Lightborn Page 10

The mage met his eyes directly. “I do not have the information.”

  That would have to do. “. . . Are you starting to regret taking the contract?” he asked.

  “I do regret it,” Tam said, low voiced. “I will regret it. But I would regret it far more if I did not—I know and sense and feel that.”

  Fejelis gave little weight to some mages’ claims of prescience, but that statement lifted the hairs on the back of his neck.

  He sighed. “. . . My mother took great pleasure in telling me that she had learned that Mistress White Hand had visited my father’s rooms in the early hours of this morning.” Watching, he saw the mage’s perturbation. “. . . Can I trust her, Tam?”

  Tam started to say something, and then stopped. “Jay,” he said, “this is for friendship, not for contract. I—cannot exclude the possibility that Floria was involved. Knowing how she loved the prince, I can hardly believe it, but I cannot exclude it. The basis of my suspicions I—cannot tell you yet. I need to investigate further.”

  He looked more than tired now; he looked white, sickly almost. Fejelis set down his bottle—on the top of the cabinet, where he would not lose sight of it—stooped, and hefted the bench some six feet from its original position. The skylight was mirrored outside, the roof well patrolled during sunlight, but he did not, and would not, create opportunities. The servants would be able to describe the layout only as it had been. “Sit down,” he said.

  Tam sat; Fejelis sat beside him, stretching to ease a twinge in his back. He’d have to get lighter benches in here if he was to have these conversations often.

  Neither of them spoke. He settled back on his hands, studying the deep blue sky. He remembered the sweetness of the poisoned peach as he lapped its juices from his hands, standing in the orchard beneath a late summer’s sky, just like this one. He had been alone, and the solitude, like the peach, seemed a gift to nourish him. He felt himself expand to his full height in it, relieved of the constantly watching eyes, the constant waiting for him to declare himself one way or the other. He could feel the breeze cooling his scalp through his close-cropped hair, the haircut that had so appalled his mother and her entourage.

  He had cut his hair for the most childish of reasons: he had been jealous of his brother, little flame- haired Orlanjis, the pampered darling of the southern faction. He had wanted attention. He had wanted to announce he was different.

  In that, he thought, he had certainly succeeded. The delicious peach, the delicious solitude, had, of course, been engineered. The Vigilance drawn away, himself lured—by a girl three years older than he whom he worshipped—into the far orchard, to the peach trees, to the low-hanging peaches. She, three years older, six inches taller, could reach past those, quite naturally. They had plucked and devoured the fruit with muffled glee. Then she had blurted that her mother would be looking for her, and dashed away, leaving him licking the juice from his fingers, until the dizziness began, and the painful muscle spasms.

  In a sense he had died that day. Whoever had been carried from the orchard, it had not been the child who wandered so blithely in.

  “. . . Does the Temple want me dead?” he said quietly to the mage beside him.

  “No,” said Tam. “Not to my knowledge.”

  Fejelis twisted to study the mage, weighing those words. “. . . I could almost wish they did,” he said, half whimsically, half bitterly. “. . . Then I would know they thought we had a serious chance.”

  “I wish,” the mage said, “I had half your courage.”

  The prince prodded him. “I’ll hold you to artisans’ wages on future contracts. We will shake the foundations of the Temple yet.”

  My courage, he thought, is of your making , though you may not know it. He remembered the moment when he had been able to breathe and hear again, the quietly spoken, “He’ll be fine now.” By the time he had opened his gummy eyes to stare at laden peach trees, and Floria White Hand’s frightened face, the two of them were alone. But the voice had lingered, the voice of a god speaking benediction on him. He’ll be fine now. The words carried the accent of the west foothills, but gods lived in places remote in place and time; the western mountains seemed as likely a place as any.

  He held that promise close throughout the slow convalescence that followed—for Tam had not erased all the ill effects of the poison, merely the death in it—and the investigations that, largely unknown to him, led to arrests, executions, and banishments. He was made aware of those only once, when he woke to the sound of the girl’s voice crying his name from the outer rooms—she had briefly escaped her captivity, come to beg him for her life. Her voice had filled his throat with sweet, poisoned juice. He rocked miserably on his pillows, hands over his ears, straining to hear the remembered voice of the god. He’ll be fine now.

