Behind her she heard a scrape and a scuttle, and movement caught the corner of her eye—Balthasar dropping to his knees before Lapaxo, who had backed to brace himself against the wall with one hand, rapier still raised, eyes still on the door. The fabric covering his right shin was bloody. Balthasar slashed a strip from his own jacket—Sweet Imogene, with one of those cursed poisoned knives!—and flipped the strip around the captain’s leg below the knee, cinching it tight. “I need water,” he said over his shoulder, to Floria. “Something to wash the wound. And a clean knife.”
“Identify them,” rasped Lapaxo.
There was only one identification she cared about: who was still a threat. Her eyes flicked over the assassins, taking in their attire: that of ordinary palace staff, complete to the red morning jackets, stained a much darker red with blood. Two of the four were dead, or indistinguishable from it. The woman was lying curled up around her spilled intestine. The fourth was sprawled on his back, gargling and trying spasmodically to roll over. The corridor outside was empty for now. She wondered what had become of the guards outside; nothing good, she expected. She flicked away all the knives she could see, and then risked leaning over the assassins to frisk them and strip them of other weapons. There were no apparent firearms, but the rearmost was carrying a rolled-up black tarpaulin. A quiet assassination, then—Balthasar with poison, Floria with poison assisted by steel, and her body, at least, quickly disposed of.
She whirled as Balthasar lunged for the table. Oblivious to her reaction, he caught up the carafe and a glass and smashed the glass and used the broken stem to open the poisoned cut, raising new blood. Lapaxo’s face was gray and he was breathing heavily, but he was still standing, back flat against the wall. Balthasar, his fingers on the pulse at his groin, said, urgently, “Floria, I need some digitalis, some stimulant—”
“I’ve nothing with me.” She would have, she
should
have, if she hadn’t been knocked from crisis to crisis.
“Then
get me some
,” Balthasar said, lurching out of his crouch to catch the captain as he began to slide down the wall. The rapier fell with a clatter. “
That
or a mage.”
Arguing the matter was pointless if Bal couldn’t see that moving them from a defensible position could kill all three of them more surely than lack of help would kill Lapaxo.
The sound of running footsteps from outside sent her back behind the table. She’d have grabbed Balthasar if she’d thought he would come, but—“Quiet!” she barked at him, and in a burst of adrenaline-fired strength, heaved the glass table on its side. It made an inadequate shield, but its crash was enough to command the attention of the new arrivals.
Who were half a dozen vigilants wearing judiciary badges, with Tempe Silver Branch at their back. The lieutenant in charge swiftly assessed her and the casualties, and then directed two of his men to clear the way for Tempe and the young mage who had questioned Balthasar. Tempe walked, seemingly unaware, across the tacky floor, while the mage followed her with mincing step, her face working in horror and revulsion. Adamantly, Floria pointed to Lapaxo. Tempe said to the mage, “Him first,” and the mage went. Balthasar ceded his place with profound relief, whispering urgently to her.
A ferocious cramp bent Floria over. Hands braced on knees, she grunted out an assurance that she’d be fine. Tempe scowled; she hated it when appearances contradicted the truth told her. “You’re bleeding.”
“Scratches,” Floria rasped. Tempe took her arm, examining the wound, and unstuck the side of her tunic to check the other, carefully avoiding the blood. “
Bitch
of a poison.” If it had come to her against the assassins, she’d have been fatally off form, even if no poison could kill her outright. She freed a hand to knead her abdomen, willing everyone to go away and leave her to her misery. Maybe she could deflect their attention. “You’d better get the mage on to them soon if you want answers.”
“Helenja or Prasav? Take your pick. The two who were posted to guard you are dead.” She put a hand on Floria’s shoulder, knee behind her knee, and pushed her down onto the mesh couch. “We’ve been having an interesting night, while you two were snug in here.” Her suggestive tone earned her a sour look, which she met with a quizzical expression. “Been two letters for him, heavily ciphered—and, yes, I know they’ve not been delivered. We want to know what’s in them. Also leaflets”—she nudged the paper on the ground with a toe—“pushed through every available mail slot and newspaper drop in the civil-service sector and servants’ quarters. Variety of texts, all the same theme—the Shadowborn are your enemy, we’re not, their brightnesses and the Temple are obstructing our alliance. You can say this for the Darkborn: they’re thorough. I’d venture to say this wasn’t all thought up in a night; someone had it planned ahead of time.”
