Lightborn. Part 17

Telmaine started to laugh at the bitter horror of it all. To laugh, and then to sob, crying through her sobs, "Be thankful! This is my fault!"

Merivan reached over and pinched her. "Not. One. Word," she said. Telmaine hiccuped into her hands. "When we get home-," she began.

said the voice, and she gave a short shriek of horror. said the Lightborn mage-she felt his magic grip and bear down on hers, hard, his will lock and mute her voice. And then the night split open with a sound like thunder, but a thunder low to the ground across the river. She had heard that very sound-or she had not heard it, but she had imagined it-or Sachever Mycene had imagined it, and she had swept the imagining from his mind. Out of the reverberations came the great sh.e.l.ls howling overhead. Barely, she heard Kip's yell, and the carriage lurched into a gallop and a careening turn, cras.h.i.+ng against a wall, rebounding onto four wheels with a rain of splinters. Merivan fell against her legs. She caught at her sister with one hand, striving to keep herself upright with the other, feeling her sister's fright for her unborn child. The guns across the river boomed again, deafening her to the sound of the impact of the first flight, which she felt only as a shudder through the floor of the coach, almost lost in the jolting. Another flight of sh.e.l.ls raved overhead. The near side of the coach ground against stone, and it dragged to a stop. The far door opened; Kingsley seized the sprawled Merivan around the waist. "Come," he screamed, "or we're all dead." He dragged her out, threw her away from the coach. "In there!" Even as Telmaine started to follow, he seized her arm and hauled her out. Her skin was suddenly stinging, the stinging building up to a sear. She remembered, suddenly, the light that had burned her hand through the keyhole of Balthasar's house. She struggled against his grip, sonning wildly around her. "Get inside!" he shouted, and thrust her into a dank-smelling doorway, following at her heels to grab and slam the damp-swollen door behind them. Cheek almost against the scarred, splitting wood, he sobbed, "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Lunatic crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Every cursed one of them ought to be in an asylum!"

Merivan and the coachman were both there, as stunned as she. Kip turned on them. "What are y'standing there for like sheep? This door's rotten and misfit." He pounded it, a sodden sound. "We've got to go down." All veneer of the genteel footman or educated apothecary abandoned, he grabbed Telmaine's cloak and dragged her toward worn stone steps. They breathed damp and old sewers. "We'll be-," he started to say.

Then she lost him, the steps beneath her feet, and everything else around her. Magic surged up around her, at first with the familiar lightness, but swiftly beyond mere lightness, a dissociating thrust as though the very earth repelled her. As it had done before, when the Lightborn mages conjured a storm to quench the fires of the Rivermarch, the magic-Lightborn magic-caught her as it blazed out of the ruin of the Mages' Tower. It burst apart the third salvo of incoming sh.e.l.ls-and plunged down onto the gun emplacements on the slopes above the river. Fleetingly she sensed the vitality of the men there, before the magic plunged into the carefully stacked boxes of fuses and sh.e.l.ls. A final, immense concussion pounded across the city as the gun emplacements exploded, annihilating the men servicing them, and half the hillside surrounding.

She came back to herself, slowly. Ishmael's memories whispered of this, of being so utterly spent in magic and body that even breathing seemed too much effort. Her mouth tasted of blood from her bitten tongue; she was lying on the uneven stone stairs, each step marking a bruise from her hips to the back of her head. She swallowed blood and turned her head to one side, struggling against the need to inhale, mortally terrified that she should breathe in smoke and seared flesh.

Her cheek brushed skirts, spread upon the stairs around their owner's ankles. She gasped in the stench of damp and old drains with profound grat.i.tude. The skirts belonged to Merivan, who was sitting above her with one hand on her stomach and her face set in resentful nausea. On her far side, Kingsley crouched with his back braced against the rough wall. He sonned her, an odd, unsettled expression on his face. "Sorry, m'lady. I should'a warned you that it was slippery," he said. A threadbare excuse for her collapse; did he realize, then, what had happened to her?

"And why, exactly," Merivan said, and swallowed, "did you bring us down here?"

He s.h.i.+fted his attention from Telmaine to Merivan, very slowly. "The Lightborn tower's been breached."

But it was supposed to happen near sunset, not sunrise, floated out from behind Telmaine's eyes. n.o.body reacted; she had not spoken aloud. She was still drifting, mind detached from body, thought from emotion. That, she thought lucidly, was why the curfew: Dukes Mycene and Kalamay clearing the streets before the attack began.

