Lightborn (23 page)

Fejelis waited. With mages, ordinary protocol did not apply. Furthermore, he had no idea of their names. He wished Tam were here.

Or perhaps not, because the woman in the center gestured, and the second woman stood up to lay a sheet on Fejelis’s desk: the contract that he and Tam had negotiated the previous night.

“. . . Is it not in order?” Fejelis said.

The woman in the center gazed steadily back at him with a northerner’s pale eyes. Unlike the other two, who were handsome to an unsettling degree, she was broad-faced, broad-nosed, and broad-l ipped, and around his mother’s age. Which in a higher-ranked mage meant she could be anywhere from eighteen years old and fed up of looking so cursed
young
—with which he could empathize—to more than a hundred and making no apologies. Her chains suggested fifth-rank, though her authoritative air suggested otherwise.

“Surely you are aware that the Temple is conducting its own investigation.”

“. . . I have no doubt,” Fejelis said.

“And that the findings would be made available to you.”

“. . . Thank you.”

“Is that not satisfactory?”

“. . . It is quite satisfactory,” Fejelis said. “. . . It is not sufficient.”

By the ripple in her lips, she had very nearly snapped,
Explain.

“. . . My father’s death represents a—singular, as far as I can tell—failure in the Vigilance.”

“All men die,” the mage said—not entirely comfortably.

“. . . But not by magic. We contract with mages to protect ourselves. The last prince to have died by magic was, what, nearly two hundred years ago, and that was only after due warning by the Temple that his contracts had been canceled. My father had no such warning.”

He held his breath. He was convinced that nothing
he
had done even approached that long-dead prince’s outrages against the Temple, but it was quite possible that he had offended them all unwittingly.

“Our objection,” she said, “is to the individual contracted. You are surely aware, Prince, that he was born outside the lineages.” Fejelis simply nodded. “He came late to training. And in the past his standing has been in question.”

“. . . In what way?”

“He was disciplined for practicing outside the compact.”

He did not blink. Did not look at the mages vigilant. Did not, he believed, reveal in any way that he knew exactly what she meant. They could probably feel the strain in his vitality, but he had no choice but to trust that the mages vigilant would fulfill their contract and guard him against magical intrusion.

“. . . He is in good standing now, is he not?” he said, after a suitable pause. “Magistra—” She tendered no name in response to his suggestive hesitation. “. . . Magistra, please reassure the high masters that I have no doubts about the integrity of the Temple. But I prefer to leave the contract with Magister Tammorn in place. I look for a quick resolution and so will use all the resources I can command.”

She did not rise. “A number of contracts arranged with your father will need to be renewed.”

Essential contracts, like those of the mages vigilant, were inherit-able, and he was glad at the moment they were, and not adding to his growing list. Of the others, he had a feeling the price had just gone up. “. . . Magistra,” he said.

The man said, “If I were you, I would ask Magister Tammorn what he stole from your father’s room yesterday.”

Fejelis couldn’t quite conceal his surprise. “What do you mean, stole?”

One of the mages vigilant stepped forward, at no prompt Fejelis could see. She was a slight, fair-haired woman with a high arched nose and prominent cheekbones, a face idiosyncratically interesting rather than beautiful. “I was one of those called to inspect your father’s room. I noticed a small box of Darkborn design and workmanship. After Tammorn left, the box was no longer there.”

While Tammorn’s checkered career included petty larceny, this seemed an oddly trivial accusation. And why would the mages vigilant be paying attention to the ornaments in the prince’s room? “. . . A talisman,” Fejelis answered himself, ruminatively. “Did you find one?”

There was a silence of several beats. Fejelis said, “. . . I take that as a no.”

Nobody contradicted him. “. . . Thank you,” he said, mildly. “Be assured I will turn my attention to the renewal of contracts as soon as I can.”

They stood with a disconcerting synchrony. “Your sister sends her best wishes,” the woman said. He blinked at her, taken aback. She smiled, and the three turned and went out, the mages vigilant following them.

