Shadowborn (5 page)

“Floria, yes.”

“This does concern your—” He wasn’t sure how he could, or should, characterize Balthasar’s relationship with his neighbor. They were as intimate as a man and woman could be who would never meet in the flesh; that he knew. And he knew how Balthasar’s wife felt about it. “Mistress Floria,” he said, sidestepping awkwardness. “Since she’s vigilant to the Lightborn prince. Isidore’s dead.”

“
Dead?
How?”

“Lights failed in his rooms during the night.”

“That’s—not possible,” Balthasar said. “The prince’s lights would be enspelled by multiple mages. They could not fail unless all those mages died at the same time.”

“Or unless the magic was released or annulled.”

“Not . . . possible,” Balthasar insisted.

“Unless the Temple lifted its protection from Prince Isidore.”

“In the whole of the history of the compact, the Mages’ Temple has only once canceled contracts with a prince, with ample warning, and only after that prince had abused magic and mages egregiously. Isidore had no such history—and no such warning. Floria would have told me if there had been any hint of it.” He paused. “Shadowborn?”

“That’s my thought,” Ishmael said grimly. “Which means strength enough t’overwhelm Lightborn high masters. Or collusion.”

He waited, sonn playing over the other man’s face as he thought that through.

“That we haven’t already met that kind of strength doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not there,” Balthasar said, slowly. “It may simply not have been needed. But as for collusion . . . No, I think that if the Lightborn were involved, even the Lightborn mages, they would make their demands directly. They have survived by the compact between earthborn and mageborn. Lightborn magic,” he said, an appeal audible in his voice, “is not
chaotic
.”

“I hope you’ve the right of that, Hearne.”

“Have you heard again from Telmaine since she contacted you on the train?”

“No,” Ishmael said. He caught his hand’s unconscious movement to his chest and laid it casually down, hoping Balthasar had not noticed. “I know th’turn I had frightened her. She didn’t understand before what it meant, the damage I had taken.”

“You should have made that plain to her and to Vladimer,” Balthasar said, levelly. “We made our plans assuming that you and Telmaine would be able to use magic as a line of communication.”

“Curse it, Hearne—” He checked his defensive reaction. “You’re right. I should’ve. I’d not let myself think how bad it could be. Now let it be.”

Balthasar Hearne let it be. “The prince should not have died by magic. The Lightborn police abuse magic.
They
should have dealt with the Shadowborn we fought, not us. Are you certain that what we are dealing with is Shadowborn, and not factionalism within the upper echelons of the mages, both Darkborn and Lightborn?”

“A mage war,” Ishmael said.
Sweet Imogene—Vladimer, Stranhorne, and now Balthasar.
He should have begged the whole bottle from Stranhorne.

“Yes,” said the physician, simply, and waited.

“Some Shadowborn—glazen, for instance”—he indicated where the scars ridged the corner of his mouth, since he knew Hearne already knew that story—“use magic in their hunting. They’re animal and it’s instinctive, but I know the sense of it, and I sensed the same magic in the one at Vladimer’s bedside. It’s unique—Telmaine sensed it, too—and you doubt the Lightborn would collude.”

“I think,” Balthasar said, slowly, “knowing what I know of the Mages’ Temple, the Lightborn would either dominate or be forced into submission. And if the Lightborn dominated, then it would be a lawful domination, not a chaotic one.”

As a bottom-ranked mage, Ish had almost negligible dealings with the Temple, but listening to the Broomes—the leaders of the commune of mages within Minhorne—he, too, had formed an opinion of lawfulness to a fault. “The last possibility Stranhorne put to me was that th’Curse is not an exception to the way of magic after all, that one of Imogene’s conclave, or even Imogene herself, survived to hold it.”

“That’s . . . always been a possibility,” Balthasar said, sounding more thoughtful than rightfully terrified. “Although given the attention that the mages have paid to the Shadowlands over the years, if there were that much magical strength anywhere in them, they should have found it.”

“I’m told that if a mage has good control or isn’t making use of his strength as magic, then it’s near impossible to know that a given vitality is his—unless you know that person. And there’s nobody on either side of sunrise of an age t’know Imogene.”