"How do you know?" demanded Merivan.

"Overheard Lord V. and Blondell arguing. Didn't make sense of what I'd heard, until now." His hands hung between his knees, fingers apart; his skin must be stinging even more than hers was, since he had been the longest exposed, pulling them all to safety. "Lord V. knew, I'm sure of it. That was what Blondell called treason."

"He was supposed to stop it," Telmaine heard her own, faint declaration.

Sonn snapped at her. "What?" Merivan said, and Kingsley, flatly, "He didn't."

Telmaine pushed herself up on the damp steps, elbow still on the hem of Merivan's dress. "He wouldn't-" But wouldn't he? He had defined the Mages' Temple as one threat, and Kalamay and Mycene as another. Set one at the other, and let them destroy each other, was that it? He said he understood the threat of magic, but could he, truly? Could anyone who had not felt what she had felt, in the storm that quenched the Rivermarch fire, and in the howling roar of magic that ruptured the gun emplacements, truly understand what Lightborn power meant?

But could anyone who had not heard the thunder of those guns appreciate the power of gunpowder and iron? Her own smarting skin attested to the ruin of the Mages' Tower.

The barest whisper, almost all she was capable of and all she dared. There was no answer.

"Telmaine," Merivan said, "from your bizarre behavior, I suspect you know rather more than you have admitted. Let us find shelter, if such is to be had, and then, by the Sole G.o.d, you will tell me. Or I swear that I shall return you to the palace, and let the dukes do with you what they will."

Tammorn Tam had twice in his life been caught in an earthquake in the mountain hamlet of his birth, and when the guns boomed, when the ground trembled with their consequence, it was the first thing he thought of. Then Lukfer's agony ripped across his mind, shearing away his connection with the resistant Darkborn mage.

Fejelis had rolled from a restless doze onto his feet, and had his hand on the window shutter before he remembered night and Darkborn and law, and hesitated. That gave Lapaxo time to seize upon him, and bellow, "Downstairs!" to his lieutenant. The vigilant caught Fejelis's other arm and between them they ran the prince out of the door while Fejelis was still trying to muster resistance. The mage vigilant who had been guarding Fejelis swung wildly around, her hair unraveling as Lukfer's turbulence manifested itself in physical form. With a cry of dread, she fled after the prince and vigilants, leaving Tam alone in the room.

Through the link with Lukfer he sensed foulness, cold, life's ant.i.thesis, life's annulment, darkness. He smelled stone dust, brimstone, blood. He felt pain, shocking pain, utter disbelief, outrage, death. From the direction of the tower he felt a ma.s.sive gathering surge of magic, magic with such rage impelling it as he'd never felt; he felt the magic rise, surge, shape itself, and plunge toward the far side of the river. With his own ears he heard the last immense explosion.

He found himself down on hands and knees, in the brightly lit bedroom. On the bed, the bedsheets spun themselves into cords and danced like entranced serpents to a piper's flute. Books leaped from the shelves to swirl, birdlike, around the ceiling. He came to his knees, panting, and sweeping out his magic to sense first Fejelis, deep in the palace, and then Beatrice and the children, across the river, and the artisans at their various lodgings, all waking in fear at the sound.

Suddenly the dancing snakes collapsed back into mere bedsheets and the bird-books tumbled from the air. All that wild magic coiled and tightened around him. Lukfer's strength shattered his like an eggsh.e.l.l. There was no refusing magic and will united to such purpose. As he felt himself being wrenched out of place, he brought his arms across his chest and bent over, as though by physical effort he could resist even a magical dismemberment.

He landed whole, amidst billowing dust and the stench of brimstone, in Lukfer's fine, wide main room. Shutters and window had been blown in, showing darkness beyond. The curtains lay shredded across the rubble. Part of the ceiling had collapsed. There was barely enough light to live by. Gasping, holding the hem of his jacket to his nose to filter the worst of the dust, he lurched toward Lukfer's bedroom.

