Lightborn Read online

  Oh, sweet Imogene. They’re here.

  With a puff of warm air that was as gentle as the opening of a door into a hearth-warmed room, fire bloomed from the undercarriage of the engine and stowage car. The first screams were as tentative and muted as the fire. Then the doors on the engine and stowage cars slammed open and men hurled themselves and one another onto the platform, the rearmost shoving the others ahead of them, to land running or sprawling, the first man to rise dragging the others clear, injured or otherwise.

  Briefly, as though a wind had shifted, the sense of Shadowborn magic ebbed. But it was no more than a gathering of breath for effort—and she heard the breath drawn. She turned toward it, her sonn catching at its limit an indistinct figure. She thought it might be young, and it was dressed as a male, standing apart, exuding chill, pollution, and triumph. His arm swept toward them in a grand gesture worthy of an actor or orator. A man screamed, “Get away from the train!” in the raw Rivermarch accents of the apothecary who had been assisting Ishmael. Who had, like Ishmael, survived the inferno that had destroyed nine blocks of the Rivermarch, a fire that was surely Shadowborn-set.

  No, Telmaine thought, you shall not. In the blazing warehouse she had pushed the flame aside; now she reached out with the full force of her magic and tore the fire from its root in the burning engine and whipped it around the Shadowborn. She risked no exchange of words or thoughts; she had tried that with his kin back at Vladimer’s bedside and had all but lost her mind to him. As the vortex of flame enfolded him, the Shadowborn screamed in the half-broken voice of an adolescent boy. Sonn caught his frantic flurry in the midst of the shimmy of flame, and the fire rippled and bellied around him as he paddled it away, stronger than she would have imagined. She felt a blast of heat and oily vapor, and terror of immolation lent her strength to tighten the vortex; she knew no other response. Then chill and foulness slapped at her, and the fires were instantly snuffed by his magic. The Shadowborn reeled in place for several heartbeats, and then, as people started to gather warily around him, he screeched a vulgarity in her direction and stumbled away.

  The train and coach burned on with a sullen natural flame, its smoke thickening the enclosed station. Telmaine’s legs abruptly surrendered beneath her. With the ladies’ steward pulling uselessly on her arm, she sank down amongst her pillowed skirts, gasping for breath. Two men caught her up, emergency overriding propriety, and bore her past the onrushing fire crews with their buckets and hoses.

  Telmaine

  “What,” said Vladimer, “exactly happened back there?” The last word came hoarsely as the carriage jolted over rough pavings. Vladimer had directed it on a tortuous approach to the archducal palace, a precaution he might be regretting as it wound through side streets.

  “Those two men were the ones who beat Balthasar and kidnapped Florilinde,” she said, almost whispering. She would rather not have been answering these questions now, and certainly not in a coach with guards riding overhead. “They were also with the group who shot Guillaume di Maurier and left him for dead. When I—when he was telling me where Florilinde was, he was remembering.”

  And she had been holding di Maurier’s hand, easing his agony with her magic. To be a mage, to be any level of mage, even a first-ranker like Ishmael di Studier, was to be a touch-reader.

  Which was why her timid offer to heal Vladimer’s wound, once they were alone, had been harshly rebuffed. He had allowed the apothecary to apply a bandage, ignoring the man’s warning that it needed proper attention, and hurried them to the coach.

  “They had nothing to do with the fire,” he said curtly. “They were dead before it started.”

  “There was a Shadowborn,” she said, and swallowed against threatened nausea from the jolting of the coach and the recollection of the magic. “I said there were two.”

  “Two?”

  “The one Ishmael killed, and this one.”

  “Ah, so that is your accounting.” His humorless smile needed the barest twist to become a grimace of pain. “Curse it, I’ll have words with someone about these roads,” he muttered. “So the fire was Shadowborn-set. You sensed it.”

  “I sensed it.”

  He withheld any reproach as to why she had not sensed the Shadowborn’s presence sooner. “Why start with the engine and stowage if they wanted me dead?” Then he answered his own question. “The corpse of the one di Studier shot at my bedside.” His lips tightened in irony. “The strongest evidence I could offer my brother and his counselors to support this wild story of ours. The fire will have done for it.”

