Lightborn (24 page)

“Mother of All Things,” Tam whispered. “You mean you’re able to—”

He never finished the sentence, or the thought. His persistent sense of Fejelis’s vitality suddenly flared bright with a sense of danger, and brighter still with agony. He choked out, “Jay—” Lukfer’s broad, white hands caught and steadied him and chaotic power suddenly surged around him. Tam caught it as it crested, heedless of the danger, wrapped it in his will, and
lifted
.

Fejelis found his younger brother on his balcony, standing in the one corner that was still not in shadow at this hour, and looking out over the late-afternoon city. Orlanjis had, by all reports, kept to his rooms all day. He was not dressed for a public appearance. His auburn hair was worked into a simple braid, held with a red ribbon.

He started as Fejelis’s name was announced, his shoulders stiffening.

“. . . I’m glad to see you didn’t suffer too many ill effects from breakfast,” Fejelis said, to his back.

Orlanjis turned, posture and expression braced, lower lip protruding slightly. “I spoiled it, didn’t I?”

“. . . If that was your intention, yes.”

“I didn’t want to, but Sharel . . . and I wasn’t feeling well anyway. . . .”

Sharel was their mother’s sister, younger by twelve years, who had joined Helenja’s entourage after the purge that had followed Fejelis’s poisoning. Fejelis was not surprised that Sharel had suggested the masquerade, or that Orlanjis had taken the suggestion; when he was younger, he had adored her, and even now, plainly he was under her influence.

“I’m ashamed of myself,” said Orlanjis, eyes downcast behind thick ginger lashes.

Which he might well be, as well as realizing that the potential consequences of offending Prince Fejelis were quite a bit more severe than the consequences of offending a mere elder brother. Fejelis rubbed thoughtfully at the callus on his right index finger, where his fencing glove had worn thin and the pommel rubbed, and looked around him. Of all the prince’s children, Orlanjis had spent the longest in their mother’s lands, in the desert, and was acutely homesick in the north. Along this narrow balcony, he had created a miniature desert, the sands sheltered and contained by glass.

Orlanjis said, dolefully, “I suppose if I want to go south for the winter, it’s you I should ask.”

Along the side of the building, blocking one of the windows, a portion of a canyon wall had been sculpted from porous clay and planted with cacti and epiphytes. Rather than answer his brother’s implied request, Fejelis crouched to study the feathery sprigs of the plants that lived on moisture from the air. After a silence, Orlanjis said, “It shouldn’t be that yellow on the tips. It needs more sun.”

Hand on the glass to balance himself, Fejelis stood, trying not to make it apparent he did so to avoid having his brother at his back. Orlanjis seemed not to notice. His eyes, dark like their mother’s, avoided Fejelis’s. “Jay,” he said more clearly, “I’d like to go south as soon as you’ll let me. I don’t want to be here while—”

While things worked themselves out around their father’s deposition, Fejelis understood. “. . . I’d miss you.”

Orlanjis took a step back. Fejelis shrugged, inviting him to believe it or not. “. . . I was thinking to ask if you would like the vacant rooms on the top floor. A far bigger balcony than this, and much more sun.”

Orlanjis blinked. “Those were Perrin’s rooms.”

“. . . . Even if she were ever to come back to the palace, it would be as a mage.” And it was not likely, he knew, from Tam. The Temple disapproved of emotional ties with earthborn. Few mages were like Tam, prepared to flout that disapproval to love and befriend earthborn. “I don’t think she would mind.”

“It’s on the same floor as Fath—you,” Orlanjis said, suspiciously. “Do you
want
me there?”

“. . . Yes,” said Fejelis. “. . . I do. And yes. It’s a bribe. I would far rather have you working with me than against me.”

Orlanjis’s lips parted.

“Father always said you had more imagination than the rest of us put together. . . . The lack spares my nerves, in these circumstances, but it does not help me solve the problems I face—the rift between north and south, the impoverishment of the earthborn lineages, the artisans’ discontent, the effect on us of the Darkborn’s progress. . . . To find solutions, I need people who can envision something new.” He gestured to the model cliff. “. . . What I can do is make sure is they and their ideas have opportunity to thrive.”

“You sound—like Father,” Orlanjis said, his brows drawing together.

“Thank you,” Fejelis said.

