“The Borders,” Fejelis said. And could not resist adding, “. . . I’m glad to see you, too, Captain.” He was; he had feared Lapaxo had been murdered to clear the way for Rupertis. He waved away Lapaxo’s apology. “This is Magistra Jovance, who has been good enough to bring me back, and is under verbal contract to me.” Fortunately for princely decorum, she did not respond to any double entendre. She still looked very pale.
“And Magister Tammorn? ”
He started along the path, and when Lapaxo did not remonstrate, strode out. Jovance dealt stoically with the pace, following a few steps behind and stumbling only a little. “Whereabouts unknown at present,
not
by his own volition. What’s been happening here?”
Lapaxo gave him a terse summary of events: the ultimatum to the Darkborn, the first signs of Darkborn retaliation, and then the arrival of the Darkborn envoy. “I knew about him,” Fejelis said—it had been part of Vladimer’s briefing. “What’s he . . . Never mind. I want to meet him.” Quite aside from the envoy’s political importance, he was curious to meet anyone with that much crazy courage.
He felt Jovance’s fingertips graze his wrist, as though by chance.
He managed not to gawk at her. Even Tam had never mind-touched him like that.
“He reacts well in a crisis,” Lapaxo said, which was high praise from the vigilant. Explaining how the Darkborn emissary had already survived one assassination attempt carried them up the steps and into the vestibule. Servants and staff stared. A couple skittered through various doorways, while others sidled casually out, no doubt to scurry every bit as quickly to various masters. He found himself fighting a manic grin: he was home.
“Where are they? ” he said.
He didn’t need to explain who, not to Lapaxo. “Up in the archmage’s suite.”
“All of them? ” Fejelis said. Either that indicated a shift in the balance of power or a refusal on the part of either his mother or Prasav to award the other the territorial advantage. “Tell them I want them down in the main receiving room, five minutes or sooner: the archmage, the high masters, Prasav, Helenja. The Darkborn envoy, too. Tell the high masters I know where they’ve sent Tammorn”—Jovance’s golden eyes flashed alarm—“and tell Prasav I am not pleased with his suborning Captain Rupertis.”
“It wasn’t Prasav alone,” Lapaxo said. “It was Shadowborn—I hadn’t come to that yet. And Rupertis is dead.”
Fejelis swallowed. His headlong pace was making him dizzy, yet he sensed that the only way to prevail here was to move fast. He’d worked hard at training speed and timing into himself on the piste; it was time to apply these lessons outside. “
Ten
minutes, then. I need a change of clothing.” He needed a bath, too, and several hours’ more sleep, but he could whistle for those, prince or no.
Jovance touched his arm again, more deliberately, and mind-whispered,
Lapaxo gave orders; they collected and shed vigilants and servants and staff as they rolled down the corridors. He scanned faces, gauging mood. Jovance’s touch said, He sensed pleasure and pride behind the words, and wished the touch had lingered.
His chief dresser and two assistants were already waiting in the main receiving room, one assistant with an armful of red fabric and the second with a steaming bowl, a razor, cloths, a towel. A mage vigilant nodded to Lapaxo from behind them: the bowl, towels, and dressers were safe. As the vigilants deployed to their posts at the doors and on the balcony, he dropped the shoulder bag on the dais with a quick “No, I’ll need that” to the servant who would have swept it away, and let the dresser strip him to his underwear and swab him down with the brisk efficiency of a mother cat washing her kitten. He was glad he’d had the chance to shave in the railway house, because having a razor plied at that speed would have tried his nerves. He stepped into trousers and shoes, and stooped for a blouse and to receive a comb through his hair. No time for the ornate styling fashionable at court. Lapaxo stayed at his right shoulder, continuing his report in an increasingly distracted fashion as servants streamed into the hall, inspecting mirrors, dusting lights, straightening pictures, carrying more lights on stands, carrying flowers in transparent bowls, trying to do in five minutes what had taken them several days before his ill-omened coming of age. Fejelis was sure his orders had not included all this, yet it took very little reflection to decide that if he had thought to give these orders, he would have. Lapaxo, finally pressed beyond endurance, said, “What
is
this? ”
Letting his intuition speak for him, Fejelis said, “Defiance.”
