The Queen of Mages (54 page)

Dardan could not help but embrace his own
valo
, a man he hadn’t seen in more than a season. Liam
seemed rougher, gaunter, less full of the confidence and vigor that
had always marked him. “Where on earth have you been, man?”

Liam stepped back, and Dardan recognized
that old grin. “Here and there. You seem not to have done too badly
yourself.” He glanced about Count Razh’s entry hall.

Dardan introduced the returned
valai
to Count Razh, who loudly thanked the Caretaker for reuniting them
with their masters, and ordered his house major to find them rooms
at once.

“Thank you, of course,” Dardan said to Razh,
“but I fear we’ve trod upon your hospitality too long already.”

“Nonsense,” Razh said. He promised to feast
them all again that evening, and left the Tarians to catch up with
their
valai
.

They all stayed awake talking long into the
night. Dardan and Amira were amazed at Liam’s rescue of Katin from
Elibarran; Amira said that she had always thought of Princess Taya
as a sweet girl, but loudly recanted that opinion once Katin told
of how vile the princess truly was. Dardan was glad to hear that
Ilya and Calys knew he was alive, and expressed his astonishment
that the usually selfish Baron Parvis Stanton had been so willing
to help them. Katin had to work very hard to keep her features
smooth when the baron’s name came up.

The tale of Carson’s Watch shocked and
saddened Amira, as Katin had known it would. Her lady grew
increasingly alarmed as Liam told the story of how he had tricked
and betrayed the mage girl who had bent the town to her cruel will.
Liam told the nobles no more than he had told Katin, but she knew
more about it than he thought she did.

“Miss Broxton will not be the only one,”
Liam said at the end of it. “I understand that the ‘mages’ you’ve
found are altogether less bloodthirsty, but…” He stared off into
space for a moment. “You found five mages in a single dukedom. It
stands to reason there’s an equal number you missed. Maybe more. So
ten to twenty mages per dukedom, and twenty dukedoms in the realm.
That puts somewhere between two and four hundred mages across the
whole realm, at a guess. And more developing all the time, if this
power reveals itself at a certain age. No doubt some of them will
turn out to be like Adeline Broxton.”

“Four hundred mages…” Dardan murmured.

“There may be rogue mages for a while, but
that will not last. They will all have to choose one side or
another,” Amira said. She stood up. “It is late. Not that we did
not miss you both, but you have been travelling for days while we
rested here in Elland. At least for tonight, you both deserve
comfortable beds.” She rang for a maid, who led the
valai
to
the servants’ quarters and showed them to separate rooms.

Liam and Katin stood before her door. He had
been a constant presence for months, and they had lain together
more than once since Carson’s Watch. Did that make her his woman?
His whore? Why had he risked so much to come for her, rescue her,
stay with her all this way? She’d feared he would leave at any
moment, so she’d given him the only thing she could trade.

She remembered when he’d have had a grin on
his face, but now his lips were pursed in a thin line. She could
not tell what he was thinking. “Well,” she said, tentative.

“I suspect we will be sleeping apart for a
while,” he said quietly. It was quite late; no one else was about.
He reached for her hand, and she let him take it. “We could…
arrange things so that we could stay together. Always.”

Giving him her body had been surprisingly
easy, but to make an honest woman of her? She could not begin to
grasp what that would mean. Katin quelled the rising panic in her
throat and jerked her hand away. “No. Not… not… I’m sorry.” She
could not suppress the tears, and she turned and fled into the
little cell, shutting the door and feeling a great fool.

———

It was not until the next day that she found
herself alone with Amira. After luncheon they retreated to the
Tarians’ bedchamber, ostensibly so that Amira could rest, but the
instant the door was closed Amira kicked off her shoes and climbed
onto the bed. “Tell me everything,” she said.

When they were girls, Katin and Amira had
spent many hours sitting on Katin’s bed and gossiping late into the
night. Clearly Amira expected that now. But Katin felt oddly
reluctant. She’d waited months to confide in someone, for there
were many things she could never say to Liam. Yet somehow she was
not champing at the bit to spill it all to Amira. Nonetheless she
climbed onto the bed and spent the next hour telling Amira
everything she’d omitted when Liam and Dardan were present the
night before.