“Mother won’t like it if I move,” Orlanjis said, toeing a twig on the balcony.

“. . . I have to try and reach an accommodation with her, too,” Fejelis said. An imp of mischief prompted him to say, “. . . Would you be willing to have breakfast with me tomorrow? Exonerate me of the suspicion of having tried to poison you this morning?”

Orlanjis’s dark eyes widened at the blunt phrasing. “. . . Bring whomever you wish,” Fejelis said, lightly.

“Jay, that mage—Tammorn—has associations with the radical artisans’ movement.”

“. . . I’m aware of that,” Fejelis said, wondering how Orlanjis had come by that information. “But thank you. Magister Tammorn came from the western provinces, so he has considerable sympathy with the artisans, though not, I think, with the radical factions.” He knew not, in fact. The radicals recruited from the dispossessed incomers to the cities, of whom, decades ago, Tam had been one. Their advocacy of revolt put at risk the innovators Tam nurtured like tender plants. “I need that sympathy. Their brightnesses of both the court and the Temple are too far removed from the hardships of ordinary people. If we can address those, the radicals will lose their support.”

Orlanjis’s cynical expression was unpleasant on so roundly appealing a face.

“. . . You think I’m being naive,” Fejelis said. “. . . So be it. Let the argument be simple compassion.”

“How do you know so much?” Orlanjis said, a little sulkily. Perhaps measuring his potential as prince against Fejelis, and not liking the contrast.

Fejelis shrugged. “. . . I went out and about when I was younger—unobserved, I thought, though Father eventually disavowed me of that notion.” Except where Tam was involved; the mage subtly used his magic to protect his meetings with Fejelis and the others from observation. “Father talked to me about what I learned, much as he talked to you about the southerners.”

“You were close to him,” Orlanjis said. “Closer than either he or you let us think.”

Fejelis let silence be his answer. He felt an involuntary tightening in his throat at the reminder that that closeness was lost to him. Orlanjis’s fingers worried at his sleeve. “I feel such a coward, Jay, not wearing red for him.”

The corner of Fejelis’s mouth quirked. “. . . ‘Be your own man’ is advice given cheaply by people who have no idea what it is to be the sons of a northern-southern marriage. But you’re not a child anymore, ’Jis; you’re a man, a prince’s son, and could well be my successor. Like it or not, you have to make those decisions for yourself, and accept the risk. . . . And here endeth the lesson,” he added, wryly, seeing the resentful flash in his brother’s dark eyes.

There was a long silence. Orlanjis, he saw, was struggling with himself over a question. He feared he knew what it was.

“Jay, who do you think killed him?”

“. . . I don’t know,” Fejelis said, leaning his elbow on the balustrade. “There is no doubt that magic was involved. The palace judiciary is reviewing all contracts, to try and identify any worded so as to permit an attack on the prince, that they missed. . . . The Temple is investigating magic outside contract.” He hesitated, and then decided on a deeper candor than he had dared up until now, leaning close to say softly, “. . . Tammorn represents our best hope for learning anything the Temple does not want us to know.”

“Oh,” said Orlanjis, staring at his brother. “But we can’t . . .”

That “we” echoed, made his heart lift, but Orlanjis did not finish the sentence. No matter, they had time. “I’m cold,” Orlanjis muttered, and retreated back into the sunlit corner. Fejelis went with him. He should, he knew, get back to his receiving room and continue with his endless work, but this new rapport he was nurturing was precious. He did not know when he would have another opportunity to speak to Orlanjis like this, without interference.

He propped himself against the balcony, enjoying the warmth on his back. Mage light might sustain life, but it did not nourish it, not as the sun did. “. . . You were going to say . . .”

Orlanjis glanced toward him. Fejelis glimpsed the flash of white around his pupils as his eyes widened. He did not consciously register the sudden horror; he was not aware of recognizing the implications, nor did he formulate intent. He simply threw himself on Orlanjis, twisting to heave him bodily behind the shield of the glassed garden. He heard a coarse hiss behind him, and something thumped his back with a sound like a stone striking a hung carcass, and enough force to drive the breath from him. He crashed forward across his brother’s legs, the impact jarring loose searing pain and a gush of salty warmth in his throat. He felt Orlanjis’s thrashing efforts to free himself, but already his senses were being stripped from him, his hearing reduced to the fading rushing of his pulse, his sight entirely red shadows darkening to black. His last sensation was of peach fuzz against his palms.