He did not at first see Lukfer, for the great slabs of ceiling and wall that had fallen across the bed, but he could sense him. His eye went at once to the red gray ooze creeping outward across the sheets. The magic pummeled him, sending him stumbling forward, enough to see that Lukfer's upper body and head were still intact. A fallen light, resting on the pillow, blazed upon the bloodless skin of Lukfer's face as his head turned, wolf yellow eyes glaring up at him, pupils constricted with bright light and pain. Tam reached for the slabs, but Lukfer's magic caught his. Lukfer said. Lukfer's hand lay flung out and palm up, dust coated, its fingers clenching and unclenching. Tam fumbled for it as tears blurred his ordinary sight. All his magic sensed was Lukfer's injury, legs and pelvis crushed, right arm and shoulder mangled, heart straining as blood saturated the mattress beneath him.

Magic drew him in like a hand on the scruff of his neck, shook him, forced his attention outward. He could sense ripples of magic spreading out from the dying mage, a profligate and senseless expenditure of vitality. All around him he could sense the fragments of ant.i.thesis-of-life that had penetrated stone, wood, flesh, the same lethal magic that had been on the bolt that had brought down Fejelis, that had nearly killed himself. The ruins of the tower were riddled with it.

But there was none of it in these rooms, he realized, as Lukfer's magic cuffed him hard, so that, physically, he staggered. . . . There was no residue in Lukfer or these rooms, and he realized then that the spreading ripples of Lukfer's magic were not random agonal spasms. He was purposefully rooting out the sh.e.l.l fragments, crus.h.i.+ng and annulling them.

Shocked, he recognized that not only was the power not random, but it was controlled, and with every second growing more so. After a hundred and thirty years a prisoner to his wild magic, and even as he died, Lukfer was finally becoming the mage he should have been. Tam could sense his exhilaration, his hunger to have this, to know this, no matter how briefly. It was not a hunger he could refuse. Lukfer's power raced outward, and Tam scrambled after, sensing the faltering vitalities around them, feeling lineage mages struggling to weave integrity back into flesh, and failing and knowing their failure, and knowing despair. His magic caught and merged with Lukfer's, spinning wide to destroy the many-so many-deadly fragments of magic- imbued matter. He had never, in his own turbulence and ambivalence around his own power, known anything so purely glorious. But gradually the effort was less and less Lukfer's, more and more Tam's own, as the body pinned beneath the stone slabs steadily weakened. But Lukfer's will and magic were still strong enough, aware enough, to thrust aside one last effort at healing. Lukfer said. A lie; there was great pain, though it was starting to recede. The exhilaration was dwindling away to a sense of repletion, of resignation, a mortal weariness. Tam let the vast mesh of magic dispersed throughout the tower slip away from him, and crouched beside Lukfer. He did not care about others' needs, only Lukfer's. He felt no grief, only devastation and outrage at having to accept this. Lukfer whispered in his mind. He moved his head slightly, glazed yellow eyes seeking Tam. Tam felt Lukfer's strained heart lose its rhythm, starved of blood and poisoned by the damaged body. His instinctive reaction was enacted before he thought; he reached in and caught Lukfer's heart with his magic.

Lukfer gasped. His stare returned from a great distance; he was frowning as though he had been interrupted in pleasant thought. The fingertips of Tam's hand blanched with pressure on Lukfer's chest. He would have to let go, Tam thought, he would have to let go, and for good. It had been wrong for him to take hold as he had. In another beat or two, he would let go. I would gift, Lukfer had said, before his heart tried to stop. Surely he meant the gift between mage and student of the master's lifetime knowledge, seldom given in full. But surely, though Lukfer deserved to give it, he did not deserve to receive it.

Lukfer's eyes suddenly crinkled in a smile. And he opened his mind and his magic to Tam, delivering up all the experience and knowledge of a lifetime trying to tame his untamable strength, accrued unrealized until the final moments of his life.

that wolf-bristle inner voice growled, and Lukfer's magic surged up for the last time, sweeping away Tam's hold on his heart, his hand on his chest, his touch on his mind-tossing Tam himself away to sprawl across rubble with bruising and winding force. Tam's own magic snapped him upright; magic reached for Lukfer; magic grasped the fibrillating heart and tried to restore it once more, but Lukfer's eyes were already fixed, their pupils slowly opening wide to death, and Tam had no more sense of Lukfer's magic or presence in the world.

