Shadowborn (30 page)

There was a silence—in which Vladimer must remember, as Telmaine did, Sylvide’s death—followed by a rasp of clothing, a snap of a holster. Telmaine’s sonn caught the passing of the revolver, hilt first, from his hand to hers. “Thank you, Lord Vladimer. I would feel better if you would let one of us deal with your wound. You would think more clearly if you were not in so much pain.”

“That is not acceptable.”

“No,” she said with a sigh, checking the revolver’s safety before slipping it into her own pocket. “I suppose not.”

Should Telmaine mention that Lord Vladimer’s cane was as lethal as a revolver in his hands? She had been there when he had killed a man with it. She found she didn’t dare.

“What do you want us to do when we pull into the station?” the mage said.

“I would suggest you leave nonmageborn to the railway crew. You deal with mages. I would much prefer that you immobilize rather than kill them, since we need information. However, the magical aspect of this is your command; I cannot advise.”

Arrival in Strumheller was a welcome anticlimax, in one sense. There was no Shadowborn ambush waiting for them. But in another, it was immediately apparent that this was no normal night. They disembarked into a cordon of railway workers and were promptly set upon by a brace of reporters from the local broadsheet and several officials from the railway. On the opposite platform, Telmaine could sonn a shifting crowd and the panting profile of a waiting train. Vladimer raised his voice over the racket to order Phoebe to secure carriages for their party to take them to the manor, and insisted on being taken to the telegraph office before he would answer any questions. The reporters descended upon Farquhar, demanding to know who they were and why they should be traveling with Lord Vladimer, and were they aware of what had happened to Stranhorne, and what were these reports of the archduke having been mortally injured. The strongest living Darkborn mage beamed at them, whipped four beanbags from his pockets, and began to juggle. Telmaine’s momentary relief that he was not going to tell them anything swiftly passed when the reporters switched their attention to her; in a traveling dress made for an archduchess, she was the obvious anomaly amongst the plainly dressed mages. She backed up under their barrage; reporters were a species the sheltered Lady Telmaine had little experience of.

She was saved by an incursion of armed men. Farquhar Broome’s beanbags swooped down into his hands—something hopefully not too conspicuous to the nonmages around—and she felt a surge of magic between the others, a massing of defensive powers. A man in railway uniform thrust himself between her and the reporters, setting his back to them and addressing her. “M’lady, we need t’clear the platform for an unscheduled train from Stranhorne. They’ve got wounded.”

“Wounded?” she managed.

“Aye. There’s bad trouble in Stranhorne.”

Trouble . . . “What,”
she said, aristocratic accent to the fore, “is happening in Stranhorne?”

“Don’t rightly know,” said the station guard tersely. “If you’ll go into th’concourse, you can talk to th’agent there—he’ll tell you what’s possible for getting y’back up the line. Excuse me.” He shouldered past her.

“This is the second evacuation train,” the younger of the two reporters said at her shoulder. “First one came through with the worst injured, children, physicians, the young baronet and baronette—”

“Physicians,” Telmaine caught. “Where—where are they? Did you speak to anyone? Did you hear anything of a Dr. Balthasar Hearne?”

“Hearne? Wasn’t he the man that—” She could not miss their suddenly keener interest. “Is he a relative of yours, m’lady?”

“Dr. Hearne is my husband,” she said. “So if you would kindly tell anything you know, I would be much obliged.”

“My colleague was going to say that a man by that name had been arrested by Lord Mycene and—taken off toward Stranhorne. Why was your husband—”

The train, reeking of smoke and burned
something
, drew into the station. The younger reporter said, “That engine’s a Stetler nine-oh-four. What are they doing running a nine-oh-four on this line?”

“Best they had, likely.”

In a long, expiring squeal of brakes, the train halted. The doors crashed open, swinging back to rebound off the train’s flanks. Men jumped down, began lifting down children, women, injured men and women. Someone shouted, “Help here!” Telmaine, straining, sought any line of profile or plane of cheek that would identify Balthasar before extending her mage sense in desperation. The sense of pain, of panic, of grief, of terror, nearly made her cry out. Her knees buckled. Phoebe’s voice in her mind said, <
Don’t
open yourself!> and the shock of that intrusion jerked her rigid. She recoiled, both from the crowd and it.

Phoebe shouldered her way through the crowd, using deference to her femaleness, and where that failed, her height and elbows. She put her mouth close to Telmaine’s ear. “Some of us are going to stay here, if they’ll accept our help for the worst hurt.”

