Lightborn (7 page)

“Unfortunately, my lady, knowing and proving before law are two different matters,” Plantageter said, with some emphasis. “The remains of four men were found in the ruins of the warehouse.” A flush of heat washed over Telmaine as she remembered brushing by the foot of one of the corpses. That realization, that distraction, would have been the death of her and Florilinde, but for Ishmael’s sacrifice.

“Lady Telmaine, did you arrange for that fire to be set, to enable you—or someone else”—as di Brennan shifted in his chair—“to free your daughter?”

“Of course not!” Telmaine said, in what she hoped was the tone of someone hearing that outrageous accusation for the first time.

“Did you bribe anyone to set the fire, with the money in that reticule and your jewelry?”

“My husband gave me this when we were
courting
,” she said in a thin voice. “It would be the last thing I would
ever
—”

“Did Baron Strumheller start the fire?”

Now she was genuinely appalled. “No! Baron Strumheller—” She caught herself; di Brennan’s hand signal was redundant warning. “Baron Strumheller was in
prison
, half the city away.” And, brazenly, “I know he has the reputation of being a mage, but I—I simply don’t believe it.”

“Baron Strumheller’s supposedly fatal collapse occurred at the time the fire began,” he noted, but without any real conviction. “Lady Telmaine, what did you plan to
do
when you confronted those men in the warehouse?”

She would
not
think of Ishmael’s agonized scream in her mind as he had reached across the distance between them to hold back the flames—an impossible effort for a first-rank mage. “I planned to bribe them to free my daughter,” she said, as steadily as she could. “I would have promised them no one would know. They could not know that Master di Maurier had been able to give testimony. Is he—” Her voice wavered. “Is he still alive?”

“I believe so, but if he does live, it will be a miracle. It does make me ask what you thought you were doing, going to the same place.”

She bit her lip. “In truth, Superintendent, I fear I was a little mad. My husband had been beaten, my daughter stolen away from me, and the man who had been helping me find her accused of the vilest crimes.”

“You should have come to us, Lady Telmaine.”

She clutched her gloved hands together. “It was—I was afraid of the publicity, Master Plantageter. Afraid that it would hurt my daughter. Baron Strumheller promised us he could use Lord Vladimer’s networks. And Master di Maurier found her. I do hope he lives. When he told me—Florilinde was all I thought about.”

He leaned back in his chair and his sonn washed deliberately over her. “I cannot decide whether you are a blessed innocent who has used up a lifetime’s luck in a night, or a woman so cunning she has been able to conceal all the traces of her crimes.” He paused, and sonned her again, catching her with her mouth a little open as she sought—truly sought—to find an answer for him. “When did the fire in the warehouse start?”

“As I set foot inside the building.”

“The description was that it was explosive.”

“It may have seemed so from outside,” Telmaine said, steadily, her heart beating hard. She must hold her nerve, hold it with all her strength. If she did not waver, they must take her testimony for what it was, or think the unthinkable. “The downstairs was passable.”

“But the guards did not escape,” he said. “And if there was time for you to reach and free your daughter, there was time for them to flee. Did you have them drugged, Lady Telmaine? Was that what your bribe money was for?”

“No,” she said, cleared the croak out of her voice and said again, clearly, “I did not drug them. I do not know why they did not escape. I paid them no heed. All I could hear”—a shallow gasp, quite unfeigned—“were my child’s cries.”

There was a silence. Plantageter said, in a confiding voice, “I suspect, Lady Telmaine, that not a court in the land would convict you.”

“Do not respond to that, Lady Telmaine,” cautioned di Brennan.

She sonned di Brennan, her brow furrowed in temper. “No court should even
charge
me, sir. I have done nothing wrong.”

There was a silence. She did not dare sonn the man’s expression until his sudden movement startled her into a nervous cast that visualized him rising from his chair. “Thank you for your time, Lady Telmaine.”

Di Brennan rose also. Telmaine remained where she was, resisting the desire to melt into the chair. Di Brennan followed the superintendent to the door but, instead of following him through it, closed the door softly and firmly behind him.