With a stab of his hand Tam blasted apart the murdering slabs of stone and tile, flicking aside the splinters, punching away the billows of dust. He wound the blood-sodden sheets around Lukfer's body, lifted the body into his arms, gathered the lights around himself with a twist of the will, and launched himself and Lukfer and the lights through the shattered window and over the bal.u.s.trade, plunging in the heart of whirling points of light toward the rubble-strewn and half-lit plaza below. Whether he would have caught himself, he would never know, but magic surged up around him, snared him, and set him down as light as a mote of dust settling in a still afternoon. A voice shouted, "Tam!" and beyond the spinning lights, he glimpsed a figure hurdling rubble with an agility its gangliness belied. Light flickered across Fejelis's dusty face as he halted, squinted, and tried to duck between the spinning lights. One hit his ribs; a second glanced off his head. Tam slapped the ensemble to the ground, where they shattered, the shards still brightly glowing.

Fejelis scrambled to his feet as the Vigilance reached them. "I'm all right-my fault . . . entirely my fault . . . stupid of me." He glanced around, seemed satisfied that violence was not going to be offered by his protectors, and then his eyes slid down to the burden in Tam's arms. ". . . Magister Lukfer?" He took a long, s.h.i.+vering breath, and returned his silvery gaze to Tam's face again, stepping close enough that his chest touched Tam's encircling arm. ". . . Don't crack on me, Tam," he said, in a low voice. "Don't you dare crack on me."

He caught Tam's arm as someone went to take Lukfer's body from him and he thrust them back with his magic. ". . . Let go," Fejelis ordered, but gently. "I know how hard it is for you, but it's time to let him go."

So Lukfer had commanded him. He yielded up the lifeless sh.e.l.l that had held great and frustrated magic and a great and frustrated heart, and left the others to discover for themselves that no act of healing would recapture lost life. Their magic lapped around him, leaving him untouched. Their voices lapped against him, going unheard. Fejelis abruptly kicked his knees out from underneath him to dump him sitting on a stone slab, and called for more light.

Tam blinked Fejelis's face into focus, wondering how long he had been in the tower, that Fejelis, whom he had last seen being bundled into the safer interior, could now be outside. He felt chilled and ill, too aware of the wrongness of the night pressing down on him, as though the light of the world itself had been annulled.

Fejelis gripped his shoulder. ". . . Tam, I am so sorry."

An echo of his own words to Fejelis, after Isidore's death. How inadequate they were. He focused a small part of a mind roiling with grief and magic on his young charge. "You shouldn't be out here."

". . . I know." Fejelis was wearing a plain vigilant's uniform and helmet, though the disguise would not deceive anyone who observed the way the vigilants aligned themselves toward him. "My word was needed for them to bring lights out here." He gestured, indicating the night, province of Darkborn. ". . . I justified it to myself with the thought that anyone who had been caught outside had found shelter or would already be dead or dying. . . ."

"What . . . happened?"

". . . As far as I know, the tower was fired upon by cannon-Darkborn cannon-emplaced across the river. We had no prior warning, no prior information. The damage done is-" He gestured upward, up the great flank of the tower above them, dim above the lights except where light shone outward through gaps in the walls, limning broken stone or fractured windows.

A bristle and plush voice said in Tam's mind, You're not done yet. His head jerked up, his magic, groping toward the vitality that belonged to that voice, finding the points of chill antipathy that were the fragments of Shadowborn magic, strewn across the plaza. He shuddered.

Fejelis squeezed his shoulder again. ". . . I'm going to offer them shelter. . . . It's the least I can do." To someone else unseen, "Look after him, please." Tam's eyes followed the lanky figure as Fejelis picked his way across the rubble toward a group that Tam recognized as the few surviving high masters. Then Fejelis's foot brushed a fragment of sh.e.l.l and he stumbled, his vitality flickering. Tam surged to his feet, reaching to crush the ensorcellment and matter both. The captain of vigilants hefted and threw the prince aside from the bursting fragment. They argued briefly, the vigilant gesturing toward the palace, Fejelis toward the mages. Fejelis won.

Tam turned, spreading his awareness out, placing each lethal sc.r.a.p. He wanted to stamp them to fragments beneath his sandals, and grind the fragments into dust. He wanted to pick each one up and feel its useless a.s.sault before he annihilated it. These were luxuries he could not permit himself, knowing that he must deal first and mindfully with those that threatened life.

A woman's voice said, "What are you doing?"

Perrin's silver eyes were inflamed with dust, and her right wept steady tears. Her pale hair hung in a tangled mat to the middle of her back, and her gauzy nightdress was caked with dust and clinging to her long, gangly body. Her bare toes curled, wincingly, on rock. ". . . I can feel them. I can feel them sucking the life out. . . ." Her voice trembled, and like Fejelis, she held back her next words, lest she show her loss of composure.

