Shadowborn (43 page)

“Did nobody try to stop her . . . Imogene?”

“Oh yes, and either joined her or died refusing.
That
was the war between mages, there, between those who’d joined Imogene and those who opposed her. To ensure the Curse would survive them, Imogene anchored it in the vitality of everyone born into it, and made her and her followers’ children the keystones of the magic. Of those, seven survived the first century. Six were alive at the end of the third. Four after the fifth. Two at the eighth.”

Magic anchored in the vitality of another,
one of the lost skills that the high masters had tried to retrieve for generations. He knew how the high masters would react to this, greedy as they were. “And those two are Emeya and . . .”

“Imogene’s younger daughter, Isolde.”

“And you are? ”

“Emeya’s great-great-grandson.
She
was so clearly deranged that even the other children knew it, so they kept her under ensorcellment. In the end, they were too few. Five hundred years had passed while she slept. You can imagine what that did for her. She let herself mature enough to bear a son, and then let others do the bearing for her.”

Five hundred years and then five generations . . . This man might be older than the archmage’s three hundred years. He had the strength for such longevity. “And Isolde? ”

Neill released a long breath through his nose. “Imogene’s other daughter, the one who was not the favorite, the one of whom nothing was expected. I’m sure her mother would have been surprised to find Isolde had outlived them all. I don’t think she’s sane, either.”

And how much of that should he believe, given that between Emeya and Isolde there was at least rivalry and possibly outright war? He wished he had Fejelis here—the prince made a study of the ways people revealed themselves. Mages could grow lazy.

“Why, after all these centuries, should the two of you be looking north? Why attack the manor? ”

“Emeya decided that Atholaya was too small for the two of them.” The tone was easy, but the shift of his eyes in their deep sockets betrayed a lie. Then he sighed and leaned back on his hands. “Emeya is afraid of Isolde.”

That might be truth, but the Temple mage distrusted such a ready admission of vulnerability. What else did it disguise? “Has she reason to be? Is Isolde the stronger? ”

“As to the manor, the Stranhornes and Strumhellers have been nothing but trouble for centuries. We wanted the manor. We’d have had
both
manors by now, but that we—
I—
got overconfident. Baron Strumheller, the man said, and I knew that name, but I’ve never sensed anything so weak and ripped up with overuse besides. So I was talking to him, waiting for Sebastien to join us, and he simply
shoots
me—calm as you please, with a bullet that would drop a scavvern. I suppose I should be glad he stopped at the one. And while I’m putting my viscera back together, Midora and the idiot boy start burning up the interior of Stranhorne, until—
boom
.” He gave Tam a dark look, then let out a sigh and snapped his fingers in the direction of the basket, following it with a prod of magic.

The wildcat hissed, but obediently caught up a kitten in its jaws and carried it, dangling, to Neill’s knee. She crouched, glaring at him, while he examined it, inserting a finger into the small mouth, running a hand down the spine, testing the thrust of its hind legs. The diversion seemed to calm him, and he smiled engagingly at the angry cat as he handed her kit back. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she? ” he said to Tam.

Her pelt certainly was thick and healthy, though small for full bounty. “The creatures—are they all yours?”

“They are now. I inherited them from Durran—my father—along with my bent toward fleshworking. He’d the original idea to use what the Darkborn call the Shadowborn to drive the Sundered out of Atholaya and keep them out. They were all terrified of what they’d do if they found us, he most of all.”

“And . . . the transformed Darkborn? ” Tam said. He’d been too overspent and sickened to characterize the magic around the flyers, but this man could rework flesh, so if any mage could . . .

A white glimmer in the shadowed eyes. “Ah, you realized that.”

“Your doing? ” he said, quietly.

“Emeya would not have let them live otherwise. Transformed, they’re useful to her.”

“Do
they
agree with you that life is worth accepting on any terms? ”

“You don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about,” Neill said, without temper.

“Do you not realize,” Tam said, in a low voice, “that what you are doing is an atrocity? ”

Neill tipped his head back, the light catching on the long, vulpine planes of his face. Its cast was not quite man, now Tam saw it fully in strong light, as though Neill had chosen to emulate one of his beloved animals. “I realize it. And I repeat: you don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about. Believe me, there are worse atrocities.”