“Mistress—Miss—,” said the younger reporter.

“Magistra,” growled Phoebe. “And if you don’t want your beer to taste like horse piss for the next month, you’ll keep your next words behind your teeth.”

Vladimer, accompanied by a four-man guard, arrived before the reporter found a rejoinder. “We’re leaving.”

The guard swallowed up Telmaine and Phoebe; Phoebe attached herself to Lord Vladimer’s side, hastily explaining the mages’ deployment, while Telmaine wavered along behind. She did not know what had shaken her most: her sense of the refugees or having Phoebe address her so.

They arrived to be greeted by an argument in Borders accents so broad as to be unintelligible. The mages’ end was being upheld by a fiery man in his late twenties; Telmaine remembered, from the flurry of introduction in Minhorne, that his name was Bryse, and that he came from Strumheller. Vladimer interrupted crisply, “I’ll pay what they’re asking. Let’s get going.”

The collective surprise over his ability to make sense of the argument was good enough to get them aboard; Vladimer, Telmaine, Phoebe, and Farquhar shared one carriage. Vladimer said, “They’ll need something to make up their losses on the Stranhorne passengers. Horses have to eat, never mind men.” With one of his thin smiles: “At one point in my misspent youth, I drove a cab for hire. Excellent way of gathering information.” He paused; he did not need to be a mage to be aware of his companions’ nervous anticipation of his next words. “Stranhorne Manor and the lands east of it have been overrun. Baron Stranhorne himself is believed dead. He and others used explosives to set fire to and collapse the manor to trap the Shadowborn who forced entry. My informants say that the explosions were probably premature, not entirely unexpected given the Shadowborn’s casual way with fire. Ishmael, Ferdenzil Mycene, and the young Stranhornes led a fighting retreat to Stranhorne Crosstracks. Unfortunately, although Ishmael escaped with the others from Stranhorne, he made a bid to reach survivors from the baron’s party, and has not been heard of since.”

On an exhale, Phoebe Broome said, “No.”

“And Balthasar?” Telmaine heard herself say in a thin voice.

“No one who knew your husband, or knew of him, had reported to the railway authorities. Perhaps we will learn more when we arrive at the manor.”

Tam rolled on his side in the hard bed, trying to find a less painful position. He’d been born a peasant and spent his young-adult years one meal away from hunger and one mischance away from prison, so he wasn’t soft, but the overreach had left him aching in bone, muscle, and joint. If he regained his former station, he was buying new mattresses for this household.

It wasn’t his aching body that kept him awake. Nor had he retreated to bed purely because he felt awful. If he had stayed in the main room, either Jovance or Fejelis would have asked him what had happened between him and the high masters. Jovance, whatever her bitter differences with the Temple, was a high-ranked mage, and Fejelis had a keen eye for deception. They would realize very soon that what he had supposedly done was impossible.

He had already been exhausted when the high masters summoned him, exhausted by grief at Lukfer’s death and from annulling the Shadowborn death magic that riddled the ruins of the tower. He had welcomed the masters’ examination, desperate that they should know what he knew—until he realized that, horrific as the shattering of the tower had been for him, it had been far more so for them. Lukfer had warned him that the archmage and the oldest high masters—centuries old themselves—had received the memories of mages who remembered the first years after the Curse. Only the earthborn’s utter dependence on the lights they created had saved mages from extinction then.

I should have warned Fejelis,
he thought, made him understand how their friends among the artisans threatened not only the Temple’s current wealth and status by their experiments with generating light from electricity, but raised atavistic terrors in ancient minds.

He had struggled at the end, which had decided his fate. He still did not know who had sent Perrin running to warn Fejelis that the high masters planned to strip his magic and probably his mind from him. Perhaps she truly did not intend Fejelis harm, since she had tried to warn him when she realized the treachery planned in her name. By then it was too late. Tam had been bound, body and magic, able to hear everything and do nothing. He had heard Fejelis argue for Tam’s life, heard him tell the high masters outright he knew about the Shadowborn and their powerlessness against their magic, and heard him appeal for the formation of an alliance. He had heard Prasav accuse Fejelis of conspiring to undermine the Temple, and offer Fejelis and Tam himself as scapegoats for the Shadowborn’s crimes. He had realized, from the silence of the mage’s spokeswoman—who with one touch could have confirmed Fejelis’s innocence, and who
knew
Tam’s—that Fejelis was about to die.

