Shadowborn (35 page)

“You might as well wake up,” a man’s voice said. “I know you’re faking; I’d do the same in your place.”

He might have taken the voice for Balthasar Hearne’s, except that it was crisper and more forceful in delivery, and slightly deeper in timbre. Without moving, Ishmael said, “Lysander Hearne, is it?”

He rolled over on the sheets, propped himself up on his elbow, and sonned the speaker. He perched on a stool well out of lunging reach, one foot hooked on the crossbar, revolver resting on his knees. The man’s resemblance to Balthasar Hearne was notable, though he was sinewy rather than slight, and casually dressed in clothes that would let him move freely. There was about him no taint of Shadowborn, only the air of a man who lived hard and wary and on the edge of the law.

“So you’ve met my weakling brother,” the man noted.

“’Twas your weakling brother set your plans in disarray.”

Lysander Hearne snorted. “And which particular plans are those?”

Ishmael, reclining, spread his free hand. “Th’ones upset by the birth of Shadowborn-got sons to Tercelle Amberley.”

Muscles tensed in Lysander Hearne’s face, enough to be noticeable, not quite enough to constitute an expression. “It so happens,” he said, levelly, “those weren’t
our
plans.” He paused. “You’re very calm. Case you don’t recall, you were dead as mutton back there.”

As an effort to disconcert him, that missed its mark entirely, because he had just realized something far more disconcerting. Carefully, he turned his magic on himself, eased vitality from his bones to his tissues . . . and felt nothing. There was no breathtaking pain, no faltering heart, no sense of his life draining uncontrollably into his magic. He caught a breath, shaken with equal measures joy and fear. Not even Magister Broome had been able to undo the damage done to him. Now he had the measure of the mage who held him prisoner.

And something else was gone, as though it had never existed: the Call.

So he was where the Call wanted him. Nowhere he recognized, in a bedroom easily as large as the baronial suite in Strumheller, furnished with pieces whose style and materials he had met only in museums. There was not a join or a seam in them, not in the curving headboard, the rounded edges of the dressing table, or the bowed front of the wardrobe.
More to the point,
he thought,
none of them can be easily moved.
This was no traveling camp.

But the bite of the arid air on his throat had already told him he was no longer in the Borders.

He tossed the covers back, swung his legs over the edge of the bed onto solid floor, and stood. “Now what?”

Hearne jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “There’s the wardrobe. Our lady wants you.”

“Your lady?”

“Lysander’s and mine,” said a woman’s voice from beyond the end of the bed. A long step carried him sideways, away from her, and his pivot placed both of them in front of him.

She came forward with no apparent embarrassment at his nakedness, a lovely, foul-tainted creature in a dress faithfully Darkborn. The gown covered her from high collar to cuffs to ankles in layers of silk and lace, and if he recalled his sister’s digressions on fashion, she was at least a decade outdated. In the Darkborn manner of a mage, she wore gloves. Her face had a sculpted refinement, with full lips, a narrow, straight nose, wide brows, and distinct cheekbones. A face such as he had sonned on celebrated actresses and lords’ mistresses, who were often one and the same.

“M’lady,” Ishmael said, dipping his head.

“Charming,” she said, “but insincere, Ishmael di Studier.” Arms folded, head tilted, she added, “Given that you greeted me by firing point-blank at me.”

He set his jaw, trying to hold his composure at the aura of magic around her. Its mere strength would have set his head spinning, even without the Shadowborn aura of it.

“I’d thank you for saving my life,” he said at last, “if I thought I’d like what you mean me for.”

“Ah, well, Ishmael. That’s not for me to explain.”

“And your name is, m’lady, since you make so free with mine?”

“Call me Ariadne.” She turned her head toward Lysander Hearne. “Sander, if you would?”

Lysander frowned, but pushed himself off his stool and went to the wardrobe, producing from its depths an evening suit in the Darkborn style, more formal than Ishmael would have chosen for himself. “Put it on. Or we’ll do it for you.”

