She shook her head. “As I said, they exchanged not a word after you spoke.”
But by the set of her shoulders, there was more. He was already learning to read her. “What is it, Floria? You said they mostly concentrated on me. What did they do to you?”
“Raised the memory of my ensorcellment,” she said, rising to stand with her back to him.
He waited. “A lover?” he said, finding the question unexpectedly difficult to ask.
She turned, eyes narrowing.
“You are not the first,” he said, turning his face a little to the side, so that he would not seem to be probing or challenging her. “It seems to have been the way they liked to turn people.”
“Curse him,”
he heard her whisper.
Hands upturned on his lap, he sighed. “We can but hope.”
She sat down beside him on the bed, the slump on her shoulders betraying her weariness. He remembered this was night for her and that she would not have shown her vulnerability to anyone. “He was one of the men in the companion house. I’ve always been so careful, as my father insisted. . . .”
It seems a bleak approach to intimacy,
he thought, as he had thought before. The promiscuity did not trouble him as much as the lovelessness. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She gave a twisted little smile. “Nothing to do with you, Bal. You always urged me to find a true partner—a husband, in your terms. You could be quite insufferable on the subject.”
He supposed he had been, happy as he himself was then. “You deserve to be loved, Floria,” he said, quietly. “No doubt you will tell me that my Darkborn prejudices are showing, but what was right for a man is not right for a woman. What was right for your father was not right for you.”
She turned her head, a smile gentling that hard, beautiful face. “You’ve said that to me before.”
This close, he could sonn the slight thickening and change in texture of her skin, and realized that her face was bruised badly. Her voice had sounded husky, which he had put down to strain. “You’re hurt,” he said, shocked that he had not realized.
She shrugged. “Met with a mob outside Bolingbroke Station on the way back from the palace. Did something stupid and needed to be fished out of the fountain.”
He touched her face gently, but the pretense that it was a clinician’s touch failed as soon as he felt the silken warmth of her skin. There was no wall between them now. Their weight on the mesh of the bed created a subtle, in-falling force. It took no effort for him to tilt sideways, to close the distance between his lips and hers; the effort would have been in resisting. Her lips were cool and firm at first, then softened as they parted. Her breath stroked against his lip, quickening with her breathing. Her hand caught the back of his neck hard, and her fingers spread in his hair.
Then that moment of abandonment passed, and he pulled back. She held him briefly, and then yielded, her hand sliding away. His sensitized skin remembered the track; his sensitized mouth, her lips.
“I’m sorry, Floria,” he muttered, deeply ashamed of his behavior. “This is not right.”
“You’ll notice,” she said after a moment, “that you are not sitting on the floor, wondering what hit you. Which you would be if I objected.”
He opened his mouth to say “I’m sorry” again, and closed it. Nine years of marriage had taught him that a wise man did not apologize for doing something a woman wanted, no matter how foolish or wrong that thing might be.
“It would have been strange,” she said, “if we had met and this had not happened.”
“I’m not myself,” he said, inadequately. “Everything that has happened . . . Telmaine . . .” Remorse mingled with his grief now, that he had come so near to betraying both the women he cared most for. “It’s too soon. Maybe . . .”
“Yes,” she said, in a tone he could not interpret. “Telmaine. I had a conversation with her just before I left the palace. She told me it was very important that I tell you we had spoken.”
“Thank you,” he whispered. “But I’m not . . . sure I’m up to hearing her message at the moment.”
“That
was
the message. When Telmaine returned to the palace and was taken prisoner, it was night. When she spoke to me, it was daylight. Why would her jailors let her speak to me? Why would they let her release me when they’d shown no sign of caring that I’d have been dead when my light failed? Balthasar, she’s a mage—a strong mage. Unless she
wanted
to stay in that cell and die, it would not hold her.” She paused. “All she said was that it was very important that I tell you she and I had spoken, not
what
I should tell you. I did not make the connection immediately myself, and then I waited to tell you because I needed you to hold together before the court.” She waited, stoically, for his response, her face like a carved mask.
So stupidly simple a chain of reasoning. He had held most of the links himself—he
knew
what Ishmael had told him about Telmaine’s strength as a mage, and he
knew
she would not submit tamely to death. He should have connected them, would have connected him, but for the abomination of the ensorcellment. In a raw whisper, he said, “Floria, even if you’d told me before, I
couldn’t
have believed you.”
A moment for understanding to come, and then she swore, softly.
He put a hand over his face, dislodging the spectacles. If his loss of composure disturbed her, he was going to shock her now. “Could you please . . . give me a few minutes to myself?”