Turning, he sonned her lightly, his face thoughtful. “When I met your husband, I thought him a clever young man. Now I appreciate he has an equally clever wife.”

“I don’t understand you, sir,” Telmaine said, struggling to summon up offense. “I have done nothing wrong. If the Sole God were not watching over me, then his
mother
was.” She regretted the statement immediately: the Mother of All Things Born was the goddess of Lightborn and mages, not of respectable Darkborn. She brought her hand to her lips. “Forgive me,” she said, from behind it.

He said, “Please mind what you say, Lady Telmaine. Even to me.”

Floria woke, unrested, eyes squeezed against the dazzle of the lights overhead. She had slept naked for want of her usual night attire, a thigh-length lace vest, Darkborn-made, that Balthasar had given her as a birthday gift years ago. Tangled sheets bound her legs; the sheet against her back felt clammy. She threw an arm across her face, ignoring the prickling of her shadowed skin, and tried not to taste the inside of her mouth. The thought might be unworthy of the prince’s loyal servant, but she could not help hoping that Isidore had paid just a little for yesterday’s overindulgence.

But the festivities had passed without major incident. Yes, several duels, three with pistols—a deplorable habit adopted from the Darkborn—and two deaths. Many alliances and schemes, some of which would no doubt lead to trouble. Numerous dalliances, some of which would produce inconvenient children. The Lightborn did not have the Darkborn’s sensitivities about legitimacy, since magic could answer questions of paternity, but alliances amongst their brightnesses were of necessity political, and even the brightest were susceptible to base jealousy. But today the guests would begin to disperse, taking with them the most uncouth from the south and the least forgiving from the north, and she could stand down.

At least there was no occasion around breakfast. The business of the princedom must go on, whether or not a son comes of age, and the prince habitually woke early, worked before breakfast, and then ate breakfast privately with one or more intimates. Today, it was his flighty daughter Liliyen. Floria angled her arm to view the clock; it was as early as she feared, given the way she felt, but not, alas, as early as she hoped, also given the way she felt. She kicked free of the sheets, rolled to her feet, and began her morning stretches.

Stepping wide for a side lunge, she bruised her bare foot on one of her own shoes. She caught it up and pitched it beneath the form carrying her court costume before she thought—
she
had not left it there.

She
had not left it there, and none of the palace servants could possibly have come into this room without her knowing. Which left—she began a methodical search of the room, looking for the evidence that would surely be there if one of her own colleagues was counting coup on her. It had to be a game, for if someone had found a way into her room with malevolence in mind, she would not have lived to awaken.

She found nothing, no mocking note or hidden counter. Perhaps, she thought, that was the object, to unsettle her. Sooner or later someone would make a point of letting her know.

She rounded off her exercises in irritable haste and went to bathe. One of the compensations of an overnight stay at the palace was the sybaritic facilities. The huge bathtub and sink were milky porcelain, chipped and marked with the fine frieze of age. They had originally been enspelled to absorb the daylight from the wide window, but subsequent economies replaced that by the usual magical lights in mirrored brackets. By habit, she noted their healthy color and brightness. A light whose store of sunlight was dwindling passed through all the colors of sunset before it went out.

It was too early to open the shutters, still before dawn. She turned away from the light and found herself facing a mirror. She assessed herself with detachment. A woman of more than average height, lean, muscles like straps and cords, bulkier on the right arm and leg. Fine lines of age around eyes and mouth, but only to those who came close. A little softening by time of the contours of breast and buttocks, but only to one who remembered. Shoulder- length hair, not much darkened from the white gold of youth, a fortunate color amongst Lightborn. She should consider it so; it was what made her father notice her mother, all those years ago. Several old scars, white on fair skin. The tattooed mandala of faded yellow and brown that spread across most of her upper abdomen.

She rubbed the mandala lightly. She had not been awake when the asset was cast upon her, the tattoo cut into her skin. Her father’s doing; he knew she would not have consented, otherwise, to assume the asset that had preserved his life and profession until then. Only one member of the White Hand lineage could carry it at any one time.