“Need t’relieve myself,” he said, accepting it from Lysander’s hand, and turned his back on them to walk, with studied steadiness, into the bathroom. As he expected, there was no way out, and no weapon more threatening than hard soap and a back brush. He’d go before their lady as stubbled as a vagrant.

He managed the suit, though not nearly as well as his manservant would have. It was tight across the shoulders, but otherwise a passable fit. He gave the cravat his best shot and then let it lie, returning to present himself for their inspection. Lysander Hearne passed him socks and shoes, and he sat down on the bed to pull them on.

“Are you hungry?” she said, the social hostess.

Not with that magic around him. “I’d sooner get m’fate settled, if you’d be so kind.”

Lysander gave an odd smile. “Oh, she is that.”

With Lysander at Ishmael’s elbow and Ariadne at Lysander’s, Ishmael left the room, finding himself in a corridor as wide and fine as any in the archducal palace. Except for one feature: windows with shutters turned back. He tried not to be disconcerted by the gusts of warm wind, and wrestled briefly with the urge to ask what time of night—or day—it might be, but pride precluded that. Lysander Hearne wasn’t alone in his posturing. Otherwise, Shadowborn stronghold or no, it had the feel of any large household. Of all the perils he had associated with capture by the Shadowborn, being run over by a dashing housemaid with a stack of fresh-laundered towels was not among them.

Ariadne’s magic thrust open a door, and they herded him into a wide receiving room. Lysander said, “Ishmael di Studier, my lady.”

His sonn caught movement at the far end of the room. A harsher stroke outlined the woman standing on a raised dais. Her simple dress, a knee-length tunic and trousers suitable for this warmth, was far more revealing to sonn than a Darkborn woman’s. His first absurd reaction was chagrin at the impropriety. He halted.

Lysander Hearne tapped his elbow. “Go on.”

“No need.” The woman forestalled his response. “Thank you, Lysander, Ariadne. Please go now.”

Lysander bowed and withdrew, as quietly as Ishmael himself might have. Ishmael heard a sandal brush tile and sonned the woman as she stepped down from the dais. She was small, her figure described by the straight lines of childhood or age. Her hair was short and untidy, a jumble of crisp curls; her mouth was generous and her nose, almost snubbed, no balance for it; her cheekbones were flat and indeterminate. An ordinary face with a winning smile. If it were her true face, any more than her apparent age were her true age.

“Ishmael di Studier,” she said, pleasantly. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a very long time.”

He had no sense of great strength about her, but that very absence was suggestive. He set his stance, hands relaxed and open at his side. “You’ll pardon me if I say I’ve had no like wish.”

“Apparently not,” she said. “I’ve seldom known anyone to hold out against Ariadne’s Call so long.”

“Then that’ll give you the measure of my will t’cooperate, if it’s cooperation y’want, or submit, if it’s submission y’want.” For all the good it might do him.

“Come here and sit down,” she said, “and we’ll talk.”

A quarter century of rough work had taught him to conserve his strength. He followed her out onto an open balcony, dense with plants in pots and planters, and took the chair she indicated.

“Have my people seen to you?” she said.

“Aye, as much as I’d allow,” he acknowledged.

A feathery eyebrow lifted, but she did not inquire. They sat in silence, each waiting out the other.

“What is it y’want with me?” he said at last. “You’ve gone to some trouble, it seems, to get me.”

“What do you think I want you for?” she said, temporizing.

Ishmael shrugged. “We’ve always thought th’ones who followed th’Call wound up in something’s larder or someone’s belly.” She frowned, but did not contradict him. “It comes t’me now, meeting Hearne there, that you’ve another use for Darkborn. But I’ll not serve you willingly, whatever it is you want of me.”

“And who do you think I am?” she said.

He tapped his abdomen with a lightly closed hand, conveying part of his answer: a mage, and one powerful enough to pull him back from a death he thought assured. “I fought you for twenty-five years. I thought t’die fighting you.”

“You would have. Does that not tell you something?”

“It’s hardly worth you making a point of raising me only t’break me. My people will regret my fate, but nothing you do t’me will weaken them. And if you send me back to them ensorcelled, they’ll know.”