Tam was tired and sickened and ready to despair, but he struggled on. “And Sebastien?”

“My cousin Ariadne’s son. Emeya wanted her mated—didn’t matter to whom—but without waiting for them to find their way”—his eyes glittered with anger—“she set an ensorcellment on them. Ari was just strong enough to twist the ensorcellment toward another man, and just to add insult, she chose a new Darkborn slave, bound him to her and herself to him. The child born to them was mageborn, and strong, so Emeya let them live. But they were marked from that day. Hearne’s a survivor, if nothing else. He persuaded Ariadne to make a run for Isolde. They’d have taken the boy, but he was Emeya’s pet then, and he didn’t want to go. Knowing what Emeya would do to her, I helped them get away.” He grimly contemplated the pattern of the carpet. “If I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t.” He glanced up. “Emeya needs this Temple alliance; she just won’t face the fact.”

“Why? ” Tam said.

The deep-set eyes looked directly at him, blue in their depths and calculating. Tam wished again to be Fejelis or one of the high masters, old and crafty, instead of a blunt, muddled peasant.

Neill said nothing; plainly, he was not going to answer that particular question, at least now.

“Why do you stay with her? ” Tam said.

Neill said, “I’m a mage. I want knowledge. I
crave
the exercise of my power. That’s what binds me. I couldn’t live with all your Temple rules.”

Tam knew that craving. At its best, that desire expressed itself as it had in Lukfer, in the long years of study and unceasing efforts to master his unruly strength, and in the generosity that had made him willing to offer his knowledge to anyone who would receive it from him. It was not his failing that so few had. At its worst . . . he thought he had taken his measure of it at its worst, when the high masters had him lying bound before them and ransacked his mind for his knowledge. But now . . .

Now he had met Emeya, he knew her strength exceeded that of the archmage, exceeded that of the archmage and high masters who had bound him—for all he might try to tell himself that she had taken him unawares and they had not. And if she knew magical protocols lost since the Sundering . . . the high masters would want those.

“You look quite horrified,” Neill observed. “What are you thinking? ”

“About magic. And your archmage. And the high masters.”

“It’s not an unendurable life, ordinarily. Just lately . . .” And then the color drained suddenly from his long face. “She wants me,” he said. “Don’t leave this room, whatever hap—” In a knot of Shadowborn magic, he was gone.

Tam gagged. “ ‘Not an unendurable life,’ ” he quoted hoarsely, to the empty room. Hissing answered him, from the basket and from under the bed.

Could he escape, while Emeya was occupied with Neill? He might yet have the strength for a
lift
, drained though he was. He was desperate enough to try—to Stranhorne, even Minhorne. As Lukfer had repeatedly reminded him, distance was more a psychological barrier than a physical one; his body’s memory of all those miles walked barefoot or in holed boots refused to yield to magic alone. But should he succeed in leaving, dared he take this information back to the high masters? Would it repel or entice them—all this power, all this knowledge? Would they believe him or think him mistaken about her strength? Would they send him back to accept her terms? And what hope for Fejelis and the earthborn then?

He had a dreadful vision of himself set up as master and protector of earthborn, as Neill was master and protector of beasts. Had his stomach not already been empty, he would have vomited. A voice insinuated itself into his thoughts.

The vision had not been his own temptation, but hers.

He extended his magic toward the archmage, the high masters; reached in blind desperation and met only her presence, her strength, pressing down. She said, and his sense of her magic reaching to twist the core out of his protective ensorcellment against darkness, of himself melting away, was so strong that for heartbeats he believed it had happened.

He fell back into the chair, feeling half dissolved. He did not sense the wolf enter the room, though he heard the wildcats hiss. He blinked tears from his eyes in time to see it regard the basket with intelligent yellow eyes, and lurched forward in his chair in an absurd protective reaction toward one predator against a greater. Then froze as the wolf turned its malign gaze toward him. It whined, padded forward, and, even as he mustered the magic he would need to defend himself, propped its jaw on his knee, its brows quirking, doglike, as it contemplated his face.