  “He was about to burn our coach,” Telmaine said.

  “And you turned his fire back on him. You seem,” he said coolly, “to be making great gains with this neglected power of yours.”

  She knew exactly what he was implying, his doubt that she was as unpracticed with her magic as she claimed to be, as she was. “All I did was distract him,” she lied desperately. “It was his own magic turned on him.”

  There was a silence, which did not tell her whether he had believed her. “A great shame it did not burn him worse.”

  Another bend in the road brought them onto the smoother roads of a quality neighborhood. She had quite lost her bearings, but knew they could not be far from the archducal palace. “Lord Vladimer,” she ventured, trying to keep her voice from going soft and high in appeal—which he would revile as feminine wiles. “Lord Vladimer, must you tell the archduke about me? It will—it will ruin me in society.”

  She knew little of the archduke’s attitude toward magic, but the little she did know suggested that he was no more sympathetic than any other aristocrat, and possibly even less.

  “I do not have the impression that your husband would repudiate you,” Vladimer noted.

  He could have had no sense of the new complexities of her marriage, now that Balthasar knew the secret she had kept from him all those years. If ever a man was set for lifelong bachelorhood, Vladimer was the man. But he was right that Balthasar would not repudiate her for being a mage, would not add to her stigma that of divorce. And she would not plead being thrown back on Balthasar’s inferior social status after all these years of cultivating loving indifference to it. “I know,” she said, humbly. “My husband honors his vows, and he loves me—more than I realized. But we have daughters, Lord Vladimer.” Children she and Balthasar had left behind in their dash to save Vladimer’s life, she thought resentfully. “Their happiness, their marriage prospects, their place in society—all would be ruined if it were known that I am a mage.” Her voice wavered with desperation and fatigue.

  There was a silence. While he weighed her plea, and she tried not to amplify it.

  “You are—however irregularly—in my service, it seems,” he said, slowly. “It is to my advantage as much as to yours, I think, not to have your capabilities known. As long as you remain—” He seemed about to say more, but the coach went through a sharp turn, jolting them both, and forcing a gasp from him. She started to put out a gloved hand to steady him, but snatched it back before he perceived the gesture. Then they were rattling along the side of the archducal palace, toward the private entrance that Vladimer used.

  She slithered down from the coach, gloved hands futilely trying to set right rumpled skirts, ruffled lace, disordered veil, disordered self. Two—or was it three?—nights ago, she had arrived at this entrance as a refugee from multiple disasters, with Balthasar battered and too weak to stand, and one daughter missing through abduction. She had been appalled then at the thought of coming here, with her life and social armor in such disarray. But at least then she had not had to face the entire ducal household, as it seemed she must now: Sejanus Plantageter himself had descended to greet them. She recognized his broad, reverberant sonn, like no other. In the converging echoes of the entire household’s sonn she perceived the archduke closing on his brother, by his manner equally poised to embrace him and to shake him. “Vladimer,” he said, in the ominous tone of someone who had waited and worried
and was ready to lose his temper with the object of the waiting and worrying.

  Vladimer, his head low, muttered, “Janus, I don’t need this circus.”

  “Then don’t go frightening us like that,” the archduke rebuked him. “First they had you at death’s door, and then I heard there was trouble at the station.” At the same time, with sharp sweeps of his hand he was waving dismissal all around. Then he sonned Vladimer sharply and said in a low voice. “You’re ill. Or hurt.”

  Vladimer shook his head minimally. “Not till we’re in private. It will take some explaining.”

  “When does it not with you, Dimi?” the archduke said. He started to turn, and his sonn caught Telmaine, in her bedraggled state. “Lady Telmaine,” he said, in surprise. “Mrs. Hearne.”

  She dropped a deep curtsy. Now in his late forties, the archduke was a man of arresting appearance who shared with his illegitimate brother their mother’s distinctive bony features, high cheekbones, and broad brow—augmented in Sejanus’s case by the equally distinctive Plantageter nose. Telmaine’s acerbic-tongued sister had once opined that the dynastic prowess of the Plantageters was surely due to that nose; where it appeared, paternity was never in question. Sejanus had been archduke for nearly forty years, and was as respected as his brother was feared.

