He felt Neill’s magic playing around him, prying at his own ensorcellment. “How fascinating,” he said. “How long have you known how to do that?”
The instincts of a tower-trained mage prevailed: above all, impress. “A few hours, since the Darkborn came with the ensorcellment on him.”
“Darkborn . . . Ah, Sebastien, what have you done? Was this Darkborn named Hearne, by chance? ”
“They didn’t say.” And to his regret, he had not asked.
“I am sure it was.” He sighed. “Foolish boy. So the Temple sent you here with a just-learned, completely untried ensorcellment on you. To impress us, I presume, with their aptitude and the obedience they can command from a strong mage.” A glint of tooth. “Are you expendable, Magister Tammorn? ”
Tam matched that cynical smile with one of his own, but did not answer.
“So . . . the Lightborn Temple wants to treat with us. For what? ”
“Should I not wait and take that up with your archmage? ”
“You could. The problem is that Emeya is insane. Come at her direct, with reasoned argument, and you will meet only unreason. I know how to deal with her.”
“Is that why she has you ensorcelled? ” Tam said, coming at him direct.
The lantern sank in his hand, throwing angled shadows across his face. Of the deep-set eyes, only a hint of bluish sclera remained. “I failed to take Stranhorne, and a valued one of our number was killed. She does not think there is any such thing as failure, only willful defiance.”
Tam lowered his voice. “You don’t have to put up with that.”
Neill lifted the lantern and held it out, almost between their faces. “Are you trying to suborn me? Better and more beloved than you have tried. But it’s less a case of where the bread’s buttered as who’s holding the knife.” Teeth showed in his smile, sharper than before. “But I suppose you’ve earned something for that. So I’ll give you some advice: go back to your Temple; go back and tell them that Emeya recognizes no peers. If she did, she would have to recognize the one who surely is. If they don’t agree, they can test themselves against her power. I expect they will lose, though I’d much prefer that they win. Oh yes, the ensorcellment only prevents me working against her will. It does not prevent me saying what I think.”
There was another Shadowborn as strong, and an enemy of Emeya? “Emeya’s presence was the strongest I sensed.”
Neill’s feral smile flashed. “You’ll not get me to spill that way, Tammorn. If you’re not going to go back to your Temple, then I suppose I’ll just have to take you to Emeya. What are the Temple’s terms? ”
“I think I should best take that up with your lady.”
“As opposed to a mere minion? On your own head be it.” Magic surged, caught him up, and, despite his reflex resistance,
lifted
him.
His first sense was of magic all around him—hideous, tainted magic that reminded him of nothing so much as a slaughterhouse in high summer. If he could endure the assault of rotting blood and hot urine and manure on his senses then, he could endure the assault of this on his magic now.
“I don’t know why it takes your kind that way at first,” Neill said. “We’ve had the occasional mage follow our Call, though all have been low-ranked. The distress will pass, or you’ll be past feeling it. This way. Stay close.”
Tam followed at Neill’s shoulder, stumbling despite the light the man carried. He had trodden rough ground before, but never by a single light, and he was repeatedly deceived by shadows and pits impersonating shadows. Some great violence had been done the land here, leaving it gouged, deeply scored, and stripped of scrub, bracken, grass, and tree. Only tussocks and fragments of root remained, barbs for the ankles and snares for the feet. He was aware they were on a downslope, but between trying to control his revulsion to Shadowborn magic and trying to keep his footing, he was not aware how the torn earth had been reshaped until Neill stopped moving and he looked ahead—up at a towering earthworks molded from the dirt and the embedded fragments of the plants swept up with it. His mouth fell a little open: he had a gift for inert-matter manipulation himself, but he could never have imagined having moved so much of it. . . . He could just see the top of the wall, and though the curve of it was perceptible, it must easily exceed the circumference of the tower. The slope they had just climbed down was the pit scoured to raise it. They reached an arch of earth that was not only packed but fused into clinker, and, passing through, entered a midden of sleeping animals.
Sleeping monsters—no farm animals these, brought into the village stockade for shelter. He could smell fur and urine and feces, and instead of grain or hay, the odor was of rotting meat and old blood, for real, this time. From a mound of gray pelt that was waist-high at its apex, a spear-shaped head rose on a long neck and four slitted eyes glared at the light. Neill murmured a word that seemed to carry as much affection as command, and the creature sighed and laid its head down once more.
