Lightborn (21 page)

“A low-ranked mage like Strumheller able to sense what Temple mages cannot?” Floria said skeptically. “Though from what you say, he sounds underranked.”

If nothing else, she should keep Floria from speculating about Ishmael’s capabilities. “Maybe,” Telmaine said, “maybe because Lightborn left the Borders so long ago, the—familiarity was lost. Your mages no longer know what Shadowborn magic
feels
like.” Though she had needed no prior familiarity and no training to sense and be revolted by it.

“Telmaine,” Floria said, “you do not understand very much about magic.”

That, Telmaine thought, was too much. She rose, in a rustle of silks and lace. “No,” she said, coolly. “I don’t suppose I do.”

“At the same time,” Floria said, apparently unhearing, “it could explain the Temple’s inaction. It could explain why—why nobody sensed the delivery of a talisman to the prince’s quarters.” Her voice quickening. “It could explain why no one sensed a shape-shifter, if it were a shape-shifter, or an ensorcellment if it were—Mother of All,” Floria breathed. “It
fits
. It fits better than any other explanation I’ve been able to think of. Telmaine, is there notepaper on your side? If I write a letter, will you see it reaches its destination?”

The unfamiliar verb, “see,” distracted her briefly. “It can’t be an hour to sunrise,” she protested.

“Couriers come and go between the houses of state at all hours of day and night. You have only to find the daylight postbag and get the letter slipped in. It will only be readable to my—to Lightborn.”

She thought rebelliously that she had not come here to make herself Floria’s tool instead of Vladimer’s, but for her own purposes and for Balthasar’s sake. “He loves you,” she blurted, a challenge she had been longing to fling at the other woman for years. “Balthasar loves you.”

Floria did not deny it, saying impatiently, “And I love him, Telmaine, but that does not
change
anything in your and his relationship. I wish you understood that.”

She wished she understood it as Floria did, because for her it mattered, painfully so. “I came to ask you to help me to protect him. Duke Mycene—” But she could
not
tell Floria what she feared from that quarter, because she could
not
tell Floria how she had learned it. “Ferdenzil Mycene—Tercelle Amberley’s betrothed—has Balthasar prisoner, because Balthasar was traveling in Ishmael’s—Baron Strumheller’s—company. I’m frightened for Bal. We have to find out who the Shadowborn are, what they intend, before Balthasar—or our children”—or, sweet Imogene, Ishmael himself—“get further hurt.”

“I do understand,” Floria said, sounding beleaguered. “My
own
life hangs on this, too. Let me write the letter.”

“Who is it to?” Telmaine said, in a tone she used to children and servants, one that implied no yielding in the question.

“To a friend of mine—the mage I spoke of.”

Telmaine trapped the question,
Is he your lover?
between her teeth. Aside from the impropriety—at least asked of another Darkborn—the answer was truly none of her business. She collected some paper—trying not to think of singed edges and smoke—and slipped it into the
passe-muraille
that served as a conduit for more than words between the two rooms. She sat tensely listening to the faint scratching of nib on page. Occasionally, Floria asked for confirmation or clarification of a detail; she had Balthasar’s gift for listening well. Eventually the scratching ceased, and Telmaine could hear her blowing softly to dry the last of the ink. Balthasar’s exercise of writing with ink had fascinated their children, and his closing ritual of blowing on the apparently unmarked sheet of paper had always set them giggling.

She heard Floria open and close the small door. “I’ve addressed it,” she said. “Thank you, Telmaine.”

There seemed not much more to be said, Telmaine thought with relief, going forward to retrieve the letter, a smooth folded sheet quite blank to her fingers. She bade the woman good night, realizing the infelicity even as she said it.

“Telmaine, I know you’ll think this presumptuous of me, but I’m surprised—at the courage and initiative you are showing through this. Bal always said there was more to you than the society lady.”

“You’re right,” Telmaine said, “it is presumptuous, but—a lady learns to take compliments as intended. Good—day, Mistress Floria.” She slipped into the vestibule, feeling oddly satisfied. Admiration from a rival was always gratifying. She tucked Floria’s letter carefully up her sleeve before stepping out into the corridor. Kingsley would surely be able to find out where the daylight post was collected, and she would simply tell him—ah!—that Lord Vladimer had finally released her husband’s letters, and she had chosen to send this one on.

