Lightborn (32 page)

That was sheer disingenuousness; he had declared himself plainly enough, had she but listened. He had chosen to let his enemies engage each other to their mutual destruction, calculating, maybe, that Sejanus would be able to prevent retaliation spreading, calculating, even, that Sejanus might disown him to do so. Poor Vladimer, she thought, in a perverse impulse of sympathy, her partner in choices and misuse of powers that led to ruin. Poor possessive, scheming Vladimer, to have so harmed the brother he loved, to have betrayed his archduke in trying to serve him.

“The guns were destroyed by the Lightborn mages—I
felt
it happen.” She grew breathless again, remembering that flight of magic. It still seemed impossible that she had returned to earth whole. “I don’t know how many of them—of the mages—survived, or what they will do now, or what the followers of Duke Mycene and Duke Kalamay will do. Or how many of them are still alive. Duke Mycene—meant to be beside the guns when the attack was launched.” Again Merivan stirred as though to ask a question; again she swallowed it down. “That’s all,” Telmaine said, with a sob. “I’ve been—I’ve been doing my
best
to be Lady Telmaine, Mrs. Balthasar Hearne, good wife, good mother, good society lady. I’ve been—doing what I was told, doing what was expected of me—trying so
hard
. And it’s all gone
wrong
. And I don’t know what to do.”

“There is no call on you to do anything,” Merivan said, recovering some sense of balance in her own authoritarian role. “When it is safe, we will go on to my house, and Theophile—” Her voice stumbled; she recovered. “
No
, he should have been already home. But the children—”

Oh
,
sweet Imogene
, the children. Reaching out felt like stretching a muscle scarred and contracted with injury, but she found Amerdale and Florilinde and the six—yes, six—vitalities of their cousins, and the equally familiar vitality of Merivan’s husband, which she knew from being in his presence the day before. “No,” she said. “No, they’re all all right.”

“Then we will return to my house,” Merivan said.

But Telmaine, reaching farther, had found the archduke. Even at this remove, she sensed his grievous hurt. “No,” she said, breathless.

“Telmaine, it is quite obvious to me—”

“Everyone,” she gasped, “has been telling me what to do. Balthasar. Ishmael.
Vladimer.
You. I
wanted
them to. I thought they knew better and that I could trust them. But they didn’t—and I couldn’t—and I’m the one—” Suddenly she remembered the last hour of her labor with Florilinde, when, after screaming her refusal to go on, after sinking her teeth into Balthasar’s hand to punish his false show of confidence in her, she had found strength she knew she did not have to do the impossible. Now she summoned up her strength for this assertion, for this—birth. “
I
am the one with the power.
I
will live or die with the consequences. So
don’t
tell me what to do.”

Merivan’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “Telmaine,” she said. “You do surprise me.” A silence followed, in which they both inspected that statement.

Telmaine said, in a voice that shook only a little, “I have to make it right, Merivan. I have to go back and make it right. But I’m going to need help.” She cast around the room, a small room, its shabbiness enlivened by decorations—props, really—a fretwork fan, a spray of peacock feathers, surely artificial in their crispness, a large mass of tired silk flowers. But there was a fireplace, and the fire was set. She drew a deep breath, gripping her hands one in the other, and reached tentatively out toward the tinder. The effort felt like pressing on a bruise. With a soft
whumph
of bursting flame, the fire caught. Merivan shrieked, springing from her chair. Telmaine remembered then her sister’s burned arm. “It’s all right,” she said, quickly. “It’s just—” But Merivan, clinging to the chair, sonned her and the fire, her and the fire, her expression raw with fright. Whatever Telmaine had said up until now, this demonstration had made it real. “Meri—”

<
What are you doing?
>

That thought stayed the Lightborn’s assault.

She thought he had gone, with his final cruel sally, but he said, <
You knew? He
—sweet Mother, this is impossible with someone as untrained as you.>

As if his mental voice wasn’t like being rubbed with ground glass, she thought. She sensed him making an effort to contain himself. Pride was at stake, the pride of the trained Temple mage. Another thought jumped, flealike, between them, her opinion of their training, and their principles, that they had neither sensed the Shadowborn nor moved against them. She sensed his sudden, acute attention, a focus sharp as a meat knife. he said.