Shadowborn (47 page)

“And the Darkborn leaflets? ” Prasav slipped in.

Darkborn leaflets?
Ten minutes was not enough. But this was his court, not Prasav’s. “I will
not
sign an order of eviction for the Darkborn from Minhorne. This city is theirs as much as it is ours. . . . But all of that is
irrelevant
. Your brightnesses, mages of the Temple: how much time have you wasted while the enemy—who murdered my father, who threatens all of us—advances? I tried to warn you not a day ago”—truly, was it only that?—“and got deposed for my pains, and nearly shot at the command of a captain of vigilants who had been suborned by the Shadowborn.”

Prasav’s expression was sweet revenge for those twisted half-truths about Tam and the artisans; he didn’t expect Fejelis already to know.

“But for the actions of Magister Tammorn, my mentor and my friend. Who is not here because he was sent, by his own superiors, the masters of the Temple, to the camps of the enemy.
Tell me,
” Fejelis fired at the high masters, “
that you did not send my friend to treat with the enemy!
”

In his peripheral vision, he glimpsed his sister’s horrified face, Jovance’s frozen stance, Lapaxo crouching to lunge, before it came to the captain that the one threat he could not protect his prince from was the prince’s own madness.

“No,” said a voice he had never heard before. “I did not send him to treat with the enemy.”

It was the archmage, who had not been known to speak aloud in the hearing of earthborn—even Temple servants—in living memory. The small man clasped his hands and bowed over them to Fejelis, a gesture of respect from two centuries past.

Several heartbeats went by before Fejelis realized that the archmage was not going to elaborate on that statement. By then he had waited too long and lost the initiative for the obvious question. Then Jovance said from beside him, in a voice that sounded girlish but determined, “Magister Archmage, Tam explained to me before he left what you had asked him to do.”

Magistra Valetta said, “That was what we had asked him to do.” Hitherto the confident mouthpiece of the archmage, the one he spoke through, she suddenly had the air of a woman who no longer knew what would drop out of her mouth.

“Please do us the courtesy of explaining,” Fejelis said, quietly.

“By their deeds,” said the archmage, “we shall know them.”

“You set Tam out,” Fejelis said slowly, “as bait.”

“With Lukfer dead, Tam is the strongest living sport,” said Magistra Valetta, still with that expression of one about to go cross-eyed from watching her own lips. “We had no one better suited. But we could not tell him because we wanted to know . . . what they were.”

They didn’t tell you, either,
Fejelis inferred. Plans within plans—he could almost feel sorry for her. He met the archmage’s eyes, experience centuries deep in them. More than three hundred years old, he knew the man was. And the archmage’s father—how old was he? How close was the archmage to a living memory of those who had laid the Curse?

He weighed what he should say next. He had been lucky and inspired to have come this far, but he had done so by outrunning the opposition. Now they were all standing still, listening.

Friendship demanded that he argue that Tam be spared, as he had done not a day ago, without a moment’s thought—charging in to challenge the high masters, throwing himself into Prasav’s trap. He had been lucky to keep his life, lucky to keep his brother, lucky to keep his sister, lucky to regain his caul. Lucky to have remained alive, so far. More than half that luck accrued from the luck of meeting Tam.

He remembered sharing breakfast with his father in the prince’s private chambers, having one of their rare conversations about the costs and burdens of being prince. They rarely dwelt on it, as there seemed no purpose: as night followed day, as summer followed spring, Fejelis would be prince. But he remembered his father saying, eyes half closed against the early sun,
“And then there will be the first time you must sacrifice a friend.
. . .
”

He could feel the quiet in the room, the expectation. He wondered what Jovance would think of him—but if she chose to remain with him, she would see him do worse than this, to try to make something of his reign, salvage earthborn and mage.

“And do you know yet? ” Fejelis said, quietly.

The archmage said, “Not yet.”

She heard Ishmael’s growled
“No,”
and felt magic grapple with magic, his great, unformed seething rising against the woman’s. The
lift
suddenly released her and she swayed on her stool, and then reached down to grip it with both hands through the folds of her skirts. Sonn and magic intersected on her from her companions. The young Borders mage, Bryse, had come to his feet, inspired by an impulse of chivalry.

“Should I—? ” she gasped to Farquhar Broome, though did not know what she wanted to ask. In the end, it was not for him or for anyone else to say.
I walked through the fire to rescue my daughter, and Ishmael went with me
. And when in distraction and weariness her concentration failed her, he had held back the inferno, though it had cost him his magic and nearly his life.

Now Ishmael was the one standing in the inferno, and she the one who must hold it back.

She felt their surprise, Ishmael’s and the woman’s, at her touch, and from him the same emotions he had felt as she went to rescue Florilinde: admiration and dismay and protectiveness. Whatever the Shadowborn had done to him, he was still Ishmael. They had no chance for any further exchange. Through him, she heard the woman say, <
Now
,> and felt her magic fasten on to Ishmael, spinning strength and vitality from him. He did not resist. Telmaine’s resistance on his behalf had no more effect than a sparrow’s pecks and fluttering wings on a boy stealing her eggs.