He felt her rise, the netting release. She touched his cheek, her fingertips callused, scratchy, and warm—except for the warmth, unlike Telmaine’s. To his lowered head, she said, “I would lie with you, Balthasar, for the asking. All these years demand more than a kiss. I would never have made you my enemy by deceiving you on something that important. . . . But I’ll leave you now.”
Eight
Tammorn
<
T
ammorn.>
He had known this contact would come ever since he spoke to Lady Telmaine. Indeed, he had known it would come since he recovered enough to think clearly. Though he had not expected the archmage himself, there was no mistaking that immense strength. The archmage’s replenishing touch across distance had the healing warmth of sunlight. Tam all but groaned in relief as his pain and leaden exhaustion dissipated. He sat up: one did not address the master of the Temple while supine in bed.
<
Why?
> He cut to the essence. <
Why release me?
>
He put force of feeling, if not force of magic, into the statement. He showed the archmage a swift succession of impressions: waking to the reports of bullets, hearing talons scrape the metal roof overhead, sensing that vile aura, hearing Orlanjis cry out and Jovance shout, and then the painfully intense burst of matter manipulation. He was aware of the archduke’s gratification at the last, but he could not have concealed Jovance’s presence, even if he had tried.
He felt a moment’s base relief that he could not conceal the information that Vladimer had known about Mycene’s and Kalamay’s plans, and done nothing to prevent it. He was glad not to be tempted.
Magistra Valetta said. Unlike the archmage, her magic stung like static sparks. This close to her, he could tell that she returned their hatred in equal measure.
the archmage said.
Shadowborn
?> he said in disbelief.
Valetta said.
murderers
,> Tam said—and sensed Magistra Valetta’s startlement at being so fiercely contradicted. they
—murdered
dozens
of us. They’d have murdered more, but for Lukfer sacrificing his life. How dare you darken his memory by pretending he lied about the Shadowborn?>
Magistra Valetta said.
Were they really going to pretend that this had been done according to compact, to pretend that the Shadowborn had been working under the orders of the Darkborn and so were indemnified, even for
this
?
the archmage said. Valetta paused.
He sensed the calculation in that thought, but even so, Lukfer had been born a sport, and his strength had been immense but dangerously uncontrolled. Ever since he had been received into the Temple’s care as a young child, he had been the high masters’ ward. He had used pain—mostly the pain of living in poor light—to bleed his energies in healing effort. Tam had assumed that he had achieved his final act of mastery because of his mortal injuries, but he remembered how even before, Lukfer had cast fire and effortlessly annulled an ensorcelled crossbow bolt that was killing Fejelis. If the high masters were right, there could be no crueler irony—
gifted
you at the last.>
He had had neither the time nor the heart to examine that gift yet. It was the gift of the master to his or her favored student—a distillation of the master’s essential knowledge of magic, imparted magically as a nucleus of insight and memory. It was a precious, perilous gift. Given too soon, it could overwhelm the student and distort his maturation. Given maliciously, as the Shadowborn had done to Lady Telmaine, it could induce possession. She should be grateful for Ishmael di Studier’s steady hand.
But given at the right time, the
gift
could accelerate a mage’s realization of his full capacities. And that, he knew, was what Lukfer would have wished for him.
know
how strong you are, Tammorn. We have felt how strong you are.>
gift
, Tammorn?>
That was rich of her. The high masters would have burned out his magic, Lukfer’s precious gift or no, for the impertinence of exposing their weaknesses.
What he had sensed, facedown on the floor within the circle of high masters, was not theater. He told them so.
dying
. The contracted mages might not have reached him in time.> He had never said he was sorry and he never would, though they had bound his magic for five years after and seemed set on holding it against him indefinitely.
<
Enough,
> said the archmage.
<
Peaceful
—with that?> He threw his impressions at them, of that swirl of violence outside the hut, of the corrupted vitality and magic of the Shadowborn.
the archmage said. Centuries whispered behind his voice.
Not for me,
Tam thought. His heart and causes were here, with Beatrice and the children, with Fejelis, with the artisans, with the immigrants from the provinces who trod the road he had trodden a quarter century ago.
the archmage said.
He was going to laugh or scream curses at them, both equally futile. will not do it
.>
He could feel the weight of Valetta’s magic, Valetta’s will, readying to bear down on him. Others stood behind her. the archmage said, no gentleness in that ancient voice.
<
They
—>
<
Shhh.
>
the archmage said into his stilled mind. of a striding man sweeping across a wide, tiled floor and turning to gesture, every long line of him radiating vitality. A chieftain or prince of an age remembered only by the high masters.
But remembered,
Tam thought,
as I would have remembered Fejelis a hundred years after his death.
night
out there,> he said, a last, desperate objection. I
will die.>