A huge wolf shouldered past Tam to butt Neill’s knees. Tam had had a herd dog who liked to do that, thinking it a merry joke if he could dump people on their rumps, but it had done it to Tam’s father, and he had sold it at the lowlands fair. Neill crouched to fondle the wolf ’s ears, allowing it to nuzzle his face and chin as though those jaws could not have torn his throat out with a snap. “Hey, Mayfly, good hunting out there?”
Tam took one look at the dried blood on the beast’s ruff and averted his gaze. Behind the beast—Mayfly—came several others, sizing up Tam for the eating and making up to Neill, whose magic spun out and around and through them. Their maker, perhaps, because Mayfly and several of the others were nearly twice the size of the foothills wolves Tam had hunted in his youth. Their master, certainly. Neill clucked at Mayfly like an old village wife feeding at her chickens, gave it a parting pat, and led Tam to stairs that followed the inner shell of the earthworks upward. Tam could not help but look back, remembering Fejelis and the others talking after their defense of the railway hut and railroad, and measuring the numbers that might yet be turned against the Darkborn and against his own earthborn. And then up, apprehensively, toward the lair of the flying Shadowborn.
The stairs, like the arch, were built of clinkered earth, rough and uneven. Neill held the light at his side, showing him the edge, for which Tam was grateful. He wondered why, with such power as he clearly had, Neill did not simply let it carry him to the top. Unless that, too, was bound.
And then all speculation ended with an obliterating sense of Shadowborn magic, and only Neill’s quick clasp saved him from a stumble and possibly a fall. “She’s back,” he said, quite unnecessarily. “And she wants you. Now.”
He let Neill haul him up the last several yards, aware of the urgency in his manner. Yet at the top of the stairs, at the first sight of the person who stood there, he halted in commonplace shock.
She was a
child
, a fair-haired girl of no more than thirteen. No taller than his chest, her figure barely budding, her dress a simple blue frock with a pattern of rushes and dragonflies and grass stains over the knees, and a circlet of wilting purple daisies around her curling crown. Her skin was translucent in Neill’s light, like his son’s, who had inherited Beatrice’s lovely complexion. Almost he might have believed that she was an innocent trapped at the center of this vortex of magic, rather than its focus, because no child commanded that kind of power. She peered up at him from beneath transparent lashes and smiled shyly.
Before her magic tore his mind apart.
He was not aware of falling to his knees and then to his hands and knees, but that was where he found himself when the magic let him go. Helpless, shaking, he vomited himself dry. In the one, two, three—however many infinite—minutes she had pillaged his mind, she had taken from him his past, his knowledge of the Temple, his knowledge of magic, and even—something the high masters had refrained from doing—Lukfer’s last
gift
. His life had been pulled from him in a tumble of faces, places, experiences, emotions: his hardscrabble boyhood, his muddled youth, Artarian’s death, his years of wandering, his rescue by Darien White Hand, meeting Lukfer, saving Fejelis and being punished for it, falling in love with Beatrice, finding a friend in Fejelis, his children’s births, Isidore’s death, Lukfer’s death and the carnage in the Temple, rescuing Fejelis, the high masters’ orders, the high masters’ wishes, his own hopes . . . Knowledge and memory, she had taken it all.
He felt Neill’s hands light on his forehead and the back of his head, but he barely felt the touch of the man’s magic, except that his stomach finally stopped wringing itself out. The Shadowborn mage hooked his hands beneath his armpits and hauled him upright on his knees and then to his feet. “I warned you,” he said, through set teeth. Angry, Tam realized, and on his behalf. The Shadowborn mage pulled Tam’s arm across his shoulders and walked him around the curve of the earthworks. They were on an inner ramparts, with another level above them; there he sensed the presence of the flying Shadowborn.
