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  “Snow in summer?” Her voice rose. “Surely that’s not natural.”

  “I am well aware of that,” Vladimer said. “Console yourself, if you will, that it will hamper Ferdenzil Mycene’s movements and communications as much as your husband’s, Strumheller’s, and mine.” He hooked the cane on the edge of the table, lifted the cup, and drank thirstily. Teacup landed on saucer with the chime of fine china and the trill of an unsteady hand. “Now, as to this evening, this is a command performance. Rumor is rife. The evening broadsheets are full of speculations of such lush inventiveness that even I do not know whether to be impressed or appalled. Ishmael di Studier’s name figures largely in them, as does your husband’s. Even Strumheller’s escape from the prison is being attributed to him in some quarters; he is quite the mastermind.”

  He was not so ill that his malicious humor was in abeyance. She supposed she should be grateful for the warning. “What am I supposed to say when people ask me where my husband is?” she demanded, but challenge quickly succumbed to panic. “I never expected this. Why has the archduke invited—”

  “To quell rumor and alarm at the ducal orders. We are to conduct ourselves with apparent confidence that everything is on its way to resolution. Depending upon your audience, you may choose to pretend you have no knowledge of your husband’s mission, though I doubt anyone who knows you well will credit that. Anyone too persistent, you may simply refer them to me.”

  “Lord Vladimer,” she said plaintively, “can’t I simply have the vapors and lie down?”

  A brief taut smile, startled out of him. “If I may not, you certainly may not.”

  “And what are you going to say?” she challenged. “Or will my husband have a profession and reputation to return to?”

  “I am not,” he said flatly, “in the habit of discussing my activities, or my agents’ activities, with the gossips of society. Be assured that the men who matter will know the services your husband has rendered.”

  And will they be grateful? Telmaine thought—but managed to stop herself from saying. Oh, Bal, what a reward for your loyalty: social ruin.

  “Lord Vladimer,” she murmured, and, hiding alarm and resentment behind a practiced, social smile, let herself be escorted from the room. She would not let Bal be sacrificed, not even for Sejanus Plantageter. She would not.

  Sylvide di Reuther, at once the first and the very last person she wished to talk to, had inveigled the footmen to bring an extra chair and set an additional place next to her. The one consolation was that they were adjacent to the archducal table, close enough to sonn without her being obtrusive. She did not need magic to sense the thunderous atmosphere around her; Lady di Reuther was in fine high dudgeon, and Sylvide’s breathing was quick and shallow and her heart- shaped face set. Telmaine ducked her head and nodded assent to the hovering footmen. Even if she could not eat, she could be spared having to speak while she picked at her plate. She lifted her fork in a trembling hand.

  She had not thought she could eat—had expected even to be sickened by the smell of it—but when the first slice of breakfast pie was laid on her plate, she found herself having to restrain herself from an unladylike greed. The aroma of island spices poignantly evoked the memory of the imprisoned Ishmael confiding a wish or whimsy to retire to the Islands and grow spices.

  “Telmaine,” Sylvide said, from beside her, “how is little Florilinde?”

  As safe, and unsafe, a question as any. “Back with us now,” she said, laying down her fork. “And unharmed.”

  Sylvide breathed out. “That is so good. I hear Master di Maurier is still holding his own, and I’m sure that knowing she is safe will do him good.”

  “You are not communicating with that reprobate, Sylvide,” decreed Lady di Reuther. “I was appalled to hear that you had visited him—and you, Telmaine. I thought better of you.”

  “Master di Maurier is a hero,” Sylvide said, her voice pinched.

  “Master di Maurier is a disgrace,” Lady di Reuther declared.

  Sylvide confined her argument to a tight little shake of the head. Softhearted Sylvide remembered Gil di Maurier from the nursery, her little boy cousin. To Telmaine’s mind he was both hero and disgrace, but the experience of the underworld that he had gained pursuing his dissipations had let him find Florilinde. Her covert attempt to heal him had been no more than she owed him.

  “Are you aware of the reason for your daughter’s travail?” Lady di Reuther demanded.

  “Yes,” Telmaine said. “Confidential information that my husband refused to divulge.”