The secretary, experienced in court matters, conducted them out and closed the doors behind them, giving Fejelis a momentary respite. He used it to put his cauled head in his hands, rubbing his forehead to ease the ache.

Perrin—or whatever her name was now—would be twenty. She had been ten when the mages vigilant detected emergent magic in her. The compact dictated that no mage could hold secular rank, much less that of heir. By the time Fejelis had been able to leave his rooms after the poisoning, she was gone, her name barely mentioned. As if she herself had been part of the conspiracy. That was the greatest of cruelties.

For nearly ten years, he had schooled himself to forget he had another sister. And now, in violation of custom if not law,
Your sister sends her best wishes.

Mother of All Things Born, what scheme was the
Temple
engaged in?

In his distraction, Tam sensed Lukfer’s visitors only almost at Lukfer’s door. By then there was no effacing himself. Lukfer said,

He opened the door not on painful shadow but on sunlight. The curtains had been flung wide. The door to the seldom-used balcony stood open, and Lukfer was lounging against the balustrade, talking to two other mages. His magic eddied and rippled around the room, twitching the curtains and rattling the contents of cabinet drawers. It prodded and nudged Tam toward the balcony, playfully.

“Ah, Tam,” Lukfer said, with a wave of a hand that was empty of any glass. “I believe you know Magister Pardel, and I believe you have met Magistra Viola, in her former life. Pardel, Viola, Magister Tammorn, who I believe needs no introduction.”

Magistra Viola returned his stare with gray eyes as pale and unrevealing of her thoughts as mirrors. Her warm sandy hair was close-woven in an ornate southern style. She had the oval face, broad cheekbones, and brow of the young prince consort Helenja, but her nose and mouth were those of her father and the elder of her brothers. She had their height, too. Her ankle- length overjacket, her sleeveless shirt and full skirts, all were made of cloth enspelled to pass light in one direction only, and all were red as blood. On the notch at the base of her throat rested the twin of the pendant Fejelis wore, except that the stone was colorless, not blue.

“Magister Tam,” Fejelis’s elder sister murmured.

From his brief visits to the palace before Fejelis’s poisoning, he remembered Perrin as a leggy hoyden of a child, the then favorite of Helenja’s circle. By the time he returned from banishment, she was long gone into her own exile, as far away from court as the Temple could place her.

What else he knew of her was through Fejelis’s very occasional mention.

Magister Pardel he also knew. A broad, black-haired, dark-skinned man, with something of the gait, still, of the young sailor he had been when his magic unexpectedly manifested. Shrewd and adaptable, he was the highest ranked of all sports within the Temple, both magically and materially successful. Almost the last person Tam would expect to find chatting on the balcony with Lukfer.

“So,” Pardel said, with a glance at Viola, “a contract with the prince. That’ll set them by their ears.”

Viola caught and held Tam’s eyes, drawing aside the collar of her jacket to show the chains of rank around her neck. “I am ranked and of age,” she said, in a sweet, light voice. “I am no longer obliged to pretend that I had no life before the Temple.”

Second-rank, only. Gossip had told him her magic had proved weak, cruelly so to have cost her her earthborn rank. He looked at her silver eyes and wondered what she felt about that.

“How is Jay?”

The name startled him into a twitch. A logical nickname amongst children, he told himself sternly. “He’s holding up well,” he said.

“Do you think he’d like to see me?” she said.

“I think he might,” he said, though cautiously.

“Would you be prepared to arrange it?”

He made a sound intended to be neither agreement nor rejection. She did not press further, but engaged him in conversation around the doings and politics within the Temple that deftly trod away from matters of legitimacy and history. He would have enjoyed it but for wondering what Lukfer, and she, and Pardel, were all about.

“An interesting young woman,” Lukfer noted after the two were well gone, “who has not forgotten that, but for a chance gift of fate, she might have been princess herself.”

Tam gave him a sharp look—Lukfer’s fluctuating magic could be intrusive in more than physical ways, though Pardel would have shielded the weaker mage. Lukfer merely raised a brow, inviting him to voice his thoughts.

“Why were they here? Did you invite them?”