“Eight hundred years,” Balthasar said a little faintly. “If Imogene had the viciousness to do this to us in the first place, then she would not wait eight hundred years to finish it. And if she were experiencing a belated remorse—”

Ishmael snorted. “Like no remorse I’ve ever met.”

Balthasar took a deep breath; Ishmael could hear the waver in his diaphragm. He held it, then steadily released it. “There are a number of these scenarios that you and I simply cannot do anything about. You are a first-rank mage suffering from severe overuse.” At least he had been kind enough not to say “disabled.” “I have a very rudimentary sense of magic, I’m told, which let me sense magic on the scale of a weather-working, but nothing else. So”—his voice was strained but firm—“our obligation remains unchanged. Find out what is going on, and get the information to the people who can do something about it.”

Ishmael set a hand on his shoulder and stood up. “Which we have done, for the moment. The next thing is dinner and a wash for both of us. The ladies won’t thank us for coming in reeking to the rafters of sweat, mud, and horse.”

Dinner was served an hour before the sunrise bell, in an intimate dining room in one of the newer parts of the manor. To Balthasar, the occasion had the unreality of a parlor drama, as though comfort and security were already more novel to him than pain and danger. A few hours ago, he had been pounding along the roads in Ferdenzil’s train. Now, in borrowed formal clothing, he was dining on snails imported from the Scallon Isles in the company of Ishmael di Studier, Ferdenzil Mycene, Baron Stranhorne and his son, and the ladies of the house.

“We were sixteen, you understand,” Baronette Lavender said, extracting a snail from its shell with an economical twist of her two-tined fork.

“T’be presented the following year,” Baronette Laurel said. “That was, if Lady Calliope di Reuther had any say in it. She’d chosen to take an interest in us poor, motherless things.” Wisely suspicious of exotic foods, she signaled for another serving of smoked chicken.

“Find out if either of us could be polished up sufficiently for her darling boy,” Lavender said, maliciously. “As if we’d be fool enough t’place ourselves within her reach.”

Balthasar decided not to mention that said darling boy was married to his wife’s close friend, Sylvide. He could not, however, dispute their assessment of Lady Calliope. The twins’ father listened with an expression of benign amusement; he, no doubt, had heard it all before.

“And,” Laurel said, returning to their joint tale, “we’d been reading all the wrong kind of literature.”

“Aye,” Ishmael rumbled. “That you had.”

“In those stories,” Lavender explained cheerfully to Bal, “all a girl needed to pass as a boy was to have boys’ clothing and a cap. It was always the cap falling off at some untimely moment that gave them away.
We
made sure that
our
caps were proof against a gale.”

“We’d ridden short, local circuits with the Stranhorne troop,” Laurel said. “We’d heard
all
about Baron Strumheller, who’d Shadowhunted for more than twenty years, and we were all afire to meet him.” She gave Bal a rueful smile. “We’d no idea the female walk was different from the male.”

“Well,” Lavender said with a sly grin, “that’s what he
claimed
. But we’d also no idea what kinds of entertainments there are up in the city that’d teach a man to know a woman in man’s garb.” Ishmael opened his mouth and, wisely, Bal felt, closed it again. “Have you visited the burlesques, Dr. Hearne?”

Bal remembered one of the early lectures in his training concerning the difference between male and female anatomy. Even then he had recognized the lecturer’s considerable achievement in managing to bore sixty young men with the intimate details of the female body. He decided against attempting to reprise the feat, though he tried to emulate the tone. “I’m doubtful that theater would have given you any better source material for your impersonation than your adventure stories. . . . I take it, then, that Ishmael recognized you were young women.”

“The moment he met us,” Lavender said. “Though he did not take us aside until later, after he’d judged our competence. Then he tore bleeding strips off both our hides and sent us straight home, under escort. We were too shocked even to cry.”

“It wasn’t that he shouted or insulted us,” Laurel explained. “But he told us in explicit terms just how unprepared we were for the style of fighting he expected, and how we were putting at risk our lives and the lives of the men who’d be with us.”

“We were in disgrace for
weeks
,” Lavender said. “Admittedly, there were compensations. Lady Calliope quite lost interest in us as prospective daughters-in-law. And”—she settled her chin on her sinewy hand and cast a teasing burst of sonn over Ishmael—“once we recovered from the shock, we were in
love
. Sixteen, remember.”