No matter her power, Telmaine would
not
cower before her. not
? >

She rose to elbows and knees, then hands and knees, in the billows of her skirts. A lady did not fight; that was one of the earliest lessons of the nursery. Any instinct for it she had as a small, unruly girl was whipped and shamed out of her. Denied the means to protect herself—physically, legally, or magically—she shied from dominant or cruel men, and so never learned how to fight as she had learned other things secondhand. She would have lost against the Shadowborn—lost magic, mind, and life—were it not for Ishmael. She would
not
abandon him.

But she could not fight his warder, and could not last against that terrible draining of vitality. She reached instead but for Ishmael’s adversaries, the ones she had sensed beyond the ruined manor of Stranhorne. One, as monstrous as the ones preying on Ishmael, two, three; the third the boy she had met—and bested—in Minhorne. Let that give her hope. She could sense the weaker presence—weaker in comparison to
them
—of the Lightborn Tammorn, and sense his despair. What price the Temple’s solicitations now?

None of them were paying attention to lesser beings. She knew about
that
as a great lady among servants. Crouching, grinning savagely, she gathered her will, gathered her magic, and aimed it at the distant trio.

Burn,
Telmaine willed.
BURN
.

She poured her magic across the miles between them, poured it into the place where he and his mistress were, igniting mats and drapes and clothing. The boy screamed in terror. She sensed the woman’s magic welling up inexorably to quench the fires, stoke them though Telmaine might with vitality and will. In doing so, the woman was killing Tammorn. Strong as he was by himself, in this company, he was the weakest of them all. She must not waver, for Ishmael’s sake.

Then the Lightborn mages stooped upon them, seizing Isolde, Ishmael, Ariadne, and Telmaine. Her skirts ignited and flame leaped up her bodice; she threw out arms and magic, trying to push away the flames from her shriveling flesh. Across her awareness came a great gust of magic—Ishmael’s magic—snuffing them out and sending her to the floor again. She curled up there, clad only in rags and cobwebs of burned lace, and choking on smoke and ash.

Phoebe Broome screamed, <
Kadar, listen to me!
> The mesh of magic between the commune mages hummed and pulsed. She lifted her head and sonned Farquhar Broome’s wizened face working with effort as he exerted himself, a seventh-rank mage, to the fullest.

It would not be enough. She pushed herself up on shaking arms and dragged a rag of skirt around her body, a scant but necessary gesture toward decency. Sweet Imogene, but it
hurt
to reach outward, hurt as much as it had bearing her children, hurt as much as it had those last dozen steps carrying Florilinde out of the inferno. Yet she pushed away the storm of magic around her, moved in a self-created void through it, toward the inferno that had Ishmael in the heart of it. This time she would not falter; this time there could be no lapse. She reached out her hand and touched not the chilled metal of a doorknob, but a broad, fever-hot hand.

Had this been the living world, clothes and skin and their own solidity would have constrained their embrace, but this was some domain of magic alone. She passed through and into him like vapor mingling with vapor. She could feel the beat of his heart behind her own ribs, the heave of his breathing in her own chest, the ache of his effort behind her own forehead. She—he—
they
were sitting in a small room, the warm wind from the open doors to a balcony on Ishmael’s sweating face. Seated to their left was a small old woman whose magic was one of sickly, draining cold. Behind them she could sense another woman, his warder, Ariadne, leaning with her hands on Ishmael’s shoulders, her magic caging him. The magic of the Lightborn wheeled around them, swift striking and merciless—still air turned suddenly to gales, bare tile raged with flame, bone cracked, scars split, flesh turned to rot. . . . She found herself suddenly, urgently, called to heal as Ishmael’s lungs began to bleed.

<
Kadar,
> Farquhar Broome cried out. <
They are not the enemy.
>

All the bones in Ishmael’s right hand shattered. Reeling with his agony, Telmaine wrapped them with her magic, started to mold them whole. Ishmael said, The woman’s hands tightened spasmodically on his shoulders, and Telmaine could hear her choking. A man’s voice—Balthasar’s? No, not possible—cried, “Ariadne—”

<
Ishmael
. What’s happening?>

On the other side, the older woman’s head turned toward Ishmael. Telmaine’s perception of her was overlaid with Ishmael’s knowledge. Isolde, daughter of Imogene herself, last but one survivor of that cursed generation, who had killed most of her descendants in trying to create another mage as powerful as she, and had finally succeeded in Ishmael.

She could sense his struggle with himself, conveyed in impressions rather than words, and it was all the stronger for that. He had no hope for himself: his strength was beyond his control and barely in Isolde’s. He was no more than a reservoir for Isolde to tap, a weapon for her to aim. Before Telmaine touched him, he had not even been a thinking weapon. need
me, Ishmael.>