Wolfblade (12 page)

“I recall wishing she would stop. I just wanted her to quiet down.” Wrayan shrugged. “I just remember thinking
if only she’d stop
. And then she did.”

“So why can’t you undo it by waving your arm and thinking
if only she’d start up again?”
Nash asked.

Kagan shook his head in despair. “Out!”

“Don’t you need my help?”

“Not unless you’ve become a magician in the last hour. Or can come up with a better suggestion than that.”

“Actually, he might be right,” Wrayan suggested. “Something like that might just undo the spell.”

“It might not, either,” Kagan warned. “And I’d rather you didn’t experiment with your uncontrollable powers on the High Prince’s only sister.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“Nothing, for the time being,” Kagan announced. “For all we know, this is simply temporary and it will wear off on its own in a few hours.”

“And if it isn’t temporary?” Wrayan asked nervously.

“Then we scour the libraries, Wrayan,” Kagan told him. “If what you’ve done is a result of using Harshini power, perhaps there’s something, somewhere, that explains how this works.”

“I’m truly sorry, Kagan. I never meant any harm.”

“I know.” The High Arrion sat down wearily on the bed and took Marla’s limp hand in his. There was no pulse at her wrist, but the flesh was warm and sprang back readily when pressed. She was definitely alive, but nobody had been confronted with genuine Harshini magic for more than a hundred years. Not unless you counted his own encounter with Brakandaran the Half-breed. But that was nearly nine years ago and there was little chance of Lord Brakandaran magically appearing to save the day this time.

Kagan was at a loss. Nobody remained alive—certainly nobody Kagan could contact—who could explain what had happened to Marla. He couldn’t begin to imagine what it would take to restore her.

“Is there anything I can do?” Wrayan asked.

“You could try praying, Wrayan,” Kagan suggested heavily. “You could pray.”

O
ne of the advantages of being an Innate sorcerer was the ability to go without sleep for extended periods of time. Alija wasn’t sure why this was so. She just knew that simply reaching for the source revitalised her and allowed her to carry on as if she’d had a full night’s sleep. It was frustrating, though. There was so much more she should have been able to do, but with the Harshini gone, there was nobody left to teach her.

Innates had always been rare, even when the Harshini were still around. Before Alija, the last recorded Innate discovered by the Collective was over sixty years ago. And now there were two of them, if you believed the rumours about Wrayan Lightfinger. That meant there were at least two people in the Sorcerers’ Collective who could actually wield real magic. The rest of them got by working spells (which were unsuccessful, often as not) and dabbling in politics, which was the reason most sorcerers gravitated towards the Collective.

Power was power, whatever the source.

Alija considered them all abominations. They were not what the Harshini wanted, not what the Harshini intended. Not the reason the Collective existed.

Back in the old days, before the Sisters of the Blade in Medalon turned on the Harshini and effectively eradicated them, the Collective had been a centre of learning. Magical learning. The magic wielded by the Sorcerers’ Collective had been real magic in those days, not the tricks and illusions they used now. The High Arrion had been chosen for his or her strength, not family connections. Time had robbed Alija of the opportunity to reach her full potential. She was born a couple of hundred years too late.

But that wasn’t going to stop her fulfilling what she saw as her mission in life. She would see the Collective restored to its former power. She intended to make certain future generations of sorcerers were chosen because of their ability, not their political ambition. And she was going to ensure Hythria remained a strong and independent nation, a situation unlikely to occur while that idiot Lernen Wolfblade was High Prince. She was a Patriot, after all.

Alija walked to the window and looked down over the bay. The palace was visible across the harbour, the last of the party lights being put out by the slaves as dawn approached. They could have stayed at the palace, but Alija preferred their townhouse. It was more private. She trusted the slaves here.

Dawn’s early light had not yet washed the darkness from the sky. From the gauzily curtained bed behind her, the soft rumbling snores of her husband indicated that Barnardo was still sound asleep, and likely to be so for several hours yet. He was always a late sleeper. And a heavy one. Alija, on the other hand, enjoyed the mornings. Perhaps
because
Barnardo was a late sleeper and she knew, for that time, she was guaranteed a few hours’ peace each day.

Looking to the east and the softly brightening sky, Alija thought of her boys, back in Dregian Province. She didn’t like bringing them to Greenharbour. There was always the risk of assassination. Always the risk of something. Like most noble houses, Alija followed the practice of surrounding her sons with a number of companions of a similar age and appearance, in the belief that should an assassin manage to get close to her children, he could not be certain which was actually the heir and which were the companions, but she didn’t put much faith in that solution. Alija had always thought, were she the assassin, the simple solution to such a dilemma was simply to put all the children in the nursery to death, but apparently the Assassins’ Guild had some unlikely ethic about killing innocent bystanders. They would take out the contracted target and not a soul besides, erring on the side of caution if there was any doubt.

She smiled grimly. That’s what she’d ordered the soldiers who assassinated Ronan Dell to do. There had been no innocent bystanders in
that
household. And it was the reason she had risked using her own troops rather than hiring the Assassins’ Guild. Alija wasn’t nearly as squeamish as they were. It had all gone just as she planned, too, except the dwarf was missing. She wasn’t sure if she should worry about that or not. Ronan’s deformed little pet might simply have been out of the house during the attack, in which case, Alija couldn’t have cared less about his fate. But if he’d witnessed the attack . . . if he could identify the killers . . .

Alija froze as the faintest prickle of magic washed over her. It sent an unfamiliar chill down her spine. It was too faint to guess the source, or even the direction it came from.

