by Melanie Rawn
—Sarra’s First Daughter, Ambrai-proud and Feiranpowerful, with the clear-eyed pragmatic honor of a Rosvenir—
“Cailet, it wasn’t your fault. If that’s what you’re thinking behind that black stare, then put it out of your head right now. This would have happened no matter what.”
—pride rebelling, power despising, honor loathing what Cailet had allowed the Mage Guardians to become. A First Daughter who would have challenged her and possibly—probably—won, and become Captal, and set the Guardians straight again.
A First Daughter who would never be born. Had Cailet been responsible for killing Sarra’s daughter before she could become a threat? Before she could even be born?
She’d tried once—unwittingly, unknowingly—to steal an unborn child’s magic. This time, had she killed? Her own sister’s daughter—
“Have you heard a word I’ve said?”
She nodded in blind response to Lusira’s voice.
“Then listen to this as well. When Collan brought Sarra to us here, Elo and I both sensed something about the baby as we were trying to help her. Just before it died, we felt—Cailet, there was something strange about the magic. Neither of us know what it was, exactly, but we don’t think it was quite normal.”
“N–normal?”
Flatly, Elomar said, “The sensations match some clinical descriptions of Wild Magic.”
And all at once another vision came to her—a postulation, rather, conjured up by those within her who were wiser than she. A lovely golden-haired infant, precocious and perfect in every way—except for the peculiar gleam in her watchful black eyes. A gleam familiar to Cailet from somewhere . . . someone. . . .
“Anniyas,” she whispered. “Her magic. Inside the baby. A taint left behind, like a disease to infect anyone not strong enough to fight it off—”
“Cailet!” Lusira took one of her hands. “That can’t be so. There’s no evidence anywhere of such a thing ever happening—”
“Not in Mage records, maybe. But what of the Malerrisi? And don’t you think that as First Lord, Anniyas was powerful enough and innovative enough to devise this on her own?”
“Impossible,” Elomar stated, but something haunted his eyes all the same.
“Maybe so, but there was enough of Anniyas left behind in those Wards to taint any Mageborn who couldn’t defend herself. I don’t know what happened, and I don’t care. It did happen, and—” Her voice caught suddenly.—and Sarra’s First Daughter died because of it.
Cailet sat up and swung her legs over the side of the cot. “Lusira, you and Elomar are Mages, and Mages obey the Captal. This is my order: you’re going to watch over her until she births her twins, and—”
“Twins?” The Healer Mage took a step back.
“Twins,” Cailet said again, firmly. “A girl and a boy. And when they’re born, I’m going to set Wards around them so strong that no one can get past them except me. And Wards around Roseguard, too, and—damn you, Elomar, no!” she blurted as a spell washed over her, weakening her limbs and fogging her thoughts. “You son of a Fifth—”
“Fourth, actually,” he said. “Shut up, Captal, and go to sleep.”
5
SHE had to go see Sarra. She knew that. Anybody with the courage to face down Malerrisi ought to be able to go visit her own sister.
She took the long way through the Council’s private gardens, telling herself she’d pick some flowers for Sarra’s bedside. A stupid offering: “I’m sorry I caused the death of your child, here’s some flowers to make you feel better.” Elomar had told her that so many bouquets had been sent that the room looked like a hothouse and smelled like a whorehouse. Not his words; Sarra’s, before she ordered the flowers sent to the maternity quarters of St. Feleris’s Hospital.
Cailet wandered the winter-bare grounds, stubbornly determined to find something pretty to give her sister. If it took her long enough, perhaps Sarra would be napping after lunch and Cailet would have to come back later.
Sheltered beneath an evergreen bush she found a few white flowers on long, slender stems. She had the usual Waster’s knowledge of botany—which plants stored fresh water, which didn’t—so these flowers were unknown to her. They were pretty, though, so she crouched down with hands extended to pinch off a few stems.
Her fingers were an inch from the flowers when she heard someone say her sister’s name. She froze. The voice was a woman’s, low and casual, not expecting to be overheard here in the Council’s private sylvan sanctuary.
“That Lady Sarra lost her baby is a great pity. Motherhood might have kept her busy and away from Ryka Court for a while.”
“I suppose it proves why there are so few Liwellans,” a second woman said with obnoxious Blood smugness. “Too many Thirds and Fourths taken to husband will do that to a family. And who knows who this Rosvenir man is, anyway? But the person who worries me most is the new Captal. It’s a shame she suffered no damage.”