“I did. I’m afraid, my young thief, that your reversion to your former habits did not go entirely unnoticed.”

“The box—” And then he realized that he had no more sense of that noxious talisman.

Lukfer followed the turn of his head. “I decided,” the older mage said, “partly for my edification, and partly as a precaution, to annul the ensorcellment.”

“Dear Mother of All,” Tam breathed at the thought of the intimacy that that implied. Little wonder Lukfer was out in the sunshine, and looked, now he paid more attention, a little sickly.

“It was not,” Lukfer said, “a pleasant experience, but very educational. Now my guests have gone, I would quite like a glass of that fine Isles wine—the decanter is standing out. Pour a glass for yourself, if you would.”

Given his precarious control, Lukfer rarely indulged. Nor did Tam: beer and spirits had played too large a part in the disasters of his youth. He poured—by hand, not magic—and carried the glasses back onto the balcony.

“So somebody noticed I had taken the box,” he said. “How much difficulty is that likely to cause? Was that why you—?” He gestured toward the interior and the quenched box.

Lukfer held the wineglass lightly, contemplating the golden depths. “Aside from its general unpleasantness, I decided I would rather not have
my
lights go out at some unpredictable moment.” His eyes lifted. “You think I did it to remove evidence?”

“I hope,” Tam said slowly, “that wasn’t the reason.”

“I cannot say it was not,” the other mage said.

Tam tamped down his temper. Getting himself tossed off the balcony by Lukfer’s stirred-up magic would attract attention. “I had breakfast with Fejelis and his relatives—both sides. There was poison in one of the sauces—the heavily spiced ones that only the southerners would eat—and what was probably a staged episode on the part of Orlanjis. The attempt wasn’t likely to have killed anyone, given the concentration of magic at the table, but I annulled it. I tried tasting it to see if I could learn more, but Fejelis stopped me out of a care for my palate.”

Lukfer grunted. “Confused the one responsible no end, no doubt.”

Tam rubbed his forehead, squinting in the late-afternoon sunlight. “Fejelis believes the solution is in identifying his father’s assassin. I don’t think he recognizes how much of the stability he was used to was because his father had ruled so well for so long. He won’t get it back just by implicating the responsible faction. He is so young, Lukfer. Idealistic and fatalistic. Convinced he’s invulnerable and equally convinced he will die young. And either way, bent on taking the most appalling risks.”

He began to pace. “Last night I sensed more Shadowborn magic. I placed it in the archduke’s palace on the Darkborn side. The worker was strong, but not particularly skillful. I wanted to examine the box again, to see if I could tell if it was the same mage.”

“Ah,” Lukfer said. “The talisman was enspelled by two mages, one powerful and skilled, and one powerful and less skilled. A master and student, perhaps; perhaps you sensed the student.” Very soberly, “They understand our form of magic very well indeed, Tam. I could not have designed a more efficient annulment myself.” Lukfer, after decades struggling to control his strength, had as much theoretical insight into magic as anyone in the tower.

But he would never be able to pass it on, neither the strength nor the insight. The masters of lineage had been unable to capture his strength for the lines; of his several children, born to carefully selected mothers, none were more than fourth- rank. His one strong granddaughter had vanished years ago. Tam was his only student in the last four decades, the only one who had the patience to receive understanding piecemeal, since even normal magespeech could be hazardous.

“Why did you have Pardel and the—Magistra Viola here?”

“You asked me—challenged me, even—to find a way to destroy this magic.”

“You
told
them?” That came out offended, but he could not forget how he had had to drag an admission out of Lukfer. He shook his head, by way of apology

Lukfer’s faint smile conveyed warmth and forgiveness. “Not yet. I have to be very sure that we can trust them, before we draw them into working outside the compact.”

Outside the . . . “That’s not possible.”

“Is it not?” There was a surge of chill and foulness, and Lukfer’s wine flared into a transparent blue flame. Tam gagged at the unexpected proximity of it. Lukfer raised the glass and, gently, quenched the flame with another pulse of the vile magic. “It is undetectable, at least by the lineage mages. And it is not nearly as unpleasant to use as to be around.”