T
am dropped to his knees, gasping, as Lukfer’s chaotic magic unraveled from his. Miraculously, he was alive and intact and not bisected by a plane of grass or planted knee-deep with the sands of this toy garden, or, worst of all, conjoined with one of the vigilants or servants clustered in the sunlight corner. His magic, wielded without thought, thrust them all aside, and he caught his first glimpse of Fejelis lying facedown and unmoving, impaled through the back by a wooden bolt. Just beyond his head, Orlanjis lay curled up against the balustrade, face twisted away in panicked, revolted denial. Even before he saw Fejelis, Tam had sensed the foul aura of the bolt itself, something crafted not for the annulment of light but for the annulment of life itself.

The mage vigilant who had been down on her knees beside Fejelis struggled against the pressure of Tam’s greater strength, shouting something at him that he ignored, as he ignored the useless fluttering of her magic. They told him later he had
lifted
the length of the balcony. He knew only that he found himself crouching over Fejelis, tearing away the bloodied fabric around the bolt as simultaneously his magic tore at the killing ensorcellment. Then he felt his own heart suddenly falter within him, his hands go numb, the bolt darken in his sight, as his nemesis, shockingly, seized upon
his
vitality.

Until Lukfer reached across the distance between them to hook the core out of the ensorcellment with a single practiced twist.

The bolt had driven all the way through Fejelis’s lung, lodging in a rib. Its tip was bone, exempt, like the wood, from the talisman against metal bullets. It was barbed, designed to tear flesh when it was withdrawn. Tam growled, and felt the bolt vibrate with the sound, warping and withering like a stick in a flame, the barbs shriveling away. He drew it out, casting it aside; he did not know where, or toward whom. Fejelis choked, strangling on blood, an excruciatingly familiar sound. <
Lukfer!
> He reached out for the other mage, despite the danger, and felt a great surge of vitality flood him. Feverish with the excess of it, he bullied together blood vessels, spun together tissues, purged the blood from Fejelis’s lungs and windpipe, and swept closed the skin around the wound so brusquely it shivered like the film on heated milk. Then he gathered Fejelis into his lap.

“Cloth,” he croaked. Someone handed him a cloth, and turning Fejelis faceup, he began to wipe his bloodstained lips and cheek and scrub at the gore in his fair hair. He was hardly aware that the name he whispered was not Fejelis’s, but that of his younger brother, now years dead. But this time it was a still-breathing body he cradled, not one still and beginning to stiffen in death.

“Here,” said Captain Lapaxo. He stepped aside as he spoke, removing himself with alacrity from Tam’s path, giving Tam and Fejelis a view of the balcony and the black tarpaulin heaped on it. Partly hidden beneath its folds was a southern-style crossbow, of wood and horn, with a powerful draw. A sideways glance confirmed that from here they could see the corner of Orlanjis’s balcony, some seventy yards away. Shadows had claimed that balcony entirely now. Overhead, the clouds were tinged with sunset gold. But that he was feverish with borrowed vitality, he would have shivered.

Fejelis stooped, lifted the edge of the tarpaulin, studied the brown residue left by a man’s quenching, and let the tarpaulin down again. The captain of vigilants looked at his pallid face, his blood-soaked, torn shirt, and the tidemarks of dried blood on his cheek, and winced, visibly.

“. . . Can you tell anything?” Fejelis said to Tam. “Who was he?”

Vitality was fled, gone the instant the bowman pulled the tarpaulin over himself. Or had it pulled over him, Tam reminded himself; murder was entirely possible. Gone, too, was any trace of ensorcellment. The mages vigilant had sensed nothing. “No,” he said. “I presume there’s nothing to identify him or her.”

“That’s a southern bow,” the captain said.

Fejelis’s head turned, his eyes unreadable as mirrors. “. . . And how many from the north are experts with the weapon,” he said, calmly, “including your own peers?”

The captain lowered his head. “Prince,” he acknowledged.

“. . . Do not let anything close your mind, Captain,” the prince advised. “There were two men on that balcony; the bolt may not even have hit the right one.”