He said, hoa.r.s.ely, "I'll explain later."

She nodded and wiped her eyes. "I saw you bring down Magister Lukfer. I'm so sorry. We just met the once. I liked him."

Her girlish ingenuousness moved him, absurd as it was to express trivial liking for that vanished giant of person and magic. He said, "While I'm doing this-will you guard Fejelis?"

"Fejelis?"

"He holds my contract; I'm seconding you while I deal with"-two more shards burst in the rubble-"this. Don't touch it. I don't want-" It was simpler for him to share his memory of Fejelis's life being annulled. She might have the strength to deal with these, but she might not, and he had neither strength nor time to expend in protecting her. She straightened in shock, her head turning toward her brother. "Mother's Milk," she breathed.

He watched her stumble on bruised feet toward Fejelis, and then returned to his grim task.

Telmaine Kingsley-Kip-led them through the old underground streets of Minhorne, once the day and night byways of the Darkborn. As a giggling gaggle on a birthday outing, Telmaine and her small friends had once been herded round one of the most majestic examples of restoration, an underground square as large as Bolingbroke Station concourse. Here, in a much poorer area, the decay would have shocked her had she not heard Ishmael's account of his underground escape from the Rivermarch fire. In places they had to trudge ankle deep through reeking mud, which made Merivan gag and Telmaine unwillingly remember Balthasar's terse condemnation of the neglect of sewers in the Rivermarch. In other places, boards had been laid, or even boardwalk built, though the boards were unsteady and the boardwalk ramshackle. Along some stretches, the tunnels had been quartered lengthways with stone, to preserve a dry pa.s.sage and let the rest go to ruin. And all the way along, they had to step, and in places climb over, the rubble of torn-down stone and brick entryways.

Merivan noted aloud that a number of the changes appeared to be recent, the rubble new and the boards still free of rot.

"Yes, m'lady," Kip said. "Since the-since the fire over to th'west of here, everyone's thinking to have an escape route."

They were now no longer alone, encountering people spilling in fours or eights or more from the underground doors into the pa.s.sageway, to accost others as they tried to pa.s.s with demands or appeals for information, or speculations about noises heard outside. Kip deflected their queries in the dense cant of the Rivermarch. On they went, turn after turn, tunnel after tunnel, and when they stopped, it was in one of the half-closed tunnels against a crumbled underground entrance no different from any of the dozens they'd pa.s.sed.

"This is the boardinghouse where I was t'live after the Rivermarch was burned out," she heard Kip say. "It's not-the place for ladies of your quality. It's not really the place for ladies at all, if you get my meaning-"

"I'm sure I don't," said Merivan, so briskly as to give the lie. "But the saying is *any port in a storm,' is it not?"

"If half of what I hear's true," Kip said, "that's not t'be said of parts of the Scallon Isles."

Merivan huffed, not unappreciatively. "Kindly show us in and introduce us."

It was a lodging house where, Telmaine shortly understood, Ishmael di Studier had lately kept rooms, rooms that he had turned over to the displaced apothecary. The tall, effete old man who greeted them made haste to inform them that, in his prime, he had been the toast of the theaters and promised to show them his memorabilia. But for all his languis.h.i.+ng manner and theatrical flourishes, he briskly reordered his household around their needs, opened a vacant suite to the sisters, and a.s.signed the coachman a room. Only Kip's guarded, "Ruther, where's Seigfried?" perturbed his voluble poise. "Dear one, I do not know. He went out. We can but hope."

And so Telmaine found herself alone with her sister, in an upstairs, interior sitting room with the same cluttered shabby splendor of the rest. Through the walls she could hear the incessant tolling of the warning bell, but otherwise little else-no voices outside, no rattle of coaches on the uneven flagstones, no sound of horses. Merivan sluiced tea into a surprisingly dainty cup and set it down before Telmaine. The smell of the tea wrenched her heart: it was the same cheap, tarry brew that Bal preferred. She cradled the cup and the warmth to her. Merivan sipped, grimaced, and set her cup away. "Now, Telmaine," she said.

"Do you really want to hear?" Telmaine said. Her voice creaked as though it had gone unused for more than a night.

Merivan's expression turned disconcerted, as though she was recognizing that she had insisted out of habit. Bored, stifled, and imperious, she had long tried to rule her sisters as she did her children.