“Ishmael,” she said, gently, “you fear all the wrong things of me.” There was something in her voice that chilled him—not merely that she deflected, but did not deny he had reason to fear. “My name, which you are too stubborn to ask for, is Isolde.” She paused, waiting for recognition. Then with slight resignation, said, “My mother was Imogene.”

As the name of the mage attached to the Curse, the supposed leader of those who had worked the great Sundering of peoples, it had been not been used on either side of sunrise for eight hundred years.

“Think it through, Ishmael,” she invited.

All he could think of was that Xavier Stranhorne had been right.

Yet he could hear Vladimer asking why, if the Shadowborn had such might, would they hide in the Shadowlands all these years. Why only now move against the north, and in such an oblique, chaotic way?

“I’m the younger sister. The one who did not make it into the history books.”

“Aye, well, it’s not usual that the living do,” Ish said, still suspended between belief and disbelief. “And the Shadowborn. What are they t’you? Are they your making?”

“But th’Call. That was your handmaiden’s. As I said, if th’Call’s how you bring people t’serve you, I’m not minded to.” Futile bravado; ensorcellment could make him serve, willing or no. He drew a deep breath and steadied his tone. “Explain t’me what you want, if y’would.”

There was a silence. His sonn caught the small smile curling the corners of her mouth. His mother had smiled so when he pleased her. She had been a sensitive, sophisticated woman who had no patience with childishness.

That, too, she could no doubt pluck out of his mind, if so inclined.

“What do you already know about the Sundering, Ishmael?”

“I’m no scholar,” he said. “A scholar I know”—no need to tell them that Xavier Stranhorne was dead, if they did not already know—“says th’final break had something t’do with geography or perhaps weather. But I’ve th’experience t’know it was probably nothing of th’sort at root. Factions, ambitions, rivalries; whether it’s dukes or dockside gangs or market stallholders or mages, it’s the same.”

“Not
quite
, Ishmael.”

“I’ll have t’take your word for it. How long have I been here?”

“Less than a day, Ishmael. Be still.” He was not aware of having moved, but inside, yes, he had reared up at the realization that time had passed without him. “They took Stranhorne Manor, but moved no further yet.”

“Not allies of yours?”

“Definitely not allies of ours.”

“Do y’mean t’oppose them, or do y’mean just to stand by?”

“That,” she said, “may depend on you.”

“And how’s that?” he fired back before he could think better of it.

She straightened up. “I’m afraid you will have to put up with some history. At the time of the Sundering,” she said, in a voice that was clear and somehow younger, “I was a child of eight. Imogene and her followers knew that laying the Curse would burn them out, if not kill them. Yet for the Curse to survive them, it had to be anchored in vitality and magic. For the anchoring in magic, they chose nine of their children—younger brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren.”

He could imagine what Phoebe Broome would have said to that. The Broomes were fiercely principled in their use of magic. “Y’make the distinction between vitality and magic,” he said. It had been deliberate enough to catch his ear, whether she meant it to or not. “And th’vitality?”

“In everyone born into it. Could you imagine it being done any other way?”

If he considered only the execution, he could not. A mage, even a low-ranked mage such as he himself had been—was—could draw on another’s vitality as well as his own, whether mage or nonmage. There was a cost; he was always laid up for days if he pushed himself into overreach. The Broomes’ commune’s code of contact prohibited them from doing so except when it made the difference between life and death, and all involved had given full, knowledgeable consent. The Lightborn Temple did not even allow that between mageborn and earthborn, although he had heard rumors of the practice behind mages. But a work of magic that drew on the vitality of all those living and yet to be born, with magic that was anchored in children . . . “And th’purpose of it.” Ishmael growled. “Th’Curse.”

“Revenge,” the woman said, sounding slightly surprised. “Imogene’s revenge upon everyone who failed her, betrayed her, let her daughter die.”

“And was th’Curse meant to turn out this way?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Because it makes cursed”—he caught himself too late to avoid the idiom—“little sense. Why, if they’d t’doom themselves in the setting of the Curse, not simply kill and be done with it?”