Magic's Price (9 page)

 

Vanyel's ears grew hot, and his hands cold. He couldn't look away from Stefen's eyes, startled and tempted by the bold invitation he read there.

In all his life, Vanyel had never been so tempted to throw over everything he'd pledged to himself and just do what he wanted, so very badly, to do.

Not that there hadn't been seduction attempts before this; his enemies frequently knew what his tastes were, and where his preferences lay. And all too often the vehicle of temptation had been someone like this—a young, seemingly innocent boy. Sometimes, in fact, it
was
an innocent. But in all cases, Vanyel had been able to detect the hidden trap and avoid the bait.

And there had been encounters that
looked
like seduction attempts. Young, impressionable children, overwhelmed by his reputation and perfectly willing to give him everything he wanted from them.

And that's what's going on here,
he told himself fiercely, the back of his neck hot, his hand beneath Stefen's icy.
That's all that's going on. I swore by everything I consider holy that I was never going to take advantage of my rank and fame to seduce anyone, anyone at all, much less impressionable children who have no notion of what they're getting into. No. It hasn't happened before, and I'm not going to permit it to happen now.

He rose to his feet, perforce bringing Stefen up with him. Once on his feet he took advantage of Stefen's momentary confusion to put the goblet down. The boy's hand slid from his reluctantly, and Vanyel endured a flash of dizziness that had nothing at all to do with the wine they'd been drinking.

“Come on, lad,” he said cheerfully, casually. “You're in no shape to walk back to your bed, and I'm in no shape to see that you get there in one piece. So you'll have to make do with mine tonight.”

He reached for the boy's shoulder before the young Bard could figure out what he was up to, and turned him about to face the bed. He gave the boy a gentle shove, and Stefen was so thoroughly intoxicated that he stumbled right to the enormous bedstead and only saved himself from falling by grabbing the footboard.

“Sorry,” Vanyel replied sincerely. “I guess I'm a bit farther gone than I thought; I can usually judge my shoves better than that!”

Stefen started to strip off his tunic, and turned to stare as Vanyel walked slowly and carefully to the storage chest and removed his bedroll.

“What are you doing?” the youngster asked, bewildered.

“You're my guest,” Vanyel said quietly, busying himself with untying the cords holding the bedroll together. “I can do without my bed for one night.”

The young Bard sat heavily down on the side of the bed, looking completely deflated. “But—where are you going to sleep?” he asked, as if he didn't quite believe what he was hearing.

“The floor, of course,” Vanyel replied, unrolling the parcel, and looking up to grin at the boy's perplexed expression. “It won't be the first time. In fact, I've slept in places a lot less comfortable than this floor.”

“But—”

“Good night, Stefen,” Vanyel interrupted, using his Gift to douse all the lights except the night-candle in the head-board of the bed because he didn't trust his hands to snuff them without an accident. He stripped off his own tunic and his boots and socks, but decided against removing anything else. His virtuous resistance might not survive another onslaught of temptation, particularly if he wasn't clothed. “Don't bother to get up when I do—the hours I keep are positively unholy, and no one sane would put up with them.”

“But—”

“Good night, Stefen,” Vanyel said firmly, crawling in and turning his back on the room.

He kept his eyes tightly shut and all his shields up; after a while, he heard a long-suffering sigh; then the sound of boots hitting the floor, and cloth following. Then the faint sounds of someone settling into a strange bed, and the night-candle went out.

“Good night, Vanyel,” came from the darkness. “I appreciate this.”

But—“Good night, Stefen,” he replied. “You're welcome to stay as long as you like.” He smiled into the darkness. “In fact, you're welcome any time. Consider yourself my adoptive nephew if you like.”

Van woke, as he always did, all at once, with no transition from sleep to full awareness. And since he was not where he
expected
to be, he held himself very still, waiting for memory to catch up with the rest of him.

A slight headache between his eyebrows gave him the clue he needed to sort himself out. Of course. I'm
sleeping—virtuously—alone. On the floor. With a hangover. Because there's a Bard who's altogether too beautiful and too young in my bed. And I'll bet he doesn't wake up with a hangover.

He heard Yfandes laughing in the back of his mind.
:Poor, suffering child. I shall certainly nominate you for sainthood.:

Van opened his eyes, and the first morning light stabbed through them and straight into his brain.
:Shut
up, horse.: He groaned and closed his eyes tightly.

:No you don‘t,:
Yfandes said sweetly.
:You have an appointment. With Lissandra, Kilchas, Tran, and your aunt. Remember?:

He stifled another groan, and opened his eyes again. The sunlight was no dimmer.
:Now that you've reminded me, yes. I have done stupider things in my life than get drunk the night before a major spellcasting, I'm sure, but right now I can't recall any.;

:I
can,: Yfandes replied too promptly.

He knew better than to reply. In the state he was in now, she'd be a constant step ahead of him. Some day, he vowed to himself,
I'm going to find out how to make a Companion drunk, and when she wakes up, I'll be waiting.

So there was nothing for it but to crawl out of his bedroll, aching in every limb from a night on the hard floor, to stare resentfully at the youngster who'd usurped his bed. Stefen lay sprawled across the entire width of the bed, a beatific half-smile on his face, and deaf, dumb and blind to the world. Dark red hair fanned across the pillow—
Van's
pillow—not the least tangled with restless tossing, as Van's was. No dark circles under Stefen's eyes—oh, no. The young Bard slept like an innocent child.

Vanyel snarled silently, snatched up his towels and a clean uniform, and headed for the bathing room.