  “You do realize, Telmaine, even if your husband does not, that it is not appropriate for men and women of our class to become the subject of such reporting as has surrounded this affair.”

  “And little Amerdale,” Sylvide said, desperately. “How is she?”

  Telmaine took firm control of herself, knowing that she was merely a goad or two from some unwise outburst. “Counting the days to her sixth birthday,” she said, brittle and airy. “We have promised her a kitten. She is quite infatuated with them.”

  “My Dorian is the same, only with him it is birds. There was an aviary in the Islands court; he would have stayed there night and day if he could. Once,” she said to the table, “he persuaded me to take him to an all-day opening. The visiting area was covered with a canvas, set up so that the birds can go outside by a series of tunnels that don’t pass light. It was quite terrifying, and at the same time utterly diverting, because the birds are so much busier and sing so much more by day. The staff made up beds for us, but neither of us slept at all.”

  “Dani,” said Lady Calliope, “did you know about this?”

  “Of course, Mother. If I had not had work, I would have gone as well.”

  “Reckless,” Lady Calliope deemed it. “Dorian is your heir.”

  “It was quite safe,” Sylvide said, breathing quickly. “Dorian is my son.”

  “No, Dani, it was reckless. I trust there will be no repetition.”

  Sylvide jabbed at a piece of bacon and sent it skittering across the plate and onto Telmaine’s napkin. Telmaine snatched it up and quickly laid it aside on the plate, trying equally to avoid a stain and further comment from Lady Calliope.

  Sylvide said, “Your hand, Telmaine. It’s all right.”

  “Quite all right,” Telmaine said, remembering too late she had planned to favor that hand when next she met Sylvide. “Oh, it stings still, but it must not have been as bad a burn as we feared. It was fright as much as anything that made me faint.”

  “I am so glad,” Sylvide said. She caught Telmaine’s wrist, pulling her close to whisper, “Telmaine, whatever they say, I don’t believe any of it.”

  “About what?” Telmaine whispered back, wondering if there was more than Vladimer had hinted at, but Sylvide said nothing more. Telmaine cast a wary sonn around her dining companions. Across the table, Lady Calliope’s aspect was haughty and disapproving, but she was ever thus. Beside his mother, Daniver di Reuther sat in sullen obedience. Telmaine thought guiltily of her lapsed resolve to speak to her brother the duke on Dani’s behalf. Dani had been ousted from his post in the Scallon Islands by Mycene’s intrigues, and the sooner he found another, the sooner he and poor Sylvide would escape his mother’s reach. At Dani’s side, his unmarried sister was teasing the food on an almost full plate, thin wrists protruding from her fashionably puffed sleeves. She was twenty-seven and still unwed, having outlived two fiancés and been jilted by the last. On Lady Calliope’s right sat her older son, on whose account she had no right whatsoever to sneer at Gil di Maurier. By his drooping posture and sagging face Xavier di Reuther had planned to be abed by now, sleeping off a day’s excess, rather than socializing to ducal order. At least the table should be spared his thumping wit, though not his heavy cologne. Merivan had stationed herself on his far side as sentinel to her erratic sister and was manifestly unhappy; her pregnancy made her extremely sensitive to odors.

  Lady di Reuther was opi
ning, disapprovingly, upon the behavior of her southern neighbors, and in particular the wayward daughters of the barony. Knowing that Ishmael was fugitive in Stranhorne lands made Telmaine listen, though she did find herself rather shocked; surely it was not true that the Baronettes Stranhorne had dressed in boys’ garb to ride out to hunt Shadowborn.

  Sylvide said, unexpectedly, “I thought it was very brave of them.”

  Xavier roused himself to a chortled “Like to sonn you in breeches, sister dear.”

  Dani started to stand, his expression ominous. His mother put a manacling hand on his arm.

  “I don’t think you would, sir,” Telmaine said. With her early-maturing figure, her sweet nature, and a family who showed scant concern for the security and happiness of a girl, Sylvide had suffered far more presumption and trespass than she deserved. Xavier was more bluster than malice, but he still would not say such things to a woman he respected—Telmaine, for instance. She smiled sweetly into his bleary face and reached across the table with her magic. “I understand your sister-in-law is quite a fair shot.” A delicate, internal nudge—it didn’t take much—and he was pushing back from the table, stumbling away with a hand clapped over his mouth. She felt an indecent thrill as two footmen swiftly converged to steer him into a side room.

