In Sharel, Floria could see the young Helenja, despite the slight physical resemblance between them: Sharel was lean, dark, and straight nosed, where Helenja was bulky, auburn, and had a nose that had been broken by a fractious horse. Nevertheless, Sharel’s arrogance and swift certainty of judgment evoked the arrogant young consort who had thought to conquer Isidore’s court.
“Of course he’s a hostage!” Sharel was saying. “You said Fejelis grabbed him just before they all disappeared. Orlanjis would never have gone willingly.”
The dowager consort looked past Sharel, toward Floria. She was squinting slightly, as though looking at a bright horizon or suffering from a headache. “Orlanjis,” Helenja said, grittily, “couldn’t have made his support for Fejelis more plain. Mistress White Hand, come here.”
Floria did not want to expose her back in this company, but she and Helenja had established a sketch of an alliance around their desire to find Prince Fejelis and his brother. Moreover, she’d never fight her way out. She obeyed.
“Tell my sister what
you
saw,” Helenja said.
Why Sharel should believe Floria’s account of the disappearance of Fejelis and Orlanjis, she had no idea. For eighteen years, Floria had been vigilant and food taster to Fejelis’s father, Isidore, on account of the magical asset that protected her against poisons—most of which had been plied by the southerners.
Perhaps,
she thought bitterly,
I have become credible because of the part I played in Isidore’s death.
Stonily, she reported, “The prince’s sister”—to refer to her by either her birth name or the name given her by the mages was equally fraught—“came running up to Prince Fejelis and Captain Rupertis in the vestibule of the palace, to tell them that the high masters had Magister Tammorn, who had been working for the prince, and were planning to burn out his magic—”
“Why?” Sharel interrupted. “He’s a mage.”
“Magister Tammorn is a sport,” Floria said. No need to explain what else the Mages’ Temple had to hold against Tam, aside from his birth outside the Temple’s carefully cultivated lineages. “Prince Fejelis went to the high masters and attempted to persuade them to release Magister Tam and to join with him in dealing with the Shadowborn.”
In defiance of centuries of protocol shielding the archmage from earthborn contact, the young prince had appealed directly to the archmage for an alliance. His appeal had been bold and moving and might have worked, except that Fejelis had made a tactical error. “He let it be known that he believed that lineage mages could not detect Shadowborn magic.”
“Was he mad?” said Sharel.
“Look out the window,” Helenja said. “And tell me.”
Out of the window was the Mages’ Tower, that thrusting assertion of the mages’ ambition, wealth, and power, which had shadowed the palace and streets beneath it for two hundred years. Its upper dome was gone, its upper stories collapsed in on themselves and fallen in slabs over the streets and buildings below, its middle and lower stories punctuated with jagged holes. The bright dust of its ruin was still settling out of the late-afternoon sunlight. That the destruction had been wreaked by material means—explosive shells from Darkborn emplacements on the far side of the river—everyone knew, but it was already widely rumored that the lethality had been magically augmented. And surely no enemy the mages sensed could have struck against them so preemptively.
“Mad, no,” Helenja said, judiciously. “But unwise to have said so outright.” She inclined her head toward Floria. “Continue.”
Floria believed the silent archmage might have been weighing Fejelis’s appeal, but her interpretation was unasked for. “Prasav”—that was Fejelis’s oldest cousin on his father’s side—“stepped forward to accuse Magister Tam of having been responsible for the prince’s—Prince Isidore’s—death, under Prince Fejelis’s instigation. He suggested that the prince and Magister Tam were lovers.”
Sharel snorted at this expression of northern bigotry.
“Fejelis asked the high masters to confirm that he and Tam were innocent of the prince’s death. They made no move to do so. Vigilants under Prasav’s command”—some of them suborned members of Fejelis’s own guard, Rupertis among them, and she owed
him
an accounting at her first opportunity—“took aim at Fejelis. The mages raised no objection, though there was no formal rescinding of contracts.”
That made Sharel’s eyes widen: the system of contracts by which earthborn secured the services of mages were sacrosanct. “Orlanjis tried to push Fejelis out of the line of fire. Magister Tam deflected the bolts, and then he, the prince, and Orlanjis disappeared.”