And then he felt the archmage’s magic slip through the binding like a sharp knife, felt the archmage’s strength extended for him to grasp. He had swatted aside the crossbow bolts, reared up, and seized and
lifted
Fejelis—and Orlanjis, too, apparently—and dropped them all here. Here in the Borders, where Lukfer had brought his granddaughter six years ago.

Once more he should be grateful for Fejelis’s steadiness. If he’d been alone, he would have died at sunset, sprawled unconscious on the bracken beside the railway tracks.

Instead, he lay on a hard bed and waited for the high masters to find him. Or for Fejelis or Jovance to ask that question.

Overspent, aching, preoccupied, he missed the first questing touch of magic. A newly familiar magic, tainted with the sense of their enemies, but fundamentally Darkborn.

He felt her sense him.

Without an introduction, Telmaine would never have known the woman who greeted them as Ishmael’s sister. She was so unlike him: dainty, pretty, and fashionably dressed. But Noellene di Studier did have her brother’s phlegmatic temperament; she received them—the archduke’s illegitimate brother, Telmaine, and a posse of mages—without fuss or fluster, directed her housekeeper to find everyone suitable rooms, and escorted Vladimer, Phoebe, and Telmaine into a large, well-appointed apartment to meet the Stranhornes.

The apartment was kept at sickroom heat by a fire in the grate. A lanky young man, no more than a teenager, lay on a couch, his shoulder and chest heavily bandaged. A woman in her early twenties sat beside him, coaxing him to drink from a medicine glass. She wore a maternity dress—she was past the stage where it was proper for her to be out in society—and riding boots, her hair woven back in a simple braid.
Wife?
No, too close a resemblance; the two shared the same wide, slightly prominent brow, the same strong features.

“Lord Vladimer Plantageter,” Noellene said. “May I introduce Baronette Laurel and Baronet Boris Stranhorne. My friends Lord Vladimer Plantageter, Mrs. Telmaine Hearne, and”—the barest hesitation—“Magistra Phoebe Broome.”

Telmaine heard the baronette draw in her breath sharply, not at Phoebe Broome’s name, but her own.

“As you are,” said Vladimer firmly, as the baronet moved to push back his covers. “You will accomplish nothing by fainting at my feet.”
You should know,
thought Telmaine, reproachfully. Had Vladimer not been faint with pain and blood loss when he first tried to convince the archduke of the emergency and Ishmael’s innocence, Ishmael and Balthasar might be with them now.

Vladimer allowed Noellene di Studier to move a chair in place for him and sat down, leaving the baronette to seat the rest of them. Telmaine could not prevent herself wondering, albeit fleetingly, whether Noellene knew that Phoebe Broome had been her brother’s mistress.

“Lord Vladimer,” Laurel Stranhorne said, extending a hand to him. He took it, dipped his head, and released it, a sketch of courtesy. “It is an honor finally to meet you. Ishmael has spoken of you often. I can offer you a summary, and then explain more fully as you need. Ishmael preferred his reports that way—the essentials first, then action, if need be, and then the details.” Her smile was almost too fleeting for them to catch the quiver at its corners.

“Ishmael always has a sound grasp of priorities,” said Vladimer, with a suggestion of warmth. “Go on.”

“Stranhorne Manor and, as far as we know, the villages to the south and west beyond, were overrun by the Shadowborn almost a full night ago,” the baronette said. Her studied detachment was effortful. “We had scant warning, and still don’t know the extent of the force against us—it consisted of Shadowborn, animals, and . . . ensorcelled Darkborn. The leaders were mages. We took in those of our people who had managed to reach us before we had to close the gates, and set to defend the manor. We had been stockpiling munitions in case the Isles asked for our help.” Vladimer’s expression did not change at that admission. “We tucked them away in the cellars of the manor when Lord Mycene arrived. When the manor came under heavy attack, our men moved the explosives to structural points within the manor. The plan was that if the Shadowborn forced entry, our father”—she stopped, pressed her lips together, and composed herself to go on—“our father and others were to fire the munitions while the rest of us broke out through the front gate and made a dash for the Crosstracks. Father and the others meant to get clear, but the Shadowborn were using fire. We think the explosions were premature.” The baronet threw his undamaged arm over his face. His sister slipped her hand into his and squeezed. “We were attacked twice on the way to the Crosstracks and lost another twenty or thirty people. But they didn’t move on us during the day, and we’re evacuating as many as we can tonight. We’ve had to fight off raids on our trains, but we have succeeded so far.”