  In time he had realized that his savior had to be a mage, not a god. But by then the promise had counteracted the last effect of the poison, the one on his spirit. He might be changed, but he was not broken.

  He had been fifteen when he finally met the man. By then, he was a boy of guarded actions and many masks, who regularly shed the Vigilance—or so he thought—to wander the city in disguise, studying people unnoticed. In the persona of a rebellious young palace servant, he had fallen in with students from the artisan colleges. Observation guided him to the group at the periphery who spoke quietly amongst themselves of the arts of the people on the other side of sunrise, of firearms that could shoot hundreds of yards with precision, of trains that rode their tracks more swiftly than a horse could run, night and day. And of a magic that was not magic, called electricity, that could—it was in the equations—move impossible loads and heat wires until they glowed with brilliant light.

  Much of what he learned, he took back to his father, at their private breakfasts. Isidore listened closely to Fejelis’s accounts of Darkborn wonders and the concerns and complaints of people outside court. Isidore in turn spoke of his discussions with the Darkborn archduke, whom he found both shrewd and sympathetic, though Sejanus Plantageter’s distaste for magic was profound and he was hampered by the prejudices of his dukes. Lightborn-Darkborn affairs were mediated by a low-level, relatively powerless shared council. And as Fejelis grew older, Isidore spoke often of the consequences of the compact and the stranglehold that the mages had on the princedom’s wealth.

  But as Fejelis listened to the young artisans argue about whether heated wires could glow as brightly as the sun, he knew his father would not find this interesting, but alarming. Light was the one form of magic that every Lightborn had no choice but to depend upon. And by their suddenly lowered voices, the artisans knew it, too.

  Even as he tried to steady himself, he became aware that he himself was being watched. At a nearby table, a man caught his eye, and crooked a finger. Fejelis took in the red hair, the broad, freckled peasant face, the sharp gray green eyes, the dress of a journeyman artisan. Quite ordinary, but very much a stranger. And he might have been sitting on the other side of a mirrored window, for all the others seemed aware of him.

  He knew then what the man was. He pushed his chair back and walked quietly around the table, his fellows’ glances sliding off him. He sat down opposite the man; yes, even from here, he could hear every excited whisper.

  There was nothing to indicate who held the mage’s contracts, and therefore nothing to indicate whether Fejelis could lawfully order him away. Nevertheless, “. . . You ought to leave,” he said. “You don’t belong here.”

  The mage’s eyes narrowed. “I would say the same of you,” he said. “You’re no servant’s boy. Not watched as you are.”

  He twitched, but managed to resist looking around to find the guard he had missed. Even so, the man smiled. “Not today, I’m afraid I’ve made sure of that. . . . What do you think”—he tilted his head toward the artisans—“of their notions?”

  He did not trust the lightness of that word, for one. “. . . I think,” he said, measuring out his words, “. . . they are very clever, but i
nnocent. They do not understand the implications.”

  “Not as well as you do, perhaps, but well enough to be dangerous.”

  “. . . Magic is not involved here. Law says this has nothing to do with the Temple. . . . Let’s walk out together. I can make it worth your while.” He slid his hand across the table, opening his palm to show a single star sapphire on a fine chain. Only those of the reigning prince’s blood were entitled to the stone.

  There was no surprise recognition in the mage’s face at the sight, only relief. With a gentle touch, he pressed Fejelis’s hand closed. “I do believe you are right.” His fingers flickered, and suddenly the students clustered around them. “Tam.” One of the girls, landing a flirtatious kiss on his wavy hair. “We didn’t see you. I see you’ve met our latest recruit—” She caught Fejelis’s expression and looked uncertainly back at the mage.

  Who said comfortingly, “Yes, we’ve met. He’ll be fine now. But you do need to be more circumspect, my children, when you’re plotting to turn the world upside down.”

  Fejelis’s world turned upside down. He’ll be fine now.

