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  Several minutes passed before she could compose herself enough to heal her hand and tuck her burned glove up her sleeve. With a trembling hand and a hearth brush, she swept the ash into the fireplace. She wondered what the housemaids would think. Secret messages. Or more likely, love letters. She should disturb the stylus and frame before she left.

  She folded another sheet and this time set it down on the hearth, touching it only with a finger. She carefully held in her mind the sense of an unlit fire, then a flame no larger than an orange blossom, and snatched back her hand as the entire paper burst into a bounding blaze. This was more difficult, more unnatural, than she had thought. She would have to lay hand on a supply of paper, one other than expensive palace stationery. Frugal Bal would be appalled. Carefully, she extended her magic, and muffled the blaze into a small flame, the flame into embers, the embers into smoke.

  Three sheets of paper later, each of which had flared up like the one before, she heard the sunset bell with a sense of relief she remembered from the schoolroom. She cleared the last of the ash into the fireplace, and replaced the cleaning equipment. She had done what Vladimer asked, tested her ability to quench flame, but she was vexed and dissatisfied at her tenuous control in the lighting; she would need more practice. At the desk, she took care to shift the position of the stylus and writing frame. If only she dared write to Bal, and to Ishmael . . . but no. A few hours’ sleep, and then her vigil would resume.

  Telmaine

  Vladimer’s summons roused Telmaine two hours into her craved- for sleep. Sweet Imogene, but the only other time she could remember being this tired was the last weeks before Amerdale was born. With her maid’s help, she put on a moderately formal evening dress and set her hair in good order. By the time she arrived at the botanical library, she was walking more or less straight and wishing that Vladimer were not himself ailing; archduke’s brother or no, he was due a piece of her mind for treating her like some clerk to be ordered to his whim.

  “Your husband’s letter case was delivered to me,” he said, by way of greeting. “One of them was ciphered.” He had read them, read her husband’s heart openings to the people he loved. “Can you interpret that cipher?”

  It was too much to hope that Vladimer be ashamed of himself. “No.”

  “What is your husband’s relationship to this Lightborn woman?”

  “They are friends from childhood,” she said. Only her mother and her closest friend, Sylvide, knew what she felt about Floria White Hand. Vladimer certainly did not need to.

  “She was highly placed in the Lightborn Prince’s Vigilance, was one of Isidore’s special agents. What,” Vladimer said, “would he tell her?”

  She caught herself, realizing that there was more staked on this than her womanly pride. “He would tell her,” she said, carefully, “everything he thought she needed to know as a servant of the Lightborn prince.”

  “Did he not trust the official channels of information?”

  Vladimer might distrust her, but he must not distrust Balthasar. “My husband has served several terms as an Intercalatory Councilman. He is part of the official channels of information.”

  Vladimer braced his cane and pushed himself to his feet. “We have an unexpected visitor. I trust you will tell me if she is who she claims to be.”

  He led her through a labyrinth of stairs, halls, and corridors, all the time providing steady commentary on the history of the palace. Merivan’s two eldest sons, reluctant students and with the gruesome tastes of young boys, would have been enthralled. For herself, she found Vladimer in the role of history tutor disconcerting, even without his recital of treachery, villainy, and horrific death.

  They turned into a corridor as wide as some dancing halls she had seen, whose finish did not disguise its rough construction. Two massive doors separated it from the rest of the palace; at the moment, both stood open, but the aspect was not inviting. This was no wing for guests, even unwelcome ones. Vladimer jerked his head toward a plain door. “Execution room,” he said, and she thought—with relief—he would not elaborate, but he said, “The skylight can be opened from outside. Been more than a few traitors who’ve ended there, quietly. And a number of criminals.”

  And for those he had sent there himself—for he surely had—he showed neither pride nor regret. Something she would not have understood before these last days.

  “It’s not always a boon in law to be wellborn,” Vladimer added. “The common-born have protections that may be denied us.”

  Any explanation he might have offered was preempted as they turned a corner and arrived at another narrow door. “This needs two hands,” Vladimer said. Telmaine pressed where he indicated, and pulled as she was bidden, until the door opened. She followed him into a tight vestibule, and waited as he struggled one- handed with the mechanism of the inner door. Grudgingly, he yielded up that secret, too, and let her open it.

  The room they emerged in was small, and, like the study in Bal’s family home, the far wall was no more than paper reinforced with mesh. She caught her breath in visceral alarm.

  “Lord Vladimer,” she hissed. He gestured her to silence and pointed to the wall. She sensed a familiar vitality on the other side. And an equally familiar taint, faint, but detectable.

  “Mistress White Hand?” said Vladimer. His sonn, and his frown, prompted Telmaine to nod in confirmation, of that identity at least.

  On the far side of the wall, a body stirred. “Balthasar?” Floria’s voice said.

  “No. But I have with me his wife.”

  “Telmaine?” Telmaine had no desire to respond; she had never accepted that she and Floria should be on first-name terms. And with that taint about her . . . “Telmaine,” Floria persisted, “is Balthasar all right? Where is he?”

  “Balthasar is quite well,” she said, politely. “Thank you for inquiring.”