For the remaining four years of his life, she had tasted his food, too. Then he had set aside his caution, and died. Another had brought the poison to the table, she understood that—and had had her vengeance—but he had brought his indifference to living longer, now that the weakness of age was fully upon him.

On her, the marks of age were slight, the marks of weakness none.

It was, she thought, unfair on a woman: her father was a decade older than herself when he sired her, yet if she were to pass the asset on to a child of her own, that child would have to be conceived soon. The alternative would be to pass it on to a cousin. She could not but find fault with all her young cousins, in some way or other.

She would think about this later, she decided, not for the first time.

Frowning at her vagrant shoes, now resting one across the other, she pulled on underclothes and trousers, blouse, and tunic. The front and rear of the blouse and tunic were opaque, the narrow side panels transparent. The fabric of the sleeves and trousers alternated stripes of translucent white with opaque silver, to muddle an enemy’s eye. Lightborn could not endure too dense a shadow. Black tarpaulin was even a weapon of assassination, though a victim had to be extraordinarily negligent, drugged, or sodden drunk to be taken that way.

As she buttoned the tunic up its side, memory niggled: sometime during the night, she had fastened these very buttons as part of a peculiarly prosaic dream of walking through the brightly lit halls to the prince’s quarters with—something in her hand. All she could think of was a little wood and ivory box that Balthasar had given her for a birthday years ago, filled with a sandalwood perfume cake. She had never told Bal that her asset reacted to the perfume, and the delicately carved wood and ivory were stained and mismatched, ugly to her court-refined eye. Though she still kept the box, because she treasured the friendship. Why she should dream of carrying that to her prince, she did not know, except if it had to do with his comment that the future lay in people like the Darkborn.

She shook her head in self-reproach. Of all the ills that could beset her after long duty and spice- laden banquets, why she should choose to fret over this one, she did not know. Or for that matter, why consider it a nightmare?

She combed out her hair, spun it into a coil at the back of her head, and contained it with a white mesh. Shoes, soft-soled with closed toes and mesh uppers. Glove on right hand, soft suede palm, mesh upper. Sword on left hip, pistol on right. Her great-grandfather had schemed to acquire an asset that would deflect bullets, but he had never been able to persuade the family to support the purchase of another asset, when their fortunes had still to recover from the first. The prince carried such an asset, cast on a talisman for his father. The price had been a province, one of the last pieces of land outside the city owned by the princedom.

Her father had always told her that politics was no concern of a vigilant. But when the impoverishing of the princedom led directly to the southern alliance, it had closed his lips on that argument.

As she opened her door, she heard the screaming. Faintly, from the direction of the prince’s chambers. She sprinted, hand gripping the sword hilt to steady it, through galleries, past where servants were gathering to open the many shutters, once certain of dawn. As she reached the last corner, the screams dwindled to a harsh mewing, more ghastly than the shrieks.

Prince’s consort Helenja and one of the consort’s Vigilance stood before the door to the prince’s rooms. At their feet was the prince’s daughter Liliyen, tumbled onto her side, her head lolling on her arm, her bare hand outstretched to the threshold. Floria noted the faint motion of her breathing, though that meant only that she was not, at the moment, dead. The vigilant was staring into the doorway with a face flayed with horror, fatally oblivious to everything about her. It was from her throat that the mewling came. Helenja turned her head. Her face was whey-hued and moist, her eyes wide to bulging, her broad jaw sagging. Her mouth silently opened and closed like that of a fish dragged into a boat to smother in air.

Slowly, Floria turned toward the door. It stood ajar, pushed wide open. The light from the corridor fanned across the floor and reflected dimly from the near furniture, on the periphery of a room in utter darkness.

A
lone in her rooms, Telmaine picked wearily at a late supper, grilled fish in an herbed butter sauce. She had scant appetite, having eaten a nursery supper with her daughters in an attempt to reconcile them to staying with their cousins. The effort had met with little success: though the nursery itself was familiar, the children sensed her ambivalence at leaving them there. But she could not—she would not—bring them back to a household under such threat as this one.