  “Lady Telmaine was good enough to accompany me from the coast, a decision I fear she came to regret,” Vladimer said.

  The archduke’s brows arched. He had surely last heard of Telmaine as sheltering within his walls, and his brother was not known for dashing around the countryside with other men’s wives. But if the expression was meant teasingly, its target missed it. His brows drew down again, less in displeasure than worry.

  Telmaine dipped a shallower curtsy. “If I may be excused, Your Grace, my mother and children will be wondering where I am.”

  The archduke eased the frown from his face, turning to say considerately, “Ah, yes, before you become concerned, I should let you know that your mother and sister have taken your daughters back to your sister’s household. They thought the children would be more comfortable in familiar surroundings.”

  None of her immediate impulses—to bolt out the door, to scream in panic, to rage at her imperious, managing, clueless sister—would have made the least sense to pragmatic Sejanus Plantageter—at least not until he had heard Vladimer’s report. The archduke’s brief, sympathetic smile said he was well aware of the personalities in his circle, even those of dukes’ daughters. Not to mention the challenges of dealing with a difficult sibling.

  Perhaps fortunately for what she might have confided, his attention was diverted by the arrival of Casamir Blondell, hurrying in with a jubilant “My lord Vladimer.”

  Vladimer raised a baleful face. “Blondell, what is this about having charges laid against Baron Strumheller for murder and sorcery?”

  She could almost pity Blondell for having his joy at his lord’s return so harshly quenched. The spymaster’s city lieutenant drew himself up, saying in a firm voice that verged on pomposity, “It was a necessary temporizing measure, my lord, to reduce suspicions of the Lightborn and interracial tensions, and there was sufficient evidence of di Studier’s presence at the scene of the murder to make it plausible.”

  “It makes a mockery of justice and came near to being a fatally stupid measure,” Vladimer rasped. “Janus, I need to speak to you now. Blondell, you should hear this, too.”

  “Just tell me why I shouldn’t have you put to bed first,” Sejanus Plantageter grumbled. “Come on, upstairs.” He nodded toward Telmaine. “Lady Telmaine. My house is yours, as ever.”

  Vladimer, who had set his cane preparatory to taking a first step, hesitated and said through half-gritted teeth, “Lady Telmaine should come as well, if she would.”

  If this was as unexpected or unwelcome to the archduke as it was to her, he did not show it, only set a firm grip on Vladimer’s sound arm, a grip that Vladimer did not resist. Casamir Blondell’s curiosity was almost palpable, but he had the courtesy not to probe her with his sonn.

  The archduke steered them into the first room at the top of the stairs. “Claudius is here; shall I bring him in on this?”

  “Yes.” A footman peeled off to carry the orders. Vladimer faltered before the challenge of lowering himself into a chair with only one working arm. The archduke said, “Come,” set his hands under his brother’s armpits with a readiness that suggested he had done this before, and eased him down. Vladimer leaned carefully against the cushions, letting his head fall back.

  “Right arm, is it?” Sejanus said.

  “Yes.”

  “Happened at the station?”

  Vladimer’s lips twitched. “And you accuse me of never waiting for a story to unfold. Yes, we were ambushed as we came off the train.”

  “The person responsible is dead or in custody, I presume.”

  “Two of three.”

  “Only two of three. You must be losing your touch.”

  Telmaine was still trying to decide whether this was meant as brotherly humor or archducal rebuke when Duke Rohan arrived. Claudius Rohan had been the youngest member of the regency council during the archduke’s long-ago minority, and, though fifteen years Sejanus’s elder, was still his closest adviser and friend. His relationship with Vladimer, however, had the meticulous formality of two men who subsumed their incompatibility in a strong mutual loyalty. “Vladimer,” he greeted the archduke’s brother. “Welcome back. What’s this about bullets and fires at Bolingbroke Station?”

  The archduke said, in a tone of distinct irritation, “You already know more about this than I, Claudius. Sit down. Vladimer has a report for us.”