Lapaxo’s look demanded he make sense. “. . . Defiance of disorder,” Fejelis said. “Defiance of change. Defiance of illegitimate authority.” He pulled the wrapped caul from the Darkborn bag, giving the wincing dresser a penitent glance, and unwrapped it with more care and respect than he had rolled it up. He handed the red mourning jacket to the dresser for shaking out and brushing down, and cradled the caul briefly in his hands. A few strands of pale hair were snagged in the wire. His father’s, or his own? The caul was still shaped to his father’s head, but its fit was close enough. By sleight of hand, the dresser produced a mirror and held it at just the right angle with the precision of long practice. Fejelis was braced for the shock of his father’s cauled face looking back at him, as it had the first time he donned the caul, but with a greater shock, he saw only his own. He felt Lapaxo’s hand on his elbow; his eyes must have lost focus for a moment. “When did you last eat? ” muttered the captain.
“Not that long ago.” Bannocks and cheese before speaking with Vladimer, though he was having difficulty remembering when he’d last eaten a full meal. “Later,” he said, as the door of lesser privilege suddenly opened on a phalanx of vigilants judiciar around a familiar fair woman in red, and a black-haired stranger whose eyes were masked by smoked lenses. “That’s the Darkborn,” Lapaxo said in a low voice. “Name’s Hearne.”
“Floria’s friend?” Fejelis said, finally remembering where he’d heard the name.
He tried not to stare, but the Darkborn’s very ordinariness made it difficult. That slim body and narrow, intense face could have belonged to one of the palace’s archivists or librarians, except for the dark glasses and the heavy, unsightly clothing. The Darkborn seemed to be perspiring a little, which Fejelis would have taken for nervousness, except that his posture suggested determination more than nerves. Those thick clothes must be hot—of course, the Darkborn were used to the chill of night. As they approached, he noticed Floria’s gliding step and ceaselessly moving eyes: Floria at her most dangerous. But when her eyes lighted on him, confirming the truth of rumor, they narrowed with glittering satisfaction, and she smiled.
At his side, Jovance was staring at the Darkborn, squinting slightly. He could see her hand working. Lapaxo had said the ensorcellment on Hearne was Shadowborn, and she was lineage. . . . “Magistra? ” he prompted in a murmur.
Recalled to herself, she put her mouth to his ear. “He’s got the archmage’s touch on him. One
mother
of an ensorcellment. That’s
exactly
what they did to Tam.” She sounded angry. He felt angry. But he said, low voiced, “It’s not his fault.”
“If he hadn’t come—” The party was nearly within earshot, and she bit back the rest of the statement. He waited, but she did not finish it, even silently.
Lapaxo muttered something at his other side, and Fejelis angled his head toward the vigilant. “Forgot to tell you,” the captain said, sounding annoyed at himself. “Temple claimed them as one of theirs. Say’s he’s mageborn.”
Says,
Fejelis thought.
Mages don’t need the Temple to say they’re mageborn.
He exchanged glances with Jovance; she shook her head slightly.
Now what are they up to?
He gestured the new arrivals to wait a moment, and beckoned the dresser with the brushed-down mourning jacket to him, slipped his arms into the sleeves, was briskly tweaked and tugged. Nodded his thanks, and, with a deep breath, turned. With the party’s entrance, the hall had begun to drain of servants, and now was almost empty of them, its hasty grooming and staging, like his, as complete as it was going to be.
He realized he didn’t know the Darkborn’s title, only that he was a physician and—no, he had met the man’s wife already; he was untitled. “Dr. Hearne, I am Fejelis Grey Rapids, styled prince.” He might as well test the man’s mettle. “. . . I understand you have already received a traditional court welcome.”
“Was
that
what it was? ” Hearne’s voice was a steady tenor.
That boded well. And because this was a Darkborn and Fejelis understood such courtesies were important, he said, “. . . I just recently—a few hours ago, in fact—spoke to your wife.”
He had not realized that a man already so pale could go that much whiter. Floria instantly closed the step between them, but the Darkborn, holding on to his composure, said, “No, I’m all—Excuse me, Prince Fejelis, but when I came here, it was under the impression my wife was dead. Floria told me otherwise, but to hear that you have spoken to her . . . What did she say? ”
“Strictly speaking, though I spoke to her, she did not get a chance to speak to me. But we were introduced, and Magistra Jovance”—he indicated her—“sensed both her presence and her magic. She was in good health.”
“Thank you,” the Darkborn breathed. Poise restored, he said a little hurriedly, “Prince Fejelis, the archduke will be delighted to know you are back. He has high expectations of your help in resolving the difficulties between our peoples.”