  “You’re smiling,” Tam said now, at his side.

  “I’m thinking about the day we met,” Fejelis said, “when I tried to bribe you, and you rather more successfully turned me into a co-conspirator. . . . If any good is going to come of this terrible thing, it will be that I can do what we’ve only just talked about until now. Having a workshop in the manor would let our friends build more and larger prototypes and generators. Now I can push to elevate the standing of the Intercalatory Council, get some higher-ranked earthborn on both sides involved. I also want the palace judiciary to explore the wording of the concord and all subsequent rulings to determine what is and is not allowed within the concord—we have to be protected against interference from the Temple.”

  “Jay, you have to take care,” Tam breathed.

  Isidore had said the very same to him, on occasion. But along with grief, he had a heady sense of possibility: he was prince, with all that entailed. He might die tomorrow, from southern ambition or northern schemes. What purpose holding back, then?

  “. . . The best help you can give me is to find out how my father died.” He would push no further, at this moment. Even friends could turn.

  He thought about Floria White Hand. Tam had said that she loved the prince, and he trusted Tam’s judgment, though no doubt the vigilant daughter of vigilants would scorn such sentimental terms. Isidore had trusted her with his life against repeated poisoning attempts—nine that Fejelis knew of, and more in the years of his infancy. In the palace, Fejelis himself had obeyed Isidore’s wish that he eat only dishes that Floria had tasted first. He said, slowly, “. . . I think I must have the Vigilance hold Mistress White Hand.”

  The mage flinched. Fejelis continued. “. . . What Mother said, I might discount as malice.” Though his mother’s survival instincts, he knew, were superb. “But along with what you said . . . if I cannot rely on Floria’s loyalty, I cannot rely on her asset. And she is herself an expert with poisons.”

  The sudden taste of ripe peach in the back of his mouth made him want to gag. Hearing the stifled sound, and perhaps mistaking it for a sob, Tam reached over to squeeze his arm briefly. “It’s a good decision,” he said. “If she’s been somehow ensorcelled, you dare not trust her.”

  Fejelis did not acknowledge either the moment of weakness or the gesture of consolation. “. . . It’ll make for a hungry few days, until she’s cleared or I have a replacement. But I’ll live. If I share Mother’s and Orlanjis’s table, aside from being vulnerable to our common enemies, I’ll burn my stomach out.” He stood up. “I need to get washed and dressed and back upstairs. Fortunately”—his smile twisted—“I doubt anyone will want to risk my company, come sunset.”

  Tam lifted his head. “You’re wrong. I’m staying with you now. I intend to find the person or persons responsible for this attack. There’s more riding on it than I can tell you, but your life is by far the least.”

  Floria

  Balthasar’s letter came into her hands in the late afternoon, delivered by the secretary of the Lightborn half of the Intercalatory Council with profuse apologies for its tardiness. Her lips thin, Floria silently cursed the woman for an incompetent—a letter meant for a recipient other than the one it was addressed to was hardly a rarity in her work—and, back against the lintel of the window of the west- facing gallery, turned the letter toward the sunlight. The script was thinner and more untidy than usual, and there were mistakes in the ciphering. It was dated two nights past.

  Floria, Baron Strumheller has been arrested for Tercelle Amberley’s murder and for sorcerous harm to Lord Vladimer. . . .

  Oh, my friend, Floria thought, reading his plea for information on the whereabouts of his kidnapped daughter. I am desperate. . . . And Strumheller, their capable ally, charged with sorcery. She turned the letter over in her hands, feeling the stippling of the Darkborn script, and paused to decipher the covering letter to the head of the Intercalatory Council, Bal’s careful strategy for disguising the message to her from his own people. She shook her head: maybe she had taught him too well.

  With the prince in no immediate need of her special services, she surely had time enough to go home and check for any further word, and time enough to send an inquiry directly to the archducal palace if there was none. Tam was with the prince; she would speak to him as soon as possible thereafter. A word to the new captain, Lapaxo, and a promise to return promptly before dinner gained her leave to go.