Was it Wrayan Lightfinger?
He was the only other person that Alija knew of who should be able to touch the source like that. Or was there another, yet-to-be-discovered
Innate out there somewhere on the streets of Greenharbour? It wasn’t such an unlikely scenario. Wrayan had been found in the marketplace in Krakandar using his untrained gift for telepathy to extort money out of unsuspecting gamblers.

Alija’s own talent had also been discovered by accident when she’d unwittingly informed her mother about her father’s new lady friend and the games she’d heard them playing down in the boathouse by the lake. As the lake house belonging to Alija’s family was located some fifty miles from the family seat in Izcomdar, her revelation had been disbelieved at first. She was only five years old, after all. Everyone put her stories down to a child’s wild imagination. A brief smile flickered over Alija’s face as she recalled the moment her mother had finally taken her seriously. They’d been down by the kennels, inspecting a new litter of hounds, when a ruckus distracted them. Everyone had looked up to discover two of the other hounds copulating in the next cage. Fascinated by the odd sight, and paying no attention to the Kennel Master who was explaining the benefits of crossing those two particular bloodlines to her mother, Alija had laughed delightedly and announced, “Look! They’re playing the same game as Daddy and his lady friend!”

Although she could see the funny side of it now she was a grown woman, Alija still remembered the horrified silence that had descended on the kennels. And the incessant questions her comment provoked after everyone had gotten over their initial shock. Finally, when she couldn’t get a satisfactory answer from her daughter, Alija’s mother had made a surprise visit to the lake house, where (Alija learned later) she had discovered her husband in the arms of Lady Lyana, wife of the Baron of Shalendor.

Alija was much too young to understand the scandal at the time. It was considered perfectly all right for a man or a woman to keep any number of
court’esa
for amusement. They were possessions, after all, not real people. One kept them for pleasure, the same way one kept works of art hanging on the walls or bards to perform at dinner parties. But it was totally unacceptable to entertain oneself with another member of one’s class, particularly when that person was married to the ruling lord of a neighbouring borough.

Being the wronged party, Alija’s mother had been able to demand all sorts of concessions from her husband and his family for the humiliation she suffered, and Alija saw her father only rarely after it happened. Fortunately, she was much older before she made the connection between her visions and the visit to the lake house that had resulted in so much crying and screaming and recrimination.

Once the fuss had died down, however, her mother’s attention turned to her daughter and
how
she had seen what was going on in the boathouse, rather than
what
she had seen. There was a trip to Greenharbour and a lot of meetings she didn’t understand between her mother and the High Arrion, and then she was informed that she was to be taken into the Sorcerers’ Collective
and apprenticed to be a sorcerer. She was an Innate, they told her. The first one they’d found in decades. She was special. She was destined for great things. One day, she might even be famous.

As the youngest of five children and the only girl, Alija had always felt rather more put upon than special. She embraced the notion of her destiny with enthusiasm, waved goodbye to her mother and her brothers and turned her back on the outside world, determined to fulfil her unknown destiny in the Sorcerers’ Collective the best way she could.

By the time she reached her teens, Alija was certain she had discovered what that destiny was. Hythria was slowly being destroyed by corruption. It had infiltrated the ranks of the Collective and reached right up to the High Prince’s throne. The Sorcerers’ Collective was a mockery of what it had once been. Hardly any of the sorcerers had the faintest idea about magic. Most didn’t even pretend to learn. They were interested in political power and were simply using the Collective as a way to secure it.

Alija was determined to stop it any way she could and her first step was to rid Hythria of the Wolfblade family, whom she considered the root of the problem. Garel Wolfblade had been a fool and a spendthrift. His son, Lernen, made the former High Prince look like a statesman. They had to go and Alija was resolved to make it happen. Then, when she took her rightful place as High Arrion—there was nobody else who could even come close to her power—she could sort out the Sorcerers’ Collective as well.

She had continued to believe it was her destiny until Tesha Zorell marched into the Sorcerers’ Collective ten years ago clutching the collar of a ragged, fair-haired boy of about thirteen, claiming he was an Innate, too.

Tesha had found Wrayan Lightfinger in Krakandar, she claimed, while visiting the city to check on the administration of the province for which the Sorcerers’ Collective was responsible until its young heir came of age. Alija’s first reaction to Wrayan had been unreasonable jealousy.
She
was the special one and it simply wasn’t fair that some pickpocket’s bastard from the slums of Krakandar could be blessed with the same ability. But over the years, her anger had changed to cautious hope. Wrayan’s ability had never been in question, but he was still an apprentice ten years later, indicating that he was having a great deal of difficulty mastering his magical ability. Alija had been studying the texts left behind by the Harshini since she was seven years old. They’d had to teach Wrayan how to read at thirteen before he could even begin to learn anything. He had power to burn and no way of mastering it, which meant perhaps his arrival was part of her destiny, too. She had certainly redoubled her efforts to learn after they brought Wrayan to Greenharbour, so in a way, she had him to thank for her high level of skill.

And she could use his power, Alija had discovered.

There were a number of Harshini techniques for amplifying your power temporarily. Alija had found the text just before she’d left Laran for
Barnardo. She hadn’t finished working the method out yet, but she would one day, and then she would be able to achieve pretty much anything she wanted just by willing it to happen. The catch—there was
always
a catch—was that even simple mind-reading took intense concentration and only seemed to work if she was in physical contact with her subject. How much easier life would be if she could simply seek out the mind she wanted from across the room and sift through its contents without her victim being any the wiser. Unfortunately, unless Alija could manage to brush against her target, or find some innocent reason to touch them, she had little hope of learning anything useful.

Barnardo mumbled something in his sleep and turned over with a grunt, but he didn’t wake. The sky was considerably lighter than before, but there had been no further feeling of magic.