He was still sitting there, pinned in place by his guardian, when Neill reappeared. The mage landed on his feet and promptly dropped to hands and knees. Tam could see the stripes across his face and neck and arms, wheals like those he had seen on a man who had fallen into a swarm of skull jellyfish. Mayfly abandoned Tam to snuffle at Neill’s ear. The mage slung an arm around his pet’s neck and leaned against the shaggy shoulder. The wheals along his jawline seemed to bubble as magics battled within them, hers to hurt, his to heal.

Her magic intensified. The wheals suddenly split and the bubbling spread across his entire face, and he rolled away from the wolf, curling into a fetal ball. Far later than Tam would have expected, he screamed.

Her magic swirled away, and Neill slumped over onto his back, the blisters sealing themselves over, the raw flesh drying and dulling and going pink. He stared at the ceiling for several minutes, chest rising and falling, then worked a hand into the wolf’s ruff and pulled himself up. “How d’you like that demonstration? ”

“Not,” said Tam.

“As you can perhaps gather,” Neill said, sounding slightly breathless, “she is not receptive to the idea of an alliance. I think she mismeasures your high masters’ strength, myself.” His skin was as unmarked as it had been before, but Tam noticed that his face had lost the angularity and length of jaw and was now entirely a man’s.

“Come outside,” Neill said abruptly. “I know you’ll never have seen this. I know I need to, just at the moment. It gives me strength.”

In trepidation, Tam followed him outside, and with even more trepidation followed him up a final series of steps to the ramparts of the earthworks. He could see around him the crumpled mounds of sleeping Shadowborn, each one with a mat for a mattress and its folded wings for blankets. He could feel Neill’s magic flickering around them, soothing. On the edge of the earthworks, not too close, Neill pointed east. The sky, so dark when they had met, had lightened along the horizon to the cobalt blue of a fine glass, draped with cloud. “Dawn,” Neill said.

“I’ve seen dawn,” Tam said. He would take no gifts from this cruel paradox of a man.

Neill glanced at him. “Not like this, I’ll warrant. Enjoy it. It may be our last.”

A wave of magic rose from beneath them. A boy’s voice screamed rawly. Neill closed his eyes in sympathetic pain. “I have to go. You stay. No one will bother you. Mayfly.” The wolf, summoned, pushed between them like a jealous child. “See no one does.”

Neill was right; seen from this side of sunrise, daybreak was astonishing—the transparent yellow, the intense orange, the blinding break of sunlight. Artarian should have been here. Beatrice should have had these colors to glaze on her pots. Fejelis would have watched with his usual interest in the new. His son . . . would no doubt have tried to throw himself from the ramparts or down the gullet of a wolf. He wiped his face. How could a sight so beautiful elicit such despair?

Neill returned, climbing the stairs, looking weary beyond words, but with no physical hurt on him, to Tam’s peculiar relief. The beast mage put a hand on Mayfly’s back and leaned briefly. “She brought the boy back,” he said. “She needs his strength. And he wanted healing.”

He straightened and turned to face Tam, half his face brilliantly lit by the new, orange sun, half in shadow. “You asked why Atholaya was too small for Emeya and Isolde, why Emeya needed new territory. I told you that Imogene and the others anchored the Curse in children. So think about the fact that magic often doesn’t mature until late adolescence or after. Even mageborn children wouldn’t have had the strength to support magic like the Curse. Imogene changed those children. We think that Isolde is close to rediscovering how—with Ariadne’s help. She may already have. Should she succeed, she will destroy Emeya.”

“And why,” Tam said, harshly, “would that be worse than allowing Emeya”—
and you
—“to continue unchecked? ”

Neill gave him a very long look. “This: how do you think many of Isolde’s own children and grandchildren died?”

Every train journey with Vladimer seems to take longer,
Telmaine thought. They did not even have the compartment to themselves, she and Vladimer; the five officers of the Strumheller troop had been shoehorned into it. She ought to be grateful that, unlike Vladimer, she was sitting hip to hip with only two men, not three. The floor was muddy and sticky and littered with scraps of oiled cloth, odd bullets, and pieces of newspaper. As the train labored up a hill, a hip flask skidded out from under her seat and bounced off her foot before sliding under the opposite bench. At intervals it, or some other detritus, reappeared. The compartment was too crowded for anyone to grope after it. The air reeked of sweaty men, soap, old smoke, damp wool, oil, and ammunition. The carriage was not designed to travel by day, so all the vents had to be closed.