Ishmael found diversion in his plate. Ferdenzil Mycene’s expression was somewhere between intrigued and appalled. Bal understood it, for all he thought himself progressive in his attitudes. Everything about them was outrageous, from their first-name address to a man so many years their elder, to their ease in discussing things that city society would have found mortifyingly improper, to their readiness to take to the road with the troop. Yet he could not but hope that in fifteen years he would share a meal in such comfort and informality with his own grown daughters.

“We spent the entire winter and spring and half the summer trying to make up the deficiencies Ishmael had so mercilessly pointed out. And then we took the train to Strumheller, all escorted and proper, to prove that we were fit to be troopers.”

“He allowed as we’d improved,” Laurel said. “And, miracle of miracles, he got Father to agree that we could ride escort on visitors and such on the near Borders.”

“I am surprised,” Ferdenzil said, though his tone implied something stronger, “that your father permitted it.”

There was a brief, disconcerted silence; perhaps the ladies were not used to hearing city prejudice manifest at their own table. Stranhorne merely murmured, “I’m at times surprised, too.”

“It’s th’glazen,” Ishmael said. “One of the most dangerous Shadowborn. About the size of a large dog, most of them, but they can ensorcell a man so he’ll let himself be eaten alive. Only men; we do not know why. A woman with a steady hand and nerve can save a dozen lives, if not more.”

This silence had a different texture to it. Bal remembered Ishmael’s lawyer telling him that the scars on Ishmael’s face, scars no mage of any strength should carry, had been made by a glazen. If these young ladies knew him as well as they seemed to, they might know that story.

Ish himself broke the silence. “Though it wasn’t as troopers I wanted them.”

“Indeed, no,” said Lavender with a laugh, and waved a hand, inviting him to elaborate.

“Two baronettes, raised t’be chatelaines of a manor, able to manage a staff of a hundred or more and oversee th’organization for events involving hundreds. They’d won the help of the men of their troop, so I knew they’d the leadership. I’d give them two or three summers’ seasoning, then set them on the logistics. Took some doing for their father t’agree, but I think he’s judged the merit of it long since.”

Stranhorne, his smile dry, raised his glass toward Ishmael.

“And that,” Lavender said, “is what we’ve been doing for the past three years—managing the planning, provisioning, and tracking of the Stranhorne Borders defenses.” She smiled sweetly at Ferdenzil. “Shocking, isn’t it?”

Ishmael softly cleared his throat. A warning, Bal thought.

“And does your husband approve?” Mycene said to Laurel. She was married, Balthasar understood, to the Stranhornes’ envoy to the court of the Dukes of Myerling, in the Isles.

“Not at the moment, of course,” she said, demurely. “But I met him riding escort.”

“Do many of your women ride with the troop?” Ferdenzil said.

Ishmael’s face, alert and unsmiling, turned toward Lavender. That he nudged her foot under the table, Bal could not know for certain, but he suspected it from her twitch. She said, coolly, “Are you one of those who believes where the language says ‘men,’ that only men need apply, Lord Ferdenzil? Our standing troop numbers are within the ducal order of six twenty-seven, men and women both.”

“I fail to see how women can be an asset to a troop, then. Women lack the strength and the will to fight.”

“Raw strength, maybe, but a gun in a woman’s hand is as deadly as in a man’s,” Ishmael said, “and they’ve often the sharper ears and the better judgment as to when t’shoot.”

“But none better than you,” Lavender said, staunchly. “I was there when he dropped a scavvern at six hundred yards, by ear. He was ahead of us on the road, and the first thing we knew was when he shouted the warning and shot. Could you shoot a Shadowborn at six hundred yards, Lord Ferdenzil?”

“I would not try,” Ferdenzil said. “Sonn is sure; anything beyond, and you’re a danger to your own people.”

“A different kind of warfare,” Ishmael said, setting down his spoon and addressing Mycene straight, one man sharing his experience with another. “Once a scavvern’s near enough t’sonn, you’ve got two shots, maybe. Our people know our routes, know t’respond to our challenges, so we can challenge and shoot t’sound, as long as th’fighting formation holds. Once it’s gone, then yes, we have t’shoot to sonn, rather than risk harming our own.”