“Lord Vladimer,” Balthasar said, from beside Lapaxo. Lapaxo’s eyes were closed, but his skin had already warmed several tones from death gray. Then Balthasar noticed Floria’s hunched posture and came quickly to his feet. “Floria!”
“I’m
all right
!” she said, sharply. “The asset protects me.” If he couldn’t read her eyes, she willed him to read her expression:
Watch what you say
. Both for her sake and his.
He started around to the rear of the couch, but was intercepted by Tempe’s outstretched arm. “You don’t want to get behind a vigilant just coming off a fight.” She looked him up and down. “Vladimer? Word came to us that he had lost it mentally.”
Floria, craning her neck, saw him realize that he had spoken too freely, particularly to a woman with an asset of veracity. He said, “Lord Vladimer would have thought about the implications of tension between Darkborn and Lightborn before. He received the council’s reports, and it is his job to assess and deal with threats to his brother’s rule.”
“I’ve read some of your council’s writings. This isn’t without precedent.”
“We—the council—write leaflets when we feel we need to inform, not to agitate,” Balthasar said, adamantly. “Floria, won’t you let me—”
“There’ll be poison mixed in with the blood,” Floria said, straightening up. “No point having you poison yourself now.”
The mage drifted over to them, leaving Lapaxo with two of the vigilants. Tempe glanced toward the door. “If you would see to the survivors, Magistra.”
“I cannot, Mistress Tempe,” she said, stiffly. “They attempted to harm a mage.”
“A mage—,” said Floria, baffled. Tempe said to Balthasar, “
Are
you?”
“Not by any useful measure,” he said, quick mind visibly working. “I can sense anything on the scale of weather-working, but nothing smaller. I never thought it amounted to anything.”
“It doesn’t, ordinarily. Well, well, well. So now you’re under
Temple
law.” Tempe looked at the mage, a glitter in her eye. “Magistra, does this man look harmed to you?”
“No,” the mage said, warily. Floria had heard that same tone in a junior vigilant greeting a veteran’s invitation to play a friendly dice game or practice a no-fail fighting move.
“Exactly. The vigilants are the ones who are poisoned and bloody, while he hasn’t a hair out of place.” Not strictly true, but any further bruises and sprains were strictly Floria’s doing. “How do you know their intent was to harm him?”
The mage opened her mouth. Closed her mouth. Said finally, “You want to know,” and turned and picked her way across the tacky floor to the fallen.
“She’ll go far,” Tempe predicted. She glanced toward Lapaxo, who was being lifted to his feet by two of the vigilants. “Good not to lose another captain tonight. Nice work with the tourniquet.”
“Yes,” Floria said, obscurely resentful that she had not been allowed to say it first. “It was.”
Tempe drummed her fingers on her knee. “So, did whoever ordered this do it before or after the Temple had laid claim?”
“I don’t understand,” said Balthasar, perching on the edge of the upturned table, his worried attention more on Floria than Tempe. She was irritated; she had survived much worse, and she needed him not to assume Tempe was an ally.
“Several possibilities. The Temple wants you completely under their control. Ordinarily, they don’t bother themselves with less than first-rank mages, but you are unique.”
Floria had a sudden, uneasy feeling that she did not want to hear the rest, not with a mage likely to lay a healing hand on her in the next few minutes.
“The compact prohibits mages from using magic to either benefit or harm earthborn, except under a negotiated public contract and at the request of an earthborn. You understand?”
“Yes.” By the tight tendons in Balthasar’s neck, he did not like the way this was going, either.
“The compact does not apply to
mages
, although there is governance on the use of magic by stronger against weaker mages.”
Governance,
Floria thought.
That depends upon strength.
She suddenly discovered an unwelcome sympathy for the princess, a mere second-rank mage in possession of knowledge that her superiors were determined to deny. Little wonder she seemed hardly more than a puppet.