 

  Her blood chilled. The voice had the crystal edges of a Lightborn, and the touch, brief as it was, exuded power.

  “Telmaine?” said Sylvide.

  She gripped the table, to hold herself in place.

  There was no answer. For a moment she struggled with the urge to flee—but where could she possibly flee to, if the Lightborn Temple Vigilance had discovered her? A whimper tried to escape; she swallowed it down.

  “Telmaine!” Merivan hissed across the table. “Control yourself!”

  “Daniver,” Lady Calliope said, far more audibly. “Sit down. One of you making an exhibition of himself is quite enough.”

  Sylvide turned in her chair and took Telmaine’s hands. “Telmaine, dear, are you ill?”

  Quite possibly she was going mad. Quite possibly she had, under strain, imagined that voice in her mind. Had Sylvide not captured her hands, she would have chewed on her gloved fingertip. Instead, she bit her inner lip until she tasted salt and iron.

  “You’ve had a bad few days,” Sylvide commiserated. “I know.”

  The intrusive voice stayed silent. She breathed more steadily and managed to smile at Sylvide. “Tell me,” she said, her voice almost under her control, “what absurd things are the broadsheets saying about my husband?”

  Across the table, Lady Calliope drew breath at her audacity at approaching the subject so brazenly.

  Sylvide’s smile wavered. “They’re saying that he—that he—oh, Telmaine, must you ask?”

  “I’m sorry, dear Sylvide, but how else am I to know what nonsense I am to refute? A lady came to him in distress; he aided her. Should he be condemned for that?”

  “I hardly think,” Lady Calliope said, frostily, “this is a suitable topic for this breakfast table.”

  Telmaine set her hands beside her plate, and leaned forward. “Why not? Why should everyone be free to whisper slander at the breakfast table, and I not be allowed to speak truth? My husband is innocent.”

  “Then where is he?” Dani asked her.

  She drew a deep breath. “Balthasar is undertaking an errand on request of Lord Vladimer. That is all I can say; you must take it up with Lord Vladimer himself.”

  “How convenient,” said Lady Calliope, frigidly.

  “Not at all,” Telmaine said, with feeling. “I would much rather he were here than risking his life and health on this errand.”

  “With Ishmael di Studier,” Lady Calliope said. “That is what the broadsheets say, that he is in collusion with that—practitioner.”

  “Baron Strumheller is no sorcerer. There”—she pointed in the direction of the ducal table—“sits your proof. Lord Vladimer, here, and willing to testify in Baron Strumheller’s defense. And Baron Strumheller never laid a hand on Tercelle Amberley.”

  “Telmaine!” said Merivan.

  Belatedly she recalled that one of the rumors accused Ishmael of fathering Tercelle’s children. She was too angry to be embarrassed. “I will not listen in silence to this slander of two good men.”

  Over at the archduke’s table, where Sejanus Plantageter sat with his brother, the Duke of Imbré, and his eldest daughter, a footman stooped to speak quietly in Lord Vladimer’s ear. Telmaine’s attention was caught as Vladimer’s thin frame went rigid. The footman laid something in his hand. Lady Calliope was talking still; Telmaine hardly heard. Without warning, ignoring his brother’s effort to speak to him, Vladimer stood up, spilling his cane on the floor. As he did so, the object he was holding tumbled free and swung from the chain tangled in his fingers. Telmaine recognized the shape of the large amulet she had last sonned hanging around Casamir Blondell’s neck, the amulet of protection against magic. Sejanus Plantageter reached for it, steadied it. Telmaine could not resist extending her magic to gather in the words he murmured to his brother, “Face, Vladimer.”

  He lifted the amulet into Vladimer’s hand and let Vladimer close his fingers on it, then patted Vladimer’s hand, rising with an easy smile. The entire table, as etiquette demanded, stood with him. As Sejanus moved away, drawing attention with him, Vladimer thrust the amulet into his pocket, accepted back his cane, and limped toward the door. Her sonn caught his face, still an imperfect mask over shock. Only the fear of gossip inhibited her from rising to hurry after him. Something terrible had happened.