  “I think . . . I will ask Lady Telmaine to explain, since much of what I know I heard from her, her husband, and Baron Strumheller. It is largely thanks to those three I am sitting here now.”

  Telmaine froze, first with simple social dismay at being thrust from her observer’s role, then with concern—was he having her tell it because he did not have the strength?—and finally with horror as she understood his strategy. He was inviting—or challenging—her to perjure herself before the archduke. Her tongue suddenly seemed too large for her mouth.

  “Strumheller?” said the archduke, sharply. “I had a report he’d died in prison.”

  “A necessary ruse, Janus. Telmaine, if you would be so good. Tell my brother the story.”

  She heard a double meaning in that, no doubt intended. But it stiffened her resolve. She would tell the archduke the story. On her, as much as on Vladimer, lay the responsibility to convince him of the threat.

  She sought just the right tone of reliable willingness. “Your Graces, when I was down at the summerhouse, at the last grand ball, Baron Strumheller asked me if I would permit him to escort me back to the city. Lord Vladimer had asked him to consult with my husband—” She faltered, aware that the men around her had stiffened at the mention of Ishmael’s name, and remembering that Blondell at least was hostile enough to have Ishmael charged conveniently with capital crimes. Did these men know that those years going in and out of the Shadowlands themselves had left Ishmael with a dangerous compulsion to return? The people who lived along the Borders, Ishmael’s people, knew it as the Call to the Shadowlands, and dreaded it. But if the archduke did not know, she would not expose Ishmael’s vulnerability. “Regarding a personal matter,” she amended. No one challenged or contradicted her. She continued her account, keeping her tone steady with some effort: arriving at her door to have her daughter snatched from her arms as a token of blackmail. Finding her husband severely beaten—abruptly, she decided to omit all mention of the magic used to save Bal’s life, hers, and Ishmael’s. Learning what the kidnappers wanted: the bastard twin sons of Lady Tercelle Amberley, recently delivered by Balthasar and his sister, Olivede. Children whom Balthasar believed to have been born sighted, as no Darkborn had been since the Curse that had created their races.

  “Tercelle Amberley,” Rohan said sharply. �
��Ferdenzil Mycene’s betrothed.” His tone was skeptical, though no more than she would have expected. Tercelle Amberley had been betrothed to the only son of the second most powerful duke in the land, after the archduke himself.

  “There have been rumors, Your Grace,” put in Blondell.

  Vladimer stirred slightly; Telmaine’s sonn caught a quelling hand gesture toward his deputy.

  “There are always rumors,” the archduke said. “Where is Hearne now?”

  “On a train to the Borders,” Vladimer said. “Continue, please, Lady Telmaine.”

  Charging Ishmael to find her daughter. Waking to the smell of smoke from the blazing Rivermarch, hearing the rainstorm summoned by the Lightborn to drown the fire—making no mention of the magical tempest that had almost sucked her into itself. The return of Ishmael di Studier, burned and suffering from smoke poisoning, to sweep them away to what he believed was a place of safety here in the archducal palace. Ishmael’s arrest for the murder of Tercelle Amberley and the suspected ensorcellment of Lord Vladimer, found unconscious at the ducal summerhouse. Learning where her daughter was, from one of Vladimer’s other agents, and setting out to rescue her.

  “Very foolish of you, Telmaine,” Vladimer said, in a tone that was dry, but otherwise not interpretable.

  “I am a mother, sir,” she said, realizing only then that he might be referring not to the act itself—of which he knew the true story—but of her daring to lie about it here. But he had set her up to do so.

  “This ensorcellment,” prompted the archduke, toward his brother.

  Vladimer’s lips tightened. “I don’t remember, Janus. I was in my private study, I heard a sound behind me, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in my own bed, four days gone.”

  He had said the same to Ishmael, Balthasar, and herself. Balthasar believed that he lied, that the sorcerous coma had followed a sorcerous seduction, cruel and damaging to a man as aloof and distrustful as Vladimer. Did Sejanus Plantageter, with his lifelong knowledge of his brother, hear the lie?