The mage approached somewhat warily. “Two of my colleagues have arrived,” she said, primly. “They’re seeing to the prisoners.”
“Was it Prasav gave them their orders?” Tempe asked the mage. “Or Helenja?”
“Sharel,” said the mage, pointedly. “And they were to kill him, too.”
“Of course,” Tempe said, relaxing slightly. This was retaliation against Floria and Balthasar for that incident in the night, not some wider political scheme. Floria wondered if she could possibly cozen the Mother of All Things into letting her be there when Helenja found out that Sharel had ordered the assassination of a man claimed by the Temple. At the very least, there would be a substantial fine.
“Mistress Floria,” said the young woman.
Floria, resenting the need, gave the mage her best intimidating stare. Tempe scolded, “Don’t bully the girl.”
She was good for a third-ranker. She dealt with the trivial wounds and left the poison and the asset to fight it out without interference. Her eyes widened, though, at the strength of the asset. Neither of the mages maintaining it had been in the tower last night, or this skirmish would have had quite a different outcome.
“You can go and report now,” Tempe said, watched the mage leave the room, then turned back to Floria.
“What are the other possible reasons for the Temple . . . adopting me?” Balthasar said.
Tempe smiled thinly. “Control, of you as a source of information and a source of disruption. Possession, of an example of some very interesting magic. I understand magic only as much as the next nonmage.”
Disingenuous of her, in Floria’s opinion, given her asset and her relentlessly inquiring nature
.
“But I do know that until now, nobody has known how to keep a Darkborn alive in light, or a Lightborn in darkness. I don’t think your archduke quite grasped the implications of this, for the Temple; if I had been him, I would not have let you come over. It may even have bearing on our understanding the nature of the Curse itself, a puzzle for eight hundred years. . . . Yes, I think they’d want you alive.”
Assuming ,
Floria thought,
that the high masters have not already learned everything they needed from Balthasar.
“That makes it less likely they’d use you as bait,” Tempe added. “Though not inconceivable.”
“Bait for whom?” Balthasar said with strain in his voice. “And for what?”
Tempe gestured suggestively toward the door. “Enemies of the Darkborn. Enemies of the Temple. Enemies of the status quo. This court is riven with factions, but in the main, enemies know each other; we exist in a balance of tensions and oppositions. We do not like them to be disturbed. Now Isidore is dead, Fejelis has vanished, and you have come in from outside, bringing with you rumors of unseen forces of unknown potential—This isn’t a simple place you have come to, Balthasar Hearne.”
“I’ve known Floria for decades,” he said, by way of answer.
“Yes,” she said, with that annoying glint of speculative amusement.
Floria bit her tongue; she did not want to invite Tempe’s curiosity.
“It’s different, being on the same side of the wall.” He turned his face to her, then to Tempe—sonning, Floria realized. “Please advise me.”
“Next time I say, ‘Stay down,’
stay down
,” Floria said. “Save me grandstanding.”
He looked abashed. “I . . . understand.”
But wasn’t sorry; she heard that distinction. And she’d be a hypocrite if she pretended she’d respect him more for cowering under the table.
The corner of Tempe’s mouth drew down. “
My
advice: get out of here. The Temple’s protection goes only so far, particularly now that they’ve torn up the compact. Tell your archduke this is not a good idea, trying to stir up the populace. Their brightnesses won’t forget it.”
“And the Shadowborn?” Nothing in Balthasar’s face betrayed his feelings—so he could do it if he needed to.
“Are magical, yes? Therefore the Temple’s problem. Or their brightnesses, should they choose to contract with the Temple to deal with them.”
“That’s not enough,” Balthasar said.
Tempe sighed. “That man Johannes—his cousin was summoned to his bedside, found him raving about Shadowborn who could turn a man into a flare, burn him to char in seconds. Half the servants had heard that story, or versions of it, by the time we knew.”
“Did he mention Balthasar?” Floria said.
“Not in any version I heard—but who’s to know who else from that household will be talking—or the group he’s part of?” She stood up and said, deliberately, “So take your lover home and leave him there, if you want him alive by tomorrow’s sunset.”
“We are not lovers,” Floria said, not looking at Balthasar.