  Smoke-tinted sunlight painted the west walls of the palace. Already the first of the palace administrative staff—those not involved in executing the elaborate funeral arrangements—were beginning to return to their own homes in the periphery of the palace round. All wore red jackets over their work clothes. Whether a deposition was rightful or unrightful did not matter to the civil service; tradition ruled.

  She lifted her eyes, looking across the garden toward the wall that enclosed the palace. Four or five centuries ago, before the crops and fields had been torn up for gardens, piazzas, and buildings, and while the palace and its staff were still small, this inner city would have been nearly self-sufficient. That was a time when princes still might expect to die in bed.

  Mother of All, but she was wearier than she could ever show, here in the Lightborn court. Perhaps she could understand her father’s mortal resignation, in the aftermath of the death of his own prince. But she did not think Benedict had ever charged Darien to look after Isidore, as Isidore had charged Floria on Fejelis’s behalf.

  She set a hat of broad-brimmed mesh on her head and glanced through its filter at the sun. Lightborn she might be, but the sun scalded her. Pale as a Darkborn, whispered the more fanciful of her enemies. But neither she nor they had ever seen a Darkborn, to know whether a Darkborn’s skin was as pale as milk, as some speculated, or dark as onyx, as others did. The Darkborn themselves could not know.

  She avoided the servants’ common ways, disliking crowds, taking a series of open paths across open lawns and alongside still pools that reflected the stippled clouds overhead. He will never see them again, she thought, and the loss pierced her, daggerlike. Mother of All, whoever is responsible will not escape their own deserved and rightful deposition, and I will make it painful.

  The red-clad guards on the side gate passed her through without a word. The next breath she took seemed freer, and she did not look back until she had reached the corner. Turning then, she did, at the wall, at the wide- but blind-windowed upper stories of the palace behind it, and at the monolith of the Temple tower at its back, the white walls, balconies, and crenellations blazing in the sunlight. Every generation the tower grew in grandeur, until even the Darkborn, enthusiastic builders though they were, protested that it could not stand safely. The sight never failed to disquiet her, but she shook her head at the futility of dispute with the order of things and continued toward her own modest home, on a border between Lightb
orn and Darkborn districts.

  She took careful note of her surroundings as she approached. Her home lacked shrubbery or statuary, or ornamentation. The stone was polished smooth and fitted close, and the woodwork and shutters were a glossy gray that would show any crack. When she was a girl, she had pointed to the Mages’ Tower and whined about the drabness. A little later, her father had taken her with him to the death scene of a member of the Prince’s Vigilance. The assassins had entered via a shutter left unlocked by the artist hired to decorate it.

  Years later, Floria had learned that her father had arranged the assassination himself, and why. Corruption within the Vigilance could not be tolerated.

  She wondered why that memory made her feel so cold. Perhaps because she could envision one type of person who might be so trusted, and so skilled, and so ruthless, as to kill a prince in such a manner.

  She unlocked her front door with care. Just inside was a decorative curtain, a silvery mesh that was another Darkborn invention. Push it aside in the usual way, and the links would fall into a new and recognizable pattern. But the pattern was undisturbed; the mesh had not been touched.

  Nevertheless, something was wrong.

  She slid past the curtain and moved silently to the archway of the large front room. The mesh on the windows was undisturbed. The open back and mesh of furnishings offered no cover. Carefully placed mirrors exposed hidden corners. Another gliding step took her to the archway to the smaller side room. Again, nothing anomalous.

  Upstairs, then, pausing to slip her key from within her belt and disarm the traps on the stairs. She knew, as soon as she reached the first landing, what was wrong. The familiar smell was subtly altered by the scents of Darkborn furnishings and Darkborn furniture treatments. Habit made her pause on the landing to check all rooms before she turned toward the half-open door of her salle, the room that, via a paper wall, abutted the home of Darkborn Balthasar Hearne. Discipline kept her eyes from fixing first on the huge rent in the paper wall and the mesh that reinforced it; she glanced over the room entire, seeing nothing else anomalous, and then back at the wall. A flap, like a doorway, had been cut away, and now hung curled under its own weight.