"Merivan," Telmaine said, slowly. "My clever sister. If only you'd been able to do what your talents fitted you for. You had to marry the man you wanted to be. To aspire for more means being the object of caricature and cruel jokes. So you fight boredom with society by staying pregnant, though you loathe the tedium of confinement more than you dread the lying-in."

"Telmaine," Merivan said, "whatever has got into you?"

"What do you think happened," she floated her question softly, so as not to rouse the terror, "there at breakfast?"

"The Lightborn-," Merivan said, and stopped. The haughty social mask was gone, and in its place was a fierce gratification at a puzzle coming together, and horror at the solution it showed. That gratification Telmaine remembered from the schoolroom, before Merivan's presentation year and the lessons taken from it. The horror was something new, something surely rare in Merivan's pugnaciously ordered life. Merivan breathed, "Uncle Artos."

"What?" Telmaine said, nerves too taut-strung for a moderated tone.

With a trace of her maddening elder-sister superiority, "Of course you wouldn't know."

"Uncle Artos died when we were small, I knew that," Telmaine said, piqued. "He was caught outside by accident."

"No," Merivan said. "Not accident."

And now it was Telmaine's turn to sense pieces falling into a pattern. Fragments of conversations overheard in the nursery and halls, feelings and thoughts sensed when she was still too young to s.h.i.+rk all touch. The grief and shame and guilt and worry were the first such adult emotions she knew. She hardly remembered now whether they were from her mother or her father. But they had centered around her mother's brother, Artos.

From the moment she knew she was pregnant with Florilinde, she had promised herself that magic could not be inherited. But Vladimer had said that the Lightborn bred their lineages to strengthen them.

"If-," she started. Stopped, gathered strength. "If you mean what I think you mean, yes, I am like Uncle Artos."

"Imposs-," Merivan began, a reflexive bark, but she didn't even complete the word. "No," Telmaine blurted. "I am a mage."

She heard her sister lurch forward; sonn caught Merivan's descending hand. The emotion conveyed through the touch was as much slap as the blow itself. "How dare you!"

"I was born this way!" Telmaine cried. Merivan did not answer, still standing over her, her breathing quick and harsh. Telmaine splashed her with sonn, a slap in turn.

"Keep your voice down!" Merivan said, hands to her head, in a rare dramatic gesture. "Let me think. I feel so sick. This wretched indisposition-and now this. Mama-poor Mama, how dare you suggest-does she-no, don't answer that."

"I don't know if she knows. I never knew to-to touch-but after what happened-I don't know."

"Who else knows?" Merivan said, calming.

"Balthasar. Baron Strumh.e.l.ler," Telmaine said. "Lord Vladimer. And Kip suspects, I am sure of it."

Merivan gathered her skirts and sat down. "Strumh.e.l.ler is discredited. Vladimer is mad. Kip will stay silent, or go to jail; Theophile will make sure of that. And your husband had better hold his tongue."

"Merivan!" Telmaine cried out, "I can't-" But what it was-which of can't go back, can't do this, can't bear it, she meant-she did not know, maybe all together. She bent forward and put her face in her hands.

Merivan said, harshly, "If you are to have any hope of a decent life, you shall."

"A decent life!" said Telmaine, through her fingers. She wanted to laugh; she wanted to shriek. "All hope of a decent life died when I-" When I first sensed another's thoughts? Why should a five-year-old child be condemned? When I chose to keep my secret, though I scarcely knew what being a mage meant, except that my one confession shocked my nanny to tears? When I used my touch-sense to find a man who could cherish me, rather than treat me as a step for his ambition and a vessel for his children? When I danced with the notorious Baron Strumh.e.l.ler, despite his gloved hands and his reputation? When I let Ishmael teach me how to save Balthasar from dying? When I walked into the heart of flame to retrieve my daughter? When I fought, magic to magic, against the Shadowborn? Agreed to guard Vladimer? Let Vladimer exploit my love, my loyalty, and my fear of being known for what I am? When I told him what Kalamay and Mycene planned, and failed to guess what he would do with it?

What would Merivan have done, if she had been born a mage? Which of the two choices, Ishmael's or her own, would Merivan have made? Or-would she have taken the third, Uncle Artos's?

"You are my sister," Merivan said, her voice brittle. "I have known you since you were an infant in your cradle. Whatever you are, you are still my sister."