  The woman on the other side of the wall gave a choked laugh. “This is hardly a social call, not at this hour, Telmaine.”

  “Mistress White Hand invoked the law of succor,” Vladimer said, neutrally. “Arriving at the palace as the sun-bell was tolling. She is in one of the rooms we keep for the purpose. It goes without saying that she brought a light source with her.”

  “Who are you, sir?”

  “I am acting in the interest of Lord Vladimer Plantageter,” Vladimer said. “You may regard everything you say to me as being said to Lord Vladimer himself.” There was a small table with recording materials against one wall. He set his cane across the table, and eased himself down into the chair. Telmaine stood beside him, her mage sense extended through the wall.

  “Very well, sir,” Floria said. “I will take you at your word. I need asylum. I’m suspected of being involved in the unrighteous deposition of the prince. I had hoped Balthasar Hearne would be here to speak for me.”

  Vladimer’s left hand slid into his pocket and his balance shifted forward. “You did not mention that before.”

  “No,” she said. “I wanted to speak to someone with the authority to grant my request for asylum.”

  Vladimer weighed the request, while Telmaine stood without breathing. It was a long moment before he settled his spine back against the chair, guarding his arm, and waved Telmaine to sit down in one of the other chairs. “Please tell us what you know of the prince’s death. Consider me Lord Vladimer’s ears.”

  He might, Telmaine thought, curb that undertone if he thought to protect himself by denying his identity. Floria White Hand was astute enough to hear it.

  After a brief pause, the woman on the far side of the wall said, “The prince retired to his rooms last night, later than his usual hour: the court had been celebrating Fejelis’s coming of age. The usual checks were done on the wards in his rooms by the mages contracted to palace service. The vigilants carried out their usual inspection. With the prince were a secretary, a servant, the captain of vigilants, and the captain of the watch. Sometime late in the night, the lights in his room failed completely. We
know that it happened with little warning because of the position of the residues: none of them had made an attempt to escape.”

  Telmaine was a moment understanding what she meant: while daylight burned the Darkborn to ash, darkness dissolved the Lightborn away to—To their daughters, Balthasar had said water, and to herself, who had not invited it, not much at all. The Lightborn were too familiar with magic for her to want to know more of them. She preferred—or had preferred—to regret ignorance rather than knowledge.

  “Go on,” said Vladimer, unmoving. “The lights failed, you said; how?”

  “How much do you know about how we make sunlight last through the night, Master—Ears?”

  Telmaine stiffened, wondering how the woman dared provoke from her position, but Vladimer’s chancy humor was teased. “By magic, I presume.”

  “The lights capture sunlight during the day and reradiate it through the night. Since magic dies with the mage, even the cheapest lights are enspelled by at least two mages. The lights in the prince’s chambers were enspelled by four.”

  “So the failure of the lights implies the involvement of a mage.” Vladimer had his chin propped on his sound hand, listening intently.

  “Yes,” Floria said, sounding stifled. “We began inquiries—the usual inquiries amongst the earthborn staff—”

  “Earthborn being nonmageborn,” Vladimer supplied, in an aside that made Telmaine twitch, exquisitely sensitive as she was to the mention of magic.

  “—as to people entering or leaving or seen around the prince’s rooms. What do you know of the—arrangements—between Lightborn mageborn and earthborn?”

  Vladimer said, in his didactic tone, “Mageborn cannot use their magic to influence the affairs of nonmages, but they can engage in publicly declared contracts to act in their interests, and in doing so are indemnified under law. The nonmageborn who engages a mage becomes liable for all their acts in his or her interest.”

  “That’s—right,” Floria said.

  “It seemed an advantageous solution, particularly to the early war-lords and potentates able to hire such mages—who, after all, would hold them accountable to the law but their fellows? I do not believe its developers anticipated a time like the present, when mages would number in the—what, thousands?—and command powers that are, frankly, barely to be imagined by the nonmageborn.”

  But someone like you would have, Telmaine thought.

  “The economic consequences have also been significant,” Vladimer observed, “given what amounts to a one-way transfer of wealth from nonmageborn to mageborn—there being few services that the nonmageborn can render that would offset the service of magic. Your system is not sustainable, Mistress White Hand.”

  There was a silence. “Might I have the pleasure of addressing Lord Vladimer Plantageter himself?” Floria said.

  “The very same.”

  Telmaine tensed, extending her senses, but Floria only breathed out, audibly. “My lord, I have heard a great deal about you.”

  “Not too unctuously flattering, I trust. What were your initial hypotheses?”

  Her tone was distinctly crisper, as though reporting to a superior. “A light that is nearly discharged changes color, conspicuously. The prince, or anyone else in the room, would have noticed. There was no evidence that they did.”

  “Mm,” Vladimer prompted her to continue.

  “Next, the possibility that the lights were faulty. In the rare event that the enspelling itself is flawed, the light fails within minutes of first use.”

  “Without—fail? As it were?”

  “Always. However, any magic can be annulled by a stronger mage. But the activities of higher- rank mages are of great interest to other mages, and the mages have admitted no such activity.”

  Vladimer collected Telmaine’s attention with a curl of his hand and pointed a finger at the wall. Calling her attention to the statement.

