Lightborn (5 page)

“Telmaine,” Ishmael said, speaking aloud in his distinctive Borders accent. “How good it is t’hear from you. Are you in th’city?”

He sighed; she felt him settle his frame deeper into his own armchair, shaken gently with the pulse of the train. “Well,” he said, “th’order’s gone out, and that’s the important part of it. I’d a worry that th’archduke would not be sure of Vladimer, with th’ensorcellment, but it’s only me he doesn’t trust.”

She had been trying, so hard, not to let him know that. Foolish to think she could, when he’d lived with society’s judgment against his magic all his adult life.

She sensed his amusement. “Telmaine, if I cannot outfox a city agent in my own lands, a drafty cell’s no less than I deserve.” She nearly protested—the last drafty cell had nearly been the death of him. “But please be so good as t’let my lawyers know that th’charges still need answered.” She felt his attention shift. “Your husband asks, how are th’little ones?”

The knock on the door brought her upright with a violent start, mage sense skittering out to confirm all was well with the archduke and Vladimer. She brushed Vladimer’s vitality closely enough to judge he was asleep, though uncomfortably so. The knock had to come again before she remembered that she had no maid to answer the door.

It was the apothecary who had helped Ishmael escape, a narrow-faced, stooped young man in a second- or thirdhand physician’s frock coat, accompanied by two footmen. “M’lady,” he said, preempting her greeting, or their introduction. “I need you to put in the word for me.”

“Yes?” she said, coolly.

“There’s a question, as t’why Lord Vladimer wanted me with him.”

Work or a prison cell, she recalled Vladimer saying, with his mordant humor. Unfortunately, those hearing it would have no means of disambiguation in Vladimer’s absence. Her mage sense registered him as Darkborn, exuding common anxiety. He had smuggled the comatose Ishmael out of the prison, and come with him to the summer palace to guard his back. Now he was jobless, homeless, and likely penniless, having aided the escape of a fugitive from the law—and no doubt expecting that the aristocratic Lady Telmaine would neither appreciate nor empathize. He would be quite right were she any other aristocrat.

But she was not; she knew exactly what it was to stand in peril of losing everything by her own rightful action. And he had saved Ishmael’s life.

“I will take responsibility for him until Lord Vladimer decides what he wants to do with him,” she said, calmly. “Please arrange servants’ quarters. Kingsley, a word.”

“M’name’s Kip,” the young man said.

The corner of her mouth tucked in. She had been there when he’d explained the lack of patronymic—in terms most unflattering to his mother—to Lord Vladimer. “Not in my service, it’s not,” she said, firmly, and stood back to let him in.

He certainly had none of the instincts of a servant in a noble household, for he seemed oblivious to the lack of a maid or chaperone. He did, however, have the basic breeding not to throw himself into a chair unbidden. “My thanks, m’lady. I thought it was to be the prison cell for sure.”

She settled back into her chair with a loud murmur of fabric, not quite sure whether to bid him to sit. He decided the matter for her by dropping abruptly down on the carpet to sit cross- legged. From there, he sonned her, with a lighter touch than she expected. “Magister di Studier said I was to put myself at
your
service.”

Her lips parted in surprise, both at the instructions and at the reference to Ishmael by his seldom-used mage’s title.

“It was while you and your husband were saying good-bye. He hunted me up, gave me orders.” He grinned like a street urchin, as at a private joke. “Promised to pay me the going rate this time; I’ll believe that when it happens.”

The grin, and the insult to Ishmael’s generosity, offended her. “You will be paid, I assure you.”

The grin fell away; his expression was pure feral River-rat. “I’m not doing this for pay, your ladyship. I lost a child when the Rivermarch burned, a little child who’d done no one harm in all her brief days. Whoever were that set the fire, I want to pi—trample on their ashes.”

Telmaine caught her breath, thinking how easily her own child could have died in fire. “I understand.”

“How’s Lord V.?” he said, abruptly. “That wound of his needed properly dealt with.”

“It has been. The archduke made sure of it.”

“Ensorcellment, a bullet, and then fire.” He could not control his shudder at the last, and Telmaine remembered the raw terror in his scream of warning. She wondered how close his escape from the Rivermarch blaze had been. “They want him dead about as badly as they want Magister di Studier. You heard about the poison, and the knife, in the prison?”

“I heard,” she said, certain that he was in some way testing her. Did he know the reason for Ishmael’s final collapse?

“M’lady, let me be straight with you,” he said, setting a hand flat on the carpet. “I think we should contact the Broomes. They’re the leaders of the Darkborn city mages, and they do a fine job with the magic and the politics, for all the father’s daft and the brother’s a slavering republican. It was Magistra Phoebe Broome brought di Studier round, her and Magistra Hearne—” She could not but start, hearing her married name coupled to
that
title, but he was referring to Balthasar’s sister, Olivede. “They’re two women as staunch as any you could have on your side. They’ll be able to sense those Shadowborn, and if there’s any trace of what they did to Lord V. That’s not something you or I can do.”

Telmaine gulped, as impressed as she was appalled by the man’s audacity at making such a suggestion to
her
, Telmaine Hearne, Lady Telmaine, and suddenly, dizzily, terrified at the thought that he might suspect. “That—that decision is for Lord Vladimer to make.”

“It’s a decision he’s got to live to make,” the apothecary said grimly. “We’re well out of our league here, your ladyship. If I’d any doubt of it before they set light to th’train, I’ve none now. It’s a blessed miracle we all survived.”

She swallowed. “I will—think about that,” she said, lying. The last thing she wanted to think about was the Darkborn mages. When they had healed Ishmael, how much had they learned about the
reason
for his overreach? Had Ishmael himself already inadvertently betrayed her?