When she came to Baron Parvis, tears welled
in her eyes and her story ground to a halt. The shame of what
Parvis had made her do—but was trading her body to him really any
different than trading it to Liam? Parvis had granted them a safe
escape from Jack Penrose; Liam had rescued her and saved her life
more than once.
No. Parvis is a monster. Liam is a hero.
The
thoughts rang false.

Amira sensed that something loomed in the
darkness here. She took Katin’s hand and said nothing. Eventually
the dam broke. “Parvis… Parvis blackmailed me. His help came at a
price. A bed price.”

Amira gasped. “What a scoundrel! Oh, you
poor girl. It had struck me as odd that he’d been so willing to
help. I should have known.” She paused. “Liam doesn’t know, does
he?”

Katin shook her head, eyes squeezed shut. “I
wish no one did,” she whispered. But it had brought her some small
catharsis. Amira embraced her and Katin wept for several
minutes.

The rest was easier. They’d told Amira and
Dardan about being thrown out of the caravan on account of Janice
Briggs’s lies about Liam, but now Katin told her mistress how much
it had pained her to hear such things about him. She told how Liam
had begun to evince a deeply held rage that she had never seen
before. “After he… killed Adeline Broxton, I spoke with some other
women of the town. They’d heard rumors from those who had seen her
body. They said she’d been hacked near to pieces. Mutilated.”

“Liam did that?” Amira asked,
astonished.

Katin shrugged. “I don’t know who else would
have. I heard from him only that he’d killed her, and even that
much he had trouble saying to me.” She felt hollow within. “I could
not deny him any longer. I gave him my body. I’d begun to fear
him.”

“Did he hurt you? If he did, by the Aspect
of Wrath, I’ll—”

“No!” Katin said, grabbing Amira’s wrist.
“He’s never laid a hand on me. Months on the road, and he never
tried to force himself on me, not even when we were pretend-married
and he’d have had a perfect excuse.”

“Katin.” Amira put her hand under Katin’s
chin and made her look up. “Whatever else you feel, it is plain as
day that you are in love with him. And I would wager everything
that he loves you just as strongly.”

Katin opened and closed her mouth several
times. “I cannot… How can you be sure?”

“Love is never certain, I don’t think,”
Amira said. She took a moment herself, looking toward the window.
But she smiled when she looked back. “I love Dardan. It has taken
me a while. At Foxhill Keep, I certainly did not. Even when we were
married in Tyndam Town, I did not, though I cannot deny that I felt
a certain comfort at his presence, especially after weeks on the
road together. In Stony Vale…” She grimaced as she talked about
what had happened there; breaking her promise to Dardan, their
other difficulties. “But by the time we arrived in Elland, I knew I
had come to love him. Whatever his faults.” There was something
more to that last, Katin was sure, but Amira did not elaborate. She
took Katin’s hand again. “You love Liam. Whatever else may have
passed between you—whatever else may be troubling him, or you, it
would benefit you both to marry. I do not think I would love Dardan
as I do now if we had not first married.”

Katin stared. “I… I can’t…”

“Why? You love him. You’ve lain with him,
though the Aspect of Ardor knows how little that can mean. I lay
with Dardan the night before we wed. I couldn’t help myself,” she
giggled. “Too much to drink. We were betrothed already, so what did
it matter? This, all this,” she waved her hand around, somehow
encompassing everything since the summer ball, “has brought with it
a great deal of insecurity and impermanence. We must hold on to
whatever little islands of stability we can.”

Something about this brought tears up again,
and once more Amira held Katin as she wept and sobbed for a while.
Katin eventually dried her eyes and agreed that it might be for the
best if she and Liam did marry, and told Amira that Liam had in
fact suggested that the previous night. Amira considered it a done
deal; it was merely up to Katin to tell Liam. Her stomach was in
knots at the prospect, though the Caretaker alone knew when she’d
have the right opportunity.

———

That opportunity proved harder to find than
Katin expected. At dinner that evening, Count Razh insisted that
the Tarians winter at Tal Vieran, as his castle was named. He also
proposed, after the main courses were done and a dessert of fig
pudding had been brought, that they open a school for mages on the
grounds of the castle.

Katin’s jaw dropped. A school? To train
mages? To bring more of them together? Razh knew what had happened
in Carson’s Watch. James and Lisa Cordway and all the other
goodfolk who had lived through Adeline’s wrath would be aghast at
the idea of bringing mages together. And what if Edon found out
about it? But it was not her place to object, here in front of so
many nobles. Count Razh’s elder sisters Arta and Klea were there,
and all the
valai
, and footmen and maids besides. Everyone
at the high table seemed to approve of the idea of a school, Amira
most of all.