  “So we come to talismanic magic, magic cast on inanimate objects and maintained by the vitality of the mage—lights are talismans themselves. Talismans can be created that annul magic. One need only be given to an individual—mage or nonmage—with access to the prince’s quarters.”

  Vladimer tapped his fingertips lightly on the desk. “And is that what you are accused of?”

  Floria’s indrawn breath was audible.

  “It is a not-unwarranted deduction, is it not?” Vladimer said. “Did you?”

  “Lord Vladimer, I would have said—not. But I have—I remember—or I dreamed—going to my prince’s rooms during the night. I would never willingly have harmed the prince.” Her voice had thickened with tears, extraordinary to hear in this woman.

  “Ensorcellment,” Vladimer said, in a voice utterly without inflection.

  “The palace mages would have sensed it on me. That was another reason why I wanted to speak to Balthasar: I know there are nonmagical means of subverting the will.”

  Telmaine drew her breath to make Balthasar’s argument that such means could not make people do things that were completely against their will, and let it out unused.

  “What had your palace mages to say?”

  “The mages contracted to the palace sensed, or say they sensed, nothing untoward. I was not satisfied; I decided to contract a mage I knew personally, a sport—a mage who—” She hesitated.

  “I know what a sport is,” Vladimer said. “Continue.”

  But I do not, Telmaine thought, perversely piqued. She cleared her throat softly, drawing Vladimer’s attention. Vladimer said, not without malice, “The Lightborn masters of lineage breed mages, Lady Telmaine, as horse breeders do prize stock, to strengthen certain traits. A sport is a mage whose powers have arisen without benefit of such pedigree; all Darkborn mages might thus be considered sports.”

  Her face heated with embarrassment at the reminder of Lightborn immorality, and the even more pointed reminder of her magic.

  “I thought—though Tam would not say—he seemed to sense something in the room the prince had died in. He seemed troubled. He said he must make inquiries of the Temple. Almost the next I knew was the vigilants coming for me with a warrant from the prince.”

  “Ah,” said Vladimer. He thought, briefly. “Mistress Floria, it is not unknown, is it, that a sufficiently powerful mage may take the form of another?”

  “Such magic around the prince would have been sensed. Any ensorcellment—they should have sensed.”

  “And so we come back, once again, to what may or may not have been sensed,” Vladimer said, half to himself. “What part might the prince’s son, or the mother, have had in Isidore’s death?”

  Telmaine shivered at the casual allusion to assassination and patricide.

  “The timing is simply wrong. Fejelis said he would not be so stupid as to arrange his father’s deposition the very day he came of age, and, Mother of All help me, I believe him. And if Helenja meant to elevate one of her sons, it would be Orlanjis, but he is only fourteen—and Helenja would not be chosen regent.”

  Vladimer considered that in silence, his skepticism palpable.

  Floria said, a little desperately, “I’m asking not only for succor from the night but also for asylum. This is the one place that the mages cannot lawfully harm me, or the Vigilance reach me.”

  “Your safety is conditional,” Vladimer noted, “assuming you are right about the existence of a talisman that can annul light, and mages lawless enough to use it.”

  “That did occur to me, yes,” she said, quite steadily.

  “That said, I will grant you asylum, and we will—see—as you would say, what manner of petitions arrive for your surrender.” He pushed himself to his feet, bracing himself with his cane.

  “Thank you, Lord Vladimer.”

  Telmaine trailed after Vladimer through the small anteroom, into the hall, and waited while he rang a bell and delivered instructions to the servant who answered for Floria’s continued care.

  “You’re not going to—tell her about the Shadowbor
n?” she said as they started back toward his rooms.

  “Not now. It will be revealing if she lives to tomorrow’s dawn.”

  Little as she cared for the woman, she was dismayed by such calculation. “Do you—what do you think of the Lightborn mages sensing nothing? Because I had wondered—Ishmael said that they punished abuse of magic. Yet your ensorcellment, the firetraps set in the warehouse . . .”

  “Those things had occurred to me, Lady Telmaine,” he said.

  On their return, there were no macabre diversions; he was noticeably flagging. Despite her skirts and his longer legs, she easily kept pace with him through the corridors, all the way back to the botanical library. He let himself down into one of the comfortable armchairs, Telmaine into the straight-backed wooden chair.

  “What did you sense?” he said.

  “It was Floria White Hand. But there was Shadowborn magic about her. Faint, but there.”

  “Was she telling the truth, as far as she knew it?”

  “I—I think she was.”

  “Think?” he said stingingly. “You cannot let your emotions interfere with your purpose, Lady Telmaine.”

  She would, she decided, find some opportune moment to quote his own words back at him.

  “I have not asked you this before, but do you sense any aura or influence around me?” His voice was very controlled, and she had seldom been so relieved as to be able to say, “No.”

  “Which may mean, simply, that the one that ensorcelled me”—he said this with only the faintest hesitation—“is indeed dead. If Mistress Floria were ensorcelled . . . But the timing, the timing is wrong. The mage died before the prince. And the ensorcellment about Mistress Floria lingers.” He drummed his fingers restlessly on the arm of the chair.