"Merivan," said Telmaine, into her hands, "I burned the archduke." If Seja.n.u.s Plantageter died, what would she do then? Sit outside and wait for the sunrise, as Artos had done. Balthasar would be furious at her, Ishmael equally so. Neither of them would do less than their all to set things right. And she had a.s.sumed they could do so, and that Vladimer would do so, and she could go on as she had always been. Go back to her parties, as Bal's sister had accused.

"There was a Lightborn mage, there in my mind. And I had been-I had been trying to understand, trying to do something with, with Shadowborn magic. So when the Lightborn mage-stabbed at me, I-the fires-burst out. It was an accident. Lord Vladimer tried to stop me, because-because the magic dies with the mage-and he shot Sylvide." A tremor went through her at the remembered bubbling of blood in her throat, of Sylvide's arms sliding away, of the spark of her life drowning. "I had found out-by magic-that Kalamay and Mycene planned to use artillery to attack the Lightborn Temple. I thought Vladimer would stop it, but he didn't. I don't know why."

That was sheer disingenuousness; he had declared himself plainly enough, had she but listened. He had chosen to let his enemies engage each other to their mutual destruction, calculating, maybe, that Seja.n.u.s would be able to prevent retaliation spreading, calculating, even, that Seja.n.u.s might disown him to do so. Poor Vladimer, she thought, in a perverse impulse of sympathy, her partner in choices and misuse of powers that led to ruin. Poor possessive, scheming Vladimer, to have so harmed the brother he loved, to have betrayed his archduke in trying to serve him.

"The guns were destroyed by the Lightborn mages-I felt it happen." She grew breathless again, remembering that flight of magic. It still seemed impossible that she had returned to earth whole. "I don't know how many of them-of the mages-survived, or what they will do now, or what the followers of Duke Mycene and Duke Kalamay will do. Or how many of them are still alive. Duke Mycene-meant to be beside the guns when the attack was launched." Again Merivan stirred as though to ask a question; again she swallowed it down. "That's all," Telmaine said, with a sob. "I've been-I've been doing my best to be Lady Telmaine, Mrs. Balthasar Hearne, good wife, good mother, good society lady. I've been-doing what I was told, doing what was expected of me-trying so hard. And it's all gone wrong. And I don't know what to do."

"There is no call on you to do anything," Merivan said, recovering some sense of balance in her own authoritarian role. "When it is safe, we will go on to my house, and Theophile-" Her voice stumbled; she recovered. "No, he should have been already home. But the children-"

Oh, sweet Imogene, the children. Reaching out felt like stretching a muscle scarred and contracted with injury, but she found Amerdale and Florilinde and the six-yes, six-vitalities of their cousins, and the equally familiar vitality of Merivan's husband, which she knew from being in his presence the day before. "No," she said. "No, they're all all right."

"Then we will return to my house," Merivan said.

But Telmaine, reaching farther, had found the archduke. Even at this remove, she sensed his grievous hurt. "No," she said, breathless.

"Telmaine, it is quite obvious to me-"

"Everyone," she gasped, "has been telling me what to do. Balthasar. Ishmael. Vladimer. You. I wanted them to. I thought they knew better and that I could trust them. But they didn't-and I couldn't-and I'm the one-" Suddenly she remembered the last hour of her labor with Florilinde, when, after screaming her refusal to go on, after sinking her teeth into Balthasar's hand to punish his false show of confidence in her, she had found strength she knew she did not have to do the impossible. Now she summoned up her strength for this a.s.sertion, for this-birth. "I am the one with the power. I will live or die with the consequences. So don't tell me what to do."

Merivan's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "Telmaine," she said. "You do surprise me." A silence followed, in which they both inspected that statement.

Telmaine said, in a voice that shook only a little, "I have to make it right, Merivan. I have to go back and make it right. But I'm going to need help." She cast around the room, a small room, its shabbiness enlivened by decorations-props, really-a fretwork fan, a spray of peac.o.c.k feathers, surely artificial in their crispness, a large ma.s.s of tired silk flowers. But there was a fireplace, and the fire was set. She drew a deep breath, gripping her hands one in the other, and reached tentatively out toward the tinder. The effort felt like pressing on a bruise. With a soft whumph of bursting flame, the fire caught. Merivan shrieked, springing from her chair. Telmaine remembered then her sister's burned arm. "It's all right," she said, quickly. "It's just-" But Merivan, clinging to the chair, sonned her and the fire, her and the fire, her expression raw with fright. Whatever Telmaine had said up until now, this demonstration had made it real. "Meri-"