Katin was flabbergasted when Count Razh
explained that it was the events in Carson’s Watch that had given
him the idea. Letting mages run around wreaking havoc was clearly
contrary to the interests of the realm; an organized school would
put mages to proper use and assuage the fears of folk like the
Cordways. Katin was not so sure. Razh had not seen how frightened
they’d been.

The count proposed that the leading men of
Elland—the heads of the local chapters of the trade guilds; the
city’s First Steward and his staff, who oversaw the temples of
Elland; the rich barons and merchants who wielded economic power—be
brought to the castle and told about the plans for the school. If
done right, those men could serve as heralds, carrying word to the
common people that mages were nothing to fear, and that Count Razh
and the other mages would use their power as benevolently as
possible.

In Razh’s office that evening, Dardan and
Razh and Amira decided that the various men should be invited three
at a time. Larger groups would be harder to manage. They spent
hours deciding who should be invited first; not all of the guild
leaders and merchants and barons got along, and it would not do for
the mages’ message to be lost among petty disagreements between,
say, Jarvis Poul, who led the goldsmiths’ guild, and Baron Akamar,
who owned gold mines in the Stormrest Hills. The two men did not
get along, not one bit, and so Razh made certain they would be
invited on different days.

Breakfast, luncheon, and dinner each day
were set aside for these introductions, to begin as soon as
possible. Each evening after the barons and guildsmen and merchants
left, the three nobles retreated to Razh’s office again to go over
the next day’s plans. Katin was put to work helping the house major
arrange the details. None of them got very much sleep.

For the most part, the men who came were
intrigued, and did not try to raise a ruckus. Amira was glad to
demonstrate her power for each of them; she lit candles and made
pots of water boil. Razh stressed that all the mages—he was vague
on exactly how many of them were in residence at Tal Vieran—were
ordinary youths who had been gifted with this power, and that the
power should be harnessed to benefit Garova. Between his
reassurances and Amira’s easy charm, very few of the men expressed
any hostility at the idea of their count gathering mages together
in a school.

A few did, and there was nothing to be done
about that; in his office, Razh assured Amira and Dardan that all
the men who had reacted negatively would not find many who agreed
with them. Katin was not so certain that they were as safe as Razh
seemed to think, but she could not gainsay the count.

Razh was no fool, though. He did not leave
things to chance. He dispatched a number of men into the city to
take its pulse; and he was pleased when they reported back that the
common folk seemed wary but accepting of the idea of the mage
school. Whatever the guildsmen and merchants and barons were saying
was mostly good. So far, his plan seemed to be working.

Now Amira began shaping the school in
earnest. Part of the castle’s inner yard was sectioned off as a
training area. Amira and Garen led the other mages in some sort of
training exercises each morning—exercises that Katin couldn’t see
or understand—and spent the evenings working out a rudimentary
curriculum. It was put into practice at once, for on the very first
day, three new mages showed up at the gates of Tal Vieran, two men
and a woman, commoners who lived in Elland itself. They’d heard
about the impending school and showed up to see if it was real. All
three were astonished to find several others like them already
gathered together.

Razh also saw to it that messengers carried
word of the school to every town, village, and sheepfold within
five leagues of the city. More extensive recruitment would have to
wait until the snows thinned, but even with the roads nearly
impassable, inside of a week the school had gained five more
pupils, young men and women with heavy furs and haunted looks. Some
of them thought it was a trick or a trap, until they were met by
Amira. She showed them her silver light and demonstrated that she
too had this strange power that had, in many cases, earned the
newcomers fear and revulsion from those who had formerly loved
them.

The Warden that had been accompanying Amira
since Stony Vale, this Mason Iris, was a constant reminder of that
fear and revulsion. At Amira’s insistence he had been given a room
in the castle, and each morning he too came to the yard to watch
the mages train. It became a daily ritual for him to demand that
Amira return with him to Callaston, and for Amira to refuse. Iris
would repeat to her that he disapproved of her gathering and
training more mages. She in turn would remind him that she had both
the right and the responsibility to impose some order on the
development of mages in Garova, lest things get out of hand as they
had in Carson’s Watch. She would also remind him of the promise
he’d made not to harm her or her friends, which made him clench his
jaw and stomp away.