She had taken the first measured strides toward the corner—
a lady
,
taking a walk
—when around the corner and straight into her came Casamir Blondell. Her skirts and his quilted jacket cushioned the impact, but they sprang apart with guilty vigor. Her sonn caught his dismay; she was certain his did hers. Their apologies washed against each other,
all my fault
,
needed a walk
,
not paying attention
. She checked herself first; of course it was proper that he should apologize to her. But what was
he
doing here? Surreptitiously, she probed for the letter in her sleeve, confirming it hidden.

“Dear me,” she said, “I thought this part of the palace was less used. I might as well take my constitutional in Bolingbroke concourse.”

He bowed to her, submitting to her rebuke. “Perhaps,” he said, a little brusquely, “I might escort m’lady back to her rooms.”

“Of course,” she said, graciously; what else could she do, aside from wonder how to prevent him from reporting this encounter to Vladimer? Working in Lord Vladimer’s service, Blondell had surely met bribes far beyond her purse, and refused those of any significance; Vladimer would not have tolerated him otherwise. Should she appeal to his sympathies? But how, without stirring his suspicions? She would simply have to hope that her air of innocence, and his reported quarrel with Lord Vladimer, would be enough for this to pass unremarked.

Unless
he
knew about Floria White Hand, and was appalled to find Telmaine so close? Then he would be thinking as hard as she, wondering how he might find out what she knew and why she was here, without arousing
her
suspicions. If so, he had the sympathy of a fellow sufferer.

At least she now knew that Blondell’s amulet was nothing to fear, since she had been as close to it as a decent woman could come. It was a medallion at least four inches across, solid metal with an ornate knotted border and with several large symbols cast in relief upon the flat face. Whatever they were, neither they nor the metal itself had any potency that she could sense, either to detect or to repel her.

So all she need do now was divest herself of Floria White Hand’s letter in the direction of the postbag, and polish a plausible account of their conversation for Vladimer, in case. She could, she thought, tell mostly the truth. She would omit only the letter.

“. . . W
hat?” Fejelis greeted his reflection in the mirror. “Not dead yet?”

“Not funny yet, either,” Tam said sourly, propping himself in the open doorway to Fejelis’s dressing room.

Fejelis lifted the prince’s caul from its stand, his smile falling away. Its stiff supporting mesh still contained the shape of his father’s skull. A few hairs, the color of winter grass, quivered in the gem- encrusted rim. “I’ll need to get this fitted,” he said quietly, turning it in his hands to study the arcs and swirls of gold filigree and cobalt blue and indigo stones. The largest gems had been sold first, the gold wire last, in his great-grandfather’s time; the caul was, in short, a fake.

Its fit was close, closer than he had expected, just a little pressure on the temples, a little looseness on the forehead, his skull slightly broader than his father’s. The face that stared back at him, framed in gilt wire and blue glass, had a likeness disconcerting even in his own eyes.

Tam, by his huffed-out breath, also saw it.

“. . . Have you anything to report?” Fejelis said.

“There were no attempts on the lights overnight,” Tam said.

“And Mistress White Hand?”

“At the archducal palace.” A fleeting hesitation. “Quite safe.”

“. . . They’ll say her flight implies her guilt,” Fejelis noted. “. . . But I didn’t like the report I had of Captain Beaudry’s actions.” He lifted off the caul and set it aside, binding his hair back into a tight knot at the nape of his neck.

“Will you ask for her surrender?”

“. . . I have no choice,” Fejelis said. “. . . The manner of my father’s death is too evocative. I think I shall leave it a few hours yet, see what transpires.”

Over a red vest, he drew on a red jacket with stiff breast panels and sheer sides and sleeves, embroidered with swirls in deep blue stitches and blue semiprecious stones. It was merely the latest of a succession of princely mourning jackets passed down the generations. He returned the caul to his head, checked its fit with a glance, and turned quickly away from the mirror.

“. . . Why is it, do you suppose, that the Darkborn do not practice deposition, yet are not burdened by senile and incompetent rulers?”