“The Temple staged a coup,” Helenja said, bluntly. “They have set Perrin up as princess—a mage princess, against seven hundred years of compact. Fejelis and Orlanjis were removed by Magister Tammorn.
His
motivations are obscure and his destination even more so. None of
my
mages”—a cold glance in their direction—“claim to be able to locate them.”
“And what are you doing here?” Sharel demanded of Floria. “You’re Isidore’s.”
“And, ironically,” Helenja said, with a smile that told Floria all their old antagonism was merely suspended, “the instrument of Isidore’s destruction.” She paused, letting Floria fully appreciate that statement.
“So that rumor about the talisman is true?” Tam believed that, under ensorcellment, Floria had carried to the prince’s rooms a talisman enspelled to annul the magic of the lights on which he depended to survive the night.
Floria did not answer. The downward flicker of Sharel’s gaze alerted her to her right hand, working on the pommel of her rapier. “Do
you
believe in the Shadowborn?”
For eighteen years she had guarded Isidore, as her father had Isidore’s father and uncle before him, and her grandmother, Isidore’s grandfather, unmoved by attempts at assassination, threats, seduction, and bribes. Nothing but magic could have made her part of the murder of her prince—yes, she believed in the Shadowborn.
Law might exonerate her of anything done under ensorcellment, yet she had murdered her prince and forfeited her honor, and she would do anything—make any alliance—to make and take recompense for that.
“Yes,” she said. “I believe in the Shadowborn.”
“And what do they say?” Sharel said, head turning toward the mage.
“The boys are not within the city; of that my mages are certain. Beyond that, they need a direction and distance, or time, to find them.”
“If they are caught outside at sunset—”
Helenja glanced toward the window, at the slant of light and depth of shadows. “They won’t be,” she said.
“How can you possibly know?” Sharel said.
“Fejelis is levelheaded. If he has survived the
lift
, he will ensure they survive the landing.”
She could not know. Tam’s feat—
lifting
himself, Fejelis, and Orlanjis—should have been beyond a mage of his official rank, even before he had endured the the high master’s questioning. Misjudgment in such extremity was likely.
“Whatever,” said Sharel, “got into Orlanjis?”
“The boy is fourteen, a bundle of emotions,” Helenja said. “That mage won’t have dropped them at random; it’ll be a place he knows. Floria,” Helenja said without turning, “you know this mage, I believe. Where would he go?”
Floria drew close the calm she had learned as a courtier in a mageridden court. “Magister Tam was born in the foothills of the Gyrheights—the Cloudherds,” she explained, giving them their southern name. Tam would never return there, even in mortal danger, but Sharel need not know that. The southerners romanticized their origins. “I know he likes the west coast.” It was not precisely a lie; he had visited the west coast once, but talked of it often.
Tam had not gone back, though, after he had met his artisan lady, Beatrice. They had a three-year-old son and a six-month-old daughter, and if Helenja did not already know about Tam’s family, then Sharel’s inquiries need not progress far before she came across them.
She would deal with Helenja to safeguard Fejelis’s rightful position as Isidore’s heir. Isidore had made her promise the night Fejelis came of age—the night Isidore died. But she also owed Tam her life; his magic had deflected those quarrels from her own heart, as well as her prince’s. She had a blood debt to repay.
“No matter,” said Helenja, when Floria said no more. “Start looking; I am expected in an audience with the ‘princess.’ Floria, with me.”
If Helenja and Floria made for strange bedmates, Floria found herself thinking some minutes later, then whatever would Isidore have made of
this
orgy of the peculiar?
She stood at ease, back to a wall, gaze shifting around the room, clashing and glancing off the gazes of the other guards and witnesses ranked around the wall. Across the room, her former friends and colleagues in the prince’s vigilance eyed her suspiciously, questioningly, or speculatively, according to their natures.