The apothecary did not, it seemed, wish to challenge her further. She said, “I want you—I want you to get close to Lord Vladimer. I know you aren’t a mage—you can’t sense the Shadowborn—but you do know and believe in what we’re fighting.”

“Thought you’d say that,” the apothecary said, and pushed himself to his feet. “He’ll have doctors, y’know.”

“You seem to me an inventive young man,” she said, not rising.

“I’m a right hungry one,” he amended. “Soon as I can get fed, I’m yours.”

F
loria White Hand leaned against the curved glass of the high balcony, gazing over the palace ballroom below. In stately, rippling rounds the dancers paced out their steps, the Lightborn court uniting to carouse at the coming of age of their prince’s heir. The bold colors of the north intermingled with the muted earth hues of the south, and gems sparkled in the lights mounted at every joint of the coffered ceiling, every bracket in the walls and around the balcony columns. No shadows were allowed in this hall.

Though how they could dance after that hours- long feast, Floria could not imagine. All she herself wanted was a quiet place to negotiate with her outraged stomach.

Beside her, Prince Isidore’s voice said softly, “He’s come on well, hasn’t he?”

The ruler of the Lightborn leaned against the balcony at her side as casually as if he were merely one of the Prince’s Vigilance and not their earthly master, robed and cauled in the royal blue and star sapphires that only the prince and his lineage were allowed to wear. The captain of the Vigilance guarded his back, and two senior lieutenants his right and left, protecting his person and, for the moment, his peace.

She followed Isidore’s gaze to the center of the dance, to find the tall, gangly figure of Fejelis, his heir. Fejelis danced as he did almost everything else, with attention, precision, and a perceptible hesitation before committing himself. He was invariably a half beat behind the music. She found it illuminating to observe the effect on his partners.

“I like to see this one from above,” the prince remarked. “For the effect of the waves. I’ve been told it goes back centuries, before the Sundering, and was an invocation of the sea.”

She made a sound more dutiful than interested.

“You look a little wan, Mistress Floria.”

“Indigestion, my prince,” Floria said.

“Ah,” he said, with a trace of chagrin. The heir’s mixed heritage had been celebrated in food as well as decoration, music, and dance. As a palace vigilant, daughter of generations of vigilants and assassins, Floria’s duty was to guard the life of her prince and those he designated. Several generations ago, an ambitious head of the White Hand lineage had contracted with the Mages’ Temple to supply and maintain an asset of immunity to poisons for a member of the White Hand lineage. The cost had beggared and the controversy divided the lineage, but the asset had descended first to Floria’s father, and then to herself. With it had come the duty of being the prince’s food taster, and as such, she had to follow where his tastes led.

Unfortunately, where the prince had been able to develop first a tolerance and then a fondness for the highly spiced fare of the south, Floria had been unable to do likewise. The asset that protected her, and by extension the prince, seemed unable to distinguish between certain spices and poison.

“Oh, I’ll live,” she said, rubbing her stomach.

“White fish in milk tomorrow,” the prince promised. She made a face, as he no doubt expected.

The heir was dancing with one of his southern cousins, a voluptuous young woman whose lush brown hair had been woven into a stiff cornice with beads and gems. The girl was asserting the rhythm, her bare stiff back expressing her resentment at being shown up by her partner. His eyes were fixed politely on her face. Beside Floria, the prince chuckled. “I shouldn’t be surprised if he were figuring out which bit of that hair to tug on to bring the whole lot tumbling down. I could tell him, I suppose, but I think I’ll leave him to find out for himself.”

She glanced sideways at him, knowing that there was nothing idle in the remark. His eyes had strayed to where his consort was sitting amongst her entourage, on the dais at the far end of the hall. Helenja’s hairstyle was even more ornate than her young cousin’s, its faded roan length woven into an ornate sculpture evocative of a shell.

The marriage between north and south had been a political and economic necessity. It had been intensely unpopular with the northerners, and the consort’s relatives had intrigued against Isidore from the start, appalling the court. There was a code and style to deposition of leaders. Two of Helenja’s brothers and several of their supporters had died at the hands of the Prince’s Vigilance before the southerners had learned. Yet by the glint in his eye, the prince was thinking of the mischief he might make with that sculpted hair. South and north might conspire against each other, but the man and woman themselves had found an accommodation, even mutual affection.

Floria wished him well, tonight of all nights. Helenja’s mood was bound to be difficult. Of their children, Fejelis was far from Helenja’s favorite—that was his brother, Orlanjis, prancing through the elements of the dance at the far end of the room from brother and mother. He was a handsome boy, much more so than his brother, growing evenly from a compact, appealing child into a well-shaped, winning youth. His auburn hair was intricately braided and wound close to his head, like a princely caul. Not by chance, Floria was sure. Fejelis’s sandy hair was no more than shoulder- length, blunt cut in the northern style—as short, as his mother complained, as a servant’s—and swung free as he spun lightly on his feet. A single star sapphire bounced on its chain at his throat.

“Do you remember when Fejelis cut his hair?” the prince said. There were times she had to wonder whether he didn’t have a trace of magic himself, but Isidore was nothing if not observant. “Looked like a new-hatched chick, he did, all the yellow down standing up in tufts. That was the day I was sure he was going to be his own man. . . . You will watch out for him, Floria, won’t you?”

He would be thinking, as she was, of the consequences of that haircut. Three days later, Fejelis was poisoned by members of his mother’s retinue. He would not have lived but for luck, and a mage’s willingness to flout the law. The outrage around the poisoning of a child had one good consequence—it divided the southerners and resulted in exile or execution for the worst of them. Helenja might countenance the assassination of her consort, but she would not countenance the murder of her son.