  Surely if it were to do with Ishmael or Balthasar, Vladimer would have given her some signal.

  And if she went after Vladimer, it would draw people’s attention to his state, attention that the archduke was skillfully diverting. Sejanus was making his progress around the table next to Telmaine’s, receiving bows and curtsies from intimidated heirs and heiresses, and exchanging easy pleasantries with their elders. Like his brother, Sejanus suited the lines of current fashion very well, though he was the bolder dresser.

  He reached their table and they all rose as one, Sylvide with a soft gulp. Telmaine squeezed her hand, though her own racing heart betrayed her nervousness. She had ceased to be socially intimidated by the archduke years ago, but that was before she had brazened her way into his higher councils, attached herself inexplicably to his brother, and, worst of all, started to spy on him with magic. Feeling the vibrant presence of his vitality, so close to her, gave her a mortifying sense of having been revealed in turn. She tucked her magic as tightly within her skin as ever she had.

  Lady Calliope, the terror of her family and inferiors, was utterly charming to the archduke, who charmed her right back. Dani was stiff and shamefaced when brought to admit to the loss of his diplomatic post, but the archduke assured him that there was always work for able men, and left Dani standing straighter. He was gentle with Dani’s sister, managing to elicit her whispered agreement to his mention of the beauty of the city’s botanic gardens in late summer. Merivan’s courtesies were initially subdued, but the archduke’s sly reference to a particularly controversial play to be staged that autumn drew the true Merivan out of cover, and he gave every indication of appreciating her tart opinions.

  He moved on to speak to the couple between Merivan and Sylvide. Telmaine leaned over and murmured, “Courage, he doesn’t bite,” to Sylvide.

  “That’s all very well for you to say,” Sylvide whispered, but she acquitted herself with poise, even warmth, as the archduke commented on the hunting in her home area of the near Borders. Sylvide was, as Telmaine had said, a good shot. Many women who lived in and around the Borders were.

  And there was Vladimer, returning along the far side of the table, unnoticed by most, his aspect grim. Something must have befallen Casamir Blondell; that seemed the only plausible reason for his amulet to have come into Vladimer’s hand in such a way.
. . . Then Sejanus Plantageter turned to her. “Lady Telmaine,” he said, taking her hand as she curtsied. “How is little Florilinde?”

  “Quite well,” she mustered in response. “Thank you.”

  “I gather from this evening’s broadsheets that I ought to find something to divert your husband’s talents.”

  She managed not to wince at his turn of humor, not so unlike his brother’s. He patted her hand lightly and said, distinctly enough to carry, “I am well aware of the reasons he undertook this errand and am satisfied of his good intentions.”

  That might not be the most he could have said in Bal’s defense, perhaps, but it was not the least, either. She sustained her grateful smile as the archduke moved on. Sylvide caught and squeezed her hand in return.

  She had just drawn breath when she felt a sudden flush of heat across her skin, like a wind up a hot summer street, like the sheet of flame from her bumbling effort at Shadowborn magic. Frightened, she swept out with her magical senses, and felt, closing around her, a smothering net of Lightborn magic.

  She gasped. The net burst with her frantic counterstroke; she felt the wielder’s surprise at the force, and knew her assailant was the Lightborn mage who had spoken silently to her moments before, the one whose power she had measured. In response, he swept his power around her again, no hotter, no harder, and she deflected it again, clumsily.

  No answer came, no acknowledgment, no mockery. Momentarily, there was calm. Momentarily, she was able to realize that she was still in the ducal ballroom, in the presence of her betters and peers, before whom she had just done—what? What of the magical assault had manifested, besides her gasp? Sonn outlined Merivan just starting around the table, righteous purpose but no horror on her face. Sylvide, at her side, steadied her, saying in innocent dismay, “Telmaine, what is it? Are you feeling faint?” At her other side, the archduke’s voice—oh, sweet Lady Imogene, no—the archduke himself was saying, “Lady Telmaine?”