In the center of the room, beneath a rose skylight, was a round table, its edge and legs carved with ornate geometric scrollwork, decorated with silver, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory. On the far side sat Perrin, two hours’ princess of the Lightborn, and aged a month for every minute of it. Whose idea was it that she sat in that chair, the high, flaring back of which diminished her to a child’s proportions? She wore a prince’s red-and-blue morning jacket, and her light hair had been hastily caught up in a style suggesting a prince’s caul, with deep blue beads threaded through. No one dared re-create the true prince’s caul, lost with Fejelis. By her height, her sandy hair, and her light gray eyes, she was Isidore’s daughter, but Floria had never seen that hunted expression in Isidore’s eyes, or even in Fejelis’s.
On either side of Perrin sat the two whose alliance had pitched her into power. On her right was a solid, unremarkable-looking woman in crimson jacket and trousers. The crimson was higher necked and more opaque than any ordinary Lightborn should have been comfortable wearing, which meant its opacity was magical. Her glittering chains of rank showed her to be one of the surviving high masters, the leaders of the Lightborn Mages’ Temple, and spokesperson for the archmage—definitely not unremarkable, was Magistra Valetta.
On Perrin’s left sat Prasav, dressed as politic in crimson mourning and the green caul that marked his rulership of several northwest provinces. Beside him, sleek and predatory, was his daughter, Ember, in the guise of her father’s secretary. She watched Perrin as a well-fed cat might a caged bird, idly considering possibilities for later.
Closest to Floria, Helenja laid her hand down on the table with a soft click of gold filigree rings. “So, Magistra,” she said to Valetta. “Are you able to tell me yet where are my sons?”
“Regardless of whether we complete his deposition,” Prasav added smoothly, “Fejelis is a disruptive influence.”
“Nobody,” Perrin said, “is completing Fejelis’s deposition. I told you both,” she emphasized, with a look at each of her power brokers, “I am not taking the caul stained with Fejelis’s blood.”
Floria had to appreciate her courage, if not her sense. A princess who refused the caul was no safer than a prince who had lost it.
“We are not interested in contracting to locate the princes, but we
will
find Tammorn, and we expect the princes will be with him.”
Her use of “princes” could not be anything but designing. While Fejelis lived, only he was entitled to the address, but it was to the mages’ advantage to have their brightnesses at each other’s throats, not least because of the lucrative contracts protecting them against each other.
“When you do,” Perrin said, firmly, “since my brothers are earthborn, not mageborn, they should be placed in the custody of the vigilance.”
Where they will last only as long as it takes the first suborned vigilant to reach them,
Floria thought. By chance—for it surely could not be the thought—Perrin’s gaze intersected hers. The princess’s face tightened, as though she had just tasted something unpleasant. The fading—Floria hoped—ensorcellment that lingered around Floria? Perrin, like Tam, was a sport mage. And sports, Fejelis had asserted,
could
sense Shadowborn magic.
“Well,” she heard Prasav say, “shall we talk about the Darkborn? We’ve two hours before we meet with Sejanus Plantageter.”
He and others cast an eye toward the sunlight shining in the west-facing window, low, slanting, and yellowing. Since the Darkborn archduke and his retinue could not travel by day, they would arrive at the meeting place after dark and cede the second hour of the night onward to the Lightborn.
“That assumes,” Helenja said, “that he lives to reach the Council Chambers.”
The meeting was to take place in the Intercalatory Council Chambers, the only space designed for such encounters, though it was hardly the environment their brightnesses—or the Darkborn aristocracy—were accustomed to. The council was of relatively low status, and its representatives not aristocratic. Floria’s neighbor and close friend Balthasar Hearne had been serving intermittent terms on the council since he was of age to do so. He had described the chambers to her, the several rooms of various dimensions, to suit different-sized groups, each one bisected by an opaque paper wall supported and reinforced by heavy mesh. Darkborn and Lightborn could hear each other perfectly through the wall—as she could attest, having spoken to Balthasar through such a wall for most of the days of their lives.
Prasav stared across the table at Helenja, open distaste in his expression. “If you mean anything in particular by that, Helenja, may I suggest you think again,
now
. We want reparations from the Darkborn, not war with them.”
Helenja snorted. “Ever the mercenary, Prasav. Do you really think that what they did last night—last
night
—can be paid for in money alone? If you have any doubt, look out there.” She stabbed two fingers toward the window.