Another earth wall loomed before them, with a smaller archway closed by a hanging. With a snap of the hand, Neill tossed aside the hanging to allow them through. Inside, another gesture lit several illuminated wands jammed into the walls. He dropped Tam into an armchair. The chair, the bed, the table—all were carved with a detail that any Darkborn would have coveted, though the wood was deep, even, rose brown, and highly polished. Except for its disturbing opacity, for its ability to cast dense shadows, it might have graced a bedroom in a guild master’s house. “I refuse to sleep on dirt,” Neill said, observing his interest.
In the corner, in a carved basket, tawny fur stirred. A small wildcat hissed at Tam from where she lay curled around her kits. “Where’s your sister? ” Neill said to her, and a thread of magic looped the room, drawing a second wildcat out from under the bed. Decades-old habit made Tam tally the bounty on the skins. Neill folded himself down on the floor, which he had covered with a camp mat in the southern style, allowing the cat to sprawl across his lap. Her flank bulged with her own unborn litter. “I’d best send you back, hadn’t I?” the mage said to her. “Too many things with big teeth around. I’ll do it as soon as she lets me.” He looked up at Tam; in this light, his eyes were a deep blue. “Not much of a welcome for the emissary from the Temple.”
“Why?” Tam said hoarsely.
“Her? Me? You? The world? Life? ”
“She could have
asked
.”
“Simplest answer: because she can, and now you and your Temple know she can.” He shook his head. “You should have let me handle it.”
“You’re stronger than I am,” Tam said bluntly, “but not that strong.”
The corner of Neill’s mouth tucked in. “And how, may I ask, did you survive in the Temple so long? ” He met Tam’s startled look with raised brows. “Did you think we didn’t study our enemy? ”
“We didn’t sense your magic.”
“We didn’t send up fireworks. We knew the Darkborn could sense Shadowborn, even if we weren’t aware that extended to Lightborn sports. We kept to the minor magic: shape-shifting when we had to”—
minor?
thought Tam—“ensorcellment of mind”—
Floria
—“some talismanic magic.”
“The”—he cleared his throat—“the munitions that destroyed the tower? ”
“Dealt with at the factory outside the city. All right,” he said to the wildcat, who had taken his stroking hand in her jaws, teeth not breaking the skin. “I’ll leave well enough alone.” She heaved herself off his lap and squeezed back into her refuge under the bed.
“Who is Emeya? How did she get . . . the way she is? The strength she has.”
Neill did not at first appear to hear the question, his eyes following the wildcat. But he let her go, rising to settle in the second chair. “How much do you know about the origin of the Curse? ”
“Laid by the mage Imogene and her followers in revenge for the death of her daughter in a war between mages,” Tam said, promptly.
“And why didn’t it die with them? ”
That was the subject of endless speculation amongst student mages, and like most such exercises in speculation, one Tam avoided. He was a peasant; what was, was. Magic was supported by the mage’s vitality and will, and when those ceased, so, too, did the magic. The Curse was the exception. Those were the facts; speculation was specious.
Then he had a sudden, appalling thought. “Did
all
the mages who laid the Curse die? ”
“The obvious question, but the answer is yes. All died, and more. If you think Emeya’s a monster, you should have met Imogene . . . Be patient,” he said in response to Tam’s stirring. “I’ll come to your answer. But first, Imogene, a monster beyond compare. She’d specialized for years—centuries, even—on ensorcellments of the will, and anyone who came within her reach was made subject or driven away, with the exception of her daughter Ismene, whom she doted on. Ismene took an earthborn lover—not by his choice, you understand. It meant nothing to her that he was plighted by custom and honor to another woman, or that he killed himself in shame when she cast him off. Earthborn law could not touch Ismene, and mage’s law barely, but that man’s betrothed—her name has not come down to us—did not forget. Thirty years it took her to have her revenge. How’d an earthborn kill a mage?” A smile, with sharp teeth. “The Darkborn seem to be learning the way of it. In this case, she found allies—many allies, who’d been injured by magic, who were jealous of magic, who feared magic—and what she couldn’t find, she bought. She found ways of setting the mageborn against each other, made sure that Ismene had enemies enough among the mageborn that her magic was worn down—not that that was difficult—and finally lured her underground and dropped a mountain on her head. And
that
is why the Curse, why Imogene took such revenge upon the earthborn, for all those who were part of her daughter’s murder. . . . I sometimes wonder what became of that lady after, though she probably did not survive too long.”