Without answering, the mage handed him the sash. He tied it around his waist, set the knot, and bloused the fabric. Stretched and twisted to ensure he could move freely, and turned to face Tam. “. . . Shall I pass?”

He watched the mage consider, and reject a cautionary word. “Yes.”

“. . . Then I propose we venture forth. If we wait for them to summon the courage to knock, we shall get no breakfast.”

“I am glad your terms of employ include breakfast.”

Fejelis gave him a scimitar smile. “. . . You’ve never eaten breakfast with my family.”

His father’s intimate dining room was a solarium on the southeast corner of the palace. Two long galleries subtended on two sides a roof-top garden. A shallow pool was its centerpiece, and the base of the pool formed a skylight to the prince’s private study on the floor below. Even on a dull winter’s morning the light was restorative.

This morning a wall of cloud, silver-limned, stood off the horizon on the east, sparing them too much glory. The faces of his seated family—families—turned, as one, toward him, giving him a reflex twinge of expected retribution. But whatever the other penalties of his position, being prince meant he would never be late again.
Don’t let it go to your head
, his father’s voice chided
.

As one, they stood to acknowledge him, red-clad northerners on one side facing drab-hued, red-ribboned southerners on the other. Mother, brother, sister; mother’s sister, brother, and cousins. Father’s cousins. The fifteen people most likely to have killed his father and most likely to kill him.

Not a job for the fainthearted
, as his father had once said.

He heard a sound like a suppressed sob from Liliyen’s direction. While Orlanjis had cultivated charm and a reputation for blithespiritedness, and Fejelis had cultivated caution and a reputation for dullness, she had cultivated high sensitivity and a reputation for flightiness and fragility. Making her probably the smartest and toughest of them all, as Orlanjis was the most melancholy and he, the least cautious.

Of his other sister, Perrin, no one spoke at all.

Orlanjis looked harrowed and sleepless. Which would make Fejelis’s opening sally a simple one. He would offer him the vacant suite on the southwest corner on the prince’s floor, a suite he knew Orlanjis coveted for the sunlight and the space to cultivate his desert gardens. It had stood empty too long. Moving would ease Orlanjis’s nerves and remove him from the immediate vicinity of Helenja’s coterie. Give him space to know his own mind, away from the southerners who had influenced him for so long. Their satisfaction over Isidore’s death would surely grate on Orlanjis, given the obscene nature of that death.

Helenja was staring at him, flat-eyed, certainly seeing the resemblance to her dead consort. She, too, looked as though she had not enjoyed an easy night’s sleep, though she still wore no more than red ribbons to sketch mourning. What she truly felt for Isidore’s passing he doubted she would ever allow him to know.

Which, he thought, had a certain justice in it, because he had no intention of letting her know what
he
felt. He and his father had hidden the closeness of their relationship as carefully as any pair of unfaithful partners.

Though Helenja, too, he would court, if he could. She was no longer the willful young woman who had seen her marriage as a conquest and her consort as a temporary inconvenience, or the mother who had tried to press her silver-eyed son into the mold of a southern prince. She, and her entourage, had learned subtlety as well as survival over the years.

And how is this good?
he all but heard Tam comment.

On the northerner side of his table, facing Helenja, sat his cousin, son of Benedict’s younger brother. Of Isidore’s four brothers, none had survived him, which left Prasav and his daughter as Fejelis’s principal rivals, after Orlanjis. Prasav’s eyes, a pale hazel gray like a tarnished mirror, were unreadable as he took in Tam by Fejelis’s side. Fejelis remembered then that Prasav was lord of much of the northern and western provinces, including the poor mountain region that had bred Tam. Prasav’s shrewd economies had stemmed the loss of wealth, but he had done little to ameliorate conditions in the struggling provinces. Fejelis regretted that he had not thought to acknowledge Tam’s feelings in this; he would later.

Prasav bowed slightly toward Fejelis. His slight build had come from Fejelis’s grandmother and he lacked Fejelis’s height, but he also had her handsomeness, and his profile would grace a new-minted coin more finely than Fejelis’s. He wore full mourning crimson and a caul set with emerald and jade—the caul of the northern lords who had once styled themselves princes—with his silvering hair finely braided and pulled back beneath it.
Those
stones were likely genuine.