Telmaine trailed after Vladimer through the small anteroom, into the hall, and waited while he rang a bell and delivered instructions to the servant who answered for Floria’s continued care.

“You’re not going to—tell her about the Shadowborn?” she said as they started back toward his rooms.

“Not now. It will be revealing if she lives to tomorrow’s dawn.”

Little as she cared for the woman, she was dismayed by such calculation. “Do you—what do you think of the Lightborn mages sensing nothing? Because I had wondered—Ishmael said that they punished abuse of magic. Yet your ensorcellment, the firetraps set in the warehouse . . .”

“Those things had occurred to me, Lady Telmaine,” he said.

On their return, there were no macabre diversions; he was noticeably flagging. Despite her skirts and his longer legs, she easily kept pace with him through the corridors, all the way back to the botanical library. He let himself down into one of the comfortable armchairs, Telmaine into the straight-backed wooden chair.

“What did you sense?” he said.

“It was Floria White Hand. But there was Shadowborn magic about her. Faint, but there.”

“Was she telling the truth, as far as she knew it?”

“I—I think she was.”

“Think?”
he said stingingly. “You cannot let your emotions interfere with your purpose, Lady Telmaine.”

She would, she decided, find some opportune moment to quote his own words back at him.

“I have not asked you this before, but do you sense any aura or influence around me?” His voice was very controlled, and she had seldom been so relieved as to be able to say, “No.”

“Which may mean, simply, that the one that ensorcelled me”—he said this with only the faintest hesitation—“is indeed dead. If Mistress Floria were ensorcelled . . . But the timing, the timing is wrong. The mage died before the prince. And the ensorcellment about Mistress Floria lingers.” He drummed his fingers restlessly on the arm of the chair.

“Floria said—lights were enspelled by more than one mage,” she said tentatively. “Perhaps this also involved more than one Shadowborn. We know there are at least two.”

“So does this taint she bears come from ensorcellment, or contact with this putative talisman?” Vladimer said. “Tell me, when you interviewed Tercelle Amberley, did you or di Studier sense such a taint around her? You did not mention it.”

“No,” she said. “But—Tercelle may not have seen her”—she threw herself at the word—“lover—since—they were last together.” He received the opinion as mere fact, to her relief; another man might have leered or reacted with distaste at such indelicacy. Emboldened, she said, “And if she
had
been ensorcelled, she might not have fled to Balthasar, since everything that has happened suggests the Shadowborn did not
want
Balthasar involved.”

“Then we have several possibilities. The Temple colluded in the assassination of the prince. Or there is a form of ensorcellment that no mage can sense. The alternative that comes to mind is an impersonation by Shadowborn. And the other concern I have is whether a talisman created to annul light might also be created to
cast
light.”

Telmaine shivered with horror. Vladimer, catching the shiver with his sonn, smiled narrowly. “Had I been sufficiently prescient, I should not have sent Ishmael into the Borders. As it is, I must rely upon you. It is entirely likely I shall need you again tonight, so please hold yourself in readiness.”

Vladimer summoned her again shortly after the midnight meal, another savory but solitary repast picked at without appetite. She was trying to compose a letter to her daughters, well aware how poor a substitute it would be for her presence, for either sender or recipients. So Vladimer’s note was almost welcome.

This time, the footman escorted her to Vladimer’s own chambers, tucked well in the depths of the older part of the palace and doubtless connected via hidden passageways to a dozen other halls and rooms. The footman announced her at the door and left her. She wondered what Vladimer had done with Kip—Kingsley.

Vladimer was sitting in an armchair, cane to hand. By the evidence of the plates on the table to his right, he had made an indifferent essay at his own lunch. A bottle and a small medicine glass sat beside the plates, the glass drained of its contents. His sling was nowhere in evidence.

“I am about to have a visitor,” he said without preamble. “I would have preferred to meet her elsewhere, but my physicians—and my brother—insist I should not be going about. They are concerned about fever.”

They should be concerned about more than that, Telmaine thought, if they were paying attention. His vitality shimmered with unnatural intensity.

“I want you within reach but not within sonn. My visitor will be quite aware of you, but I fully expect you will discourage any unseemly interest: she is merely of fourth rank.”