The room was very quiet this early in the morning, and every sound he made echoed from the white-tiled walls. He might well have been the only person alive in the Palace; he couldn't hear anything at all but the noise he made. After plunging his head under cold water, then following that torture with a hot bath, he was much more inclined to face the world without biting something. In fact, he actually felt up to breakfast, of sorts; perhaps a little bread and a great deal of herb tea.

Stefen was still blissfully asleep, no doubt, which made Van's room off limits. Well, it was probably too early for any of the servants to be awake.

He dressed quickly, shivering a little as the chill morning air hit his wet skin, and headed down the deserted hallways to the kitchen, where he found two cooks hard at work. They were pulling hot loaves from the ovens, anonymous in their floured brown tunics and trousers, their hair caught up under caps. They gave him startled looks—it probably wasn't too often that a Herald wandered into their purview—but they gave him a pot of tea and a bit of warm bread when he asked them for it, and he took both up to the library.

The Palace library was a good place to settle; the fire was still banked from last night, and a little bit of work had it crackling cheerfully under new logs, filling the empty silence. Vanyel chose a comfortable chair near it, his mug of tea on the hearthstone beside him, and nibbled at his bread while watching the flames and basking in the heat. The last of the headache faded under the gentle soothing warmth of the tea. Yfandes, having sensed, no doubt, that he had reached the limits of his patience, had remained wisely silent.

:Are you up to this?:
she asked, when his ill-humor had turned to rueful contemplation of his own stupidity.
:It won't hurt to put it off another day, or even two.:

He leaned back in his chair and tested all the channels of his mind and powers.
:Oh, I think so, No harm done, other than to my temper. Sorry I snapped.:

She sent no real thoughts in reply to that, just affection. He closed everything down and thought about the planned session. They would be working magic of the highest order, something so complicated that no one had ever tried it before.

If he'd had any choice, Vanyel wouldn't be doing it now—but the ranks of the Herald-Mages had thinned so much that there was no one to replace any of the four Guardians should something happen to one of them. There were no spare Herald-Mages anymore. The Web, the watch-spell that kept the Heralds informed of danger, required four experienced and powerful mages to make it work; a Guardian of the Web was effectively tied to Haven—not physically, but psychically—as long as he or she was a Guardian. One fourth of the Guardians' energy and time were devoted to powering and monitoring the Web.

Van intended to change all that.

He had been gradually augmenting a mage-node underneath Haven for the past several years. He was no Tayledras, but he was Hawkbrother-trained; creating a new node probably would have been beyond him, but feeding new energy-flows into an existing node wasn't. He intended to power the new Web-spell with that node, and he intended to replace the Guardians with
all
the Heralds of Valdemar, Mage-Gifted or no.

And lastly, he intended to set the new Web-spell to do more than watch Valdemar; he intended to make it part of Valdemar's defenses, albeit a subtle part.

He was going to summon
vrondi,
the little air-elementals used in the Truth Spell, and summon them in greater numbers than anyone ever had before. Then he was going to “purpose” them; set them to watching for disturbances in the fabric of mage-energy that lay over Valdemar, disturbances that would signal the presence of a mage at work.

No one but a mage would feel their scrutiny. It would be as if there was something constantly tapping the mage's shoulder at irregular intervals, asking who he was.

And if the mage in question was not a Herald, it would report his presence to the nearest Herald-Mage.

This was just the initial plan; if this worked, Vanyel intended to elaborate his protections, using other elementals besides
vrondi,
to keep Valdemar as free as he could from hostile magics. He wasn't quite certain where to draw the line just yet, though. For now, it would probably be enough for every mage in Valdemar to sense he was being watched; it would likely drive a would-be enemy right out of his mind.

Well, sitting there thinking about it wasn't going to get anything accomplished.

Vanyel rose reluctantly from his chair, left his napkin stuffed into his mug on the hearth, and left the comforting warmth of the library for the chilly silence of the stone-floored corridors.

He headed straight for the Work Room; the old, shielded chamber in the heart of the Palace that had been used for apprentice Herald-Mages to practice their skills under the eyes of their teachers. But there were no apprentices here now, and every Herald-Mage stationed in Haven had his or her own private workrooms that would serve for training if any new youngsters with the Mage-Gift were Chosen.

Now the heavily shielded room could serve another purpose ; to become the Heart of the new Web.

Tantras was already waiting for him when he arrived, arranging the furniture Vanyel had ordered. A new oil lamp hung from a chain in the center of the room. Directly beneath it was a circular table with a depression in the middle. Around it stood four high-backed, curved benches. Over in one corner, Tran was wrestling a heavy chair into place, putting it as far from the table as possible.

The older Herald looked up as Van closed the door behind him, raked graying hair out of his eyes with one hand, and smiled.

“Ready?” Vanyel asked, taking his seat, and putting his mage-focus, a large, irregular piece of polished tiger-eye, in the depression in the center. He hadn't been able to find a piece of unflawed amber big enough to use as a Web-focus, and fire-opals were too fragile to use in the Web. Fortunately when he'd replaced Jaysen as Guardian, he'd learned that he worked as well with Jaysen's tiger-eye as with opal and amber; flawless tiger-eye was
much
easier to find.

Vanyel looked back over his shoulder at his friend. “About as ready as I'm ever likely to be,” Tantras replied, shrugging his shoulders. “This is the first time I've ever been involved with one of these high-level set-spells of yours. First time I've ever worked with
one
Adept, much less two.”

“Nervous?” Vanyel raised an eyebrow at him. “I wouldn't blame you. We've never tried anything like this before.”

“Me? Nervous? When you're playing with something that could fry my mind like a breakfast egg?” Tran laughed. “Of course I'm nervous. But I trust you. I think.”