Not a professional diplomat,
Fejelis thought,
but in earnest.
And he had the delicacy of phrasing mastered already.
Difficulties, indeed.
He said, “I have equal hopes of his—”
Floria’s head turned like a cat’s. He hadn’t been aware of the noise from outside, but that was surely his mother’s voice. And then the door of greater privilege burst open before a roil of mages and vigilants. He caught sight of several he recognized as Prasav’s, plus men and women in the dun and ochre of the southern contingent, plus the bright glitter of chains of rank around several throats. He realized he was on the brink of entertaining an unrighteous brawl for precedence.
“Excuse me,” he said to the Darkborn envoy, and started to draw a breath, but stopped as he caught Lapaxo’s headshake. He was glad of that a moment later, and gladder still that Lapaxo had the courtesy to take a step away before he thundered, “Order in the presence of the prince! ”
He could have sworn he could hear the chime of shuddering glass in the silence that followed. The contested doorway cleared. Fejelis sprang onto the dais, which earned him a glower from Lapaxo as the vigilants scrambled to cover him. At his glance of appeal, Jovance tripped up the steps to stand where a contracted mage would be expected to stand.
There was a pause, then Perrin entered, flanked by mages and Temple vigilants, the archmage, Magistra Valetta, and the high masters—seven of them—following so closely on her heels they seemed to be herding her. The change in his sister, since their meeting in the ruins of the tower, was appalling. No twenty-year-old should be that haggard. A sideways glance at Jovance, no partisan of Perrin’s, showed her as disconcerted as he was. She wasn’t close enough to tell him whether this was magical overreach, the burden of her awareness of Shadowborn magic, or the burden of being a usurper princess. At Perrin’s first sight of him, her expression showed only relief, then guilt, and finally unease. He waited for her to draw closer, keeping a slight smile on his face all the time. “Hello, sister,” he said. “Had enough of this job yet? ”
Her breasts rose and fell beneath the thin, red vest and mourning jacket, reminding him how that first time they met after ten years, before he recognized her, she had demanded he mind his eyes. “Mother,
yes
,” she said, strongly. “You want it back? ”
The depth of his relief told him that he had not been sure that she would yield, or that the Temple would let her. She slipped through her honor guard and swiftly mounted the stairs. She turned toward their gathering brightnesses—Prasav and Helenja’s retinues were in the room, and the rear was filling fast—and paused, and then pulled the blue pins from her hair that held it in its caul-like style, shaking out the braids with a vigor that was near violence. “I renounce all claim on my brother’s title!” She turned to him, and Fejelis did not miss the tensing of the vigilants around him. With a silent apology to them, he held out his hand to her. And Jovance tensed in her turn, until she realized, as he had, that Perrin’s hands were gloved, her touch safe.
“Fejelis, I’m so sorry,” she said, so quickly her words slurred. “It happened so fast, and you were barely gone when I realized you’d been
right
, and the
Temple
was hiding from the truth
—
” He squeezed her hand, quieting her. Now to find out the price the Temple would extract for ceding his title back to him . . .
“Where is Orlanjis? ” shouted Sharel from Helenja’s side, and no doubt with Helenja’s leave. His mother, true to nature, looked as disgusted at Perrin’s ready surrender of her pretendership as she had at her assumption of it.
“He’s in the Borders, helping the Darkborn defend themselves,” Fejelis said. “And doing well at it, thanks to your teaching.” She started to shout something else, but he was ready for her. He might not have Lapaxo’s seasoning, but he had healthy lungs and a voice solidly past adolescence, and whether he liked it or not, the blood of generations of southern clan chiefs.
“This ends here! ”
No shivering glass, but a gratifying silence. “This internecine warfare
ends here
,” he said, less loudly but no less emphatically. “I pardon my sister for her offense against me. I left Orlanjis in the Borders with my full trust, knowing that he
would
fulfill that trust. I left him with instructions to support the Darkborn in every way he could—because having seen them fight, having spoken to them and heard their preparations, I’d much rather have them as friends than enemies. I
know and acknowledge
the outrage of the attack on the tower, but until we establish what part magical influence played in the decisions made by Duke Mycene, whom I am told died under magical attack by a Shadowborn”—Hearne, he saw, was surprised he knew that already—“and Kalamay, then by our own law, we cannot retaliate.”