Concealed behind the shrubbery with thin winter sunlight dappling her back, hardly daring to breathe, Cailet tried to identify the voices. Nothing came to her, not from her own memory or anyone else’s. She wished fervently that she had Collan’s ear for sounds.
“One would’ve thought Anniyas’s magic more powerful, even after the passage of time.”
“What if it was still potent, and the Captal’s powers are simply greater? A prospect few view with delight.”
“Truly told. The girl is a liability, you know.”
There was a brief pause, and during it Cailet tried to make herself as small as possible beneath the overhanging shrubbery.
“Shall we sit down?” said the lighter voice, with a trace of an accent Cailet couldn’t quite place. “I love how the gardens smell after a rain. Not those chairs, Granlia, they’re still wet. The sun has dried these. How wonderful to be outside again! I can’t recall a more dismal winter.”
Cailet connected the melodious given name with the powerful Family Name, and with a very ordinary face. Granlia Feleson, elected last year for a third time to the Assembly for Gierkenshir, was a close cousin of the Jereth Feleson who had not been reelected to the Council. A back-bencher whose voice Cailet couldn’t recall ever hearing in debate, her politics and personality were a cipher. To say such things so freely, she must be in company with someone completely trusted.
“The weather has matched the political climate,” said Granlia Feleson. “These adherents of the Rising are bad enough. But Cailet Rille worries me. She’s dangerously gifted. It was one thing to have sluggish old Lusath Adennos as Captal. This girl, though. . . . Magic is an unknown quantity in her very young hands. We have no idea what to expect from her. It would have been much better if she’d died.”
“Tragically martyred,” agreed the second woman, whose voice Cailet still did not recognize. “Useful as a rallying point, reassuring to a populace still wary of magic.”
“Her death by magic would prove that not even a Captal is all-powerful.”
“Exactly what I’ve been thinking. We still need magic—but we also need to control it. If she’d died using it in the people’s defense, what spells and Wards the government now deems useful would be accepted—suspect in some ways, perhaps, but accepted.”
Cailet hunkered down, fists clenched on her knees. Branches dripped onto her shoulders and back, soaking her light shirt until she shivered. Please, she thought, don’t let them get chilled and leave before I hear it all. And don’t let anyone else walk by and see me!
“Trying to control Mage Guardians is what started everything twenty years ago.” Granlia Feleson gave an impatient sigh. “We might have a chance while she’s still young, but once she trains up more Mages and sends them out the way it used to be—”
“Do you think she could? It’s the oddest thing, but I believe I actually feel sorry for her. What good is her life now? The Mage Academy is gone. And what’s left? A hundred Mages from the ol
d days, some badly trained Prentices, and whatever ragged group of Mageborns she scrapes together. It’s not as it was before. Ambrai back then positively hummed with magic.”
“Establishing a new school for Mage Guardians is the last thing she should be allowed to do,” said Granlia Feleson in a vigorous tone. “Magic is dangerous. If she spreads Guardians across Lenfell the way it used to be, with no Lords of Malerrisi to counter their power—”
“They’d have no one to oppose them but the government!” the other woman interrupted. “And Mageborns don’t enter government, so we’d have none on our side to check them if it became necessary. Sweet Saints, Granlia, I never imagined!”
She was lying. Cailet heard it in her voice. This was exactly where the conversation had been headed, and this woman had guided it there every step of the way.
Granlia Feleson said, “The renewed ban on governmental service is at the Captal’s order, contrary to Lady Sarra’s hopes. I’m told they had quite a spat about it.”
“The Captal would do better to cultivate her only real ally on the Council. She must be stupid as well as naive. I mean, what sort of education can she have had in The Waste? Even if she does set up a school, half the Mageborns on Lenfell would lose respect for her the instant she opened her mouth and revealed her ignorance.”
“And those who are Bloods wouldn’t bother with her at all,” Granlia Feleson agreed with all the lofty disdain Cailet loathed in old-line Bloods. “She must be a fool even to think of it.”
“Yes, it would have been much better for all of us if she’d died. Even for her, poor thing. She’d have everlasting acclaim without having to work for it at all.”
They were quiet for a few moments. Then the second woman said, “We need a dead martyr more than a living Captal. Granlia . . . could something be done to provide us with one?”
“It would have to be very subtle, very clever.”
“Or very public and very obvious. A malcontent’s vicious attack—”
“An assassination?” Granlia sounded intrigued.
“With the killer instantly apprehended, tried, and executed for the crime, and all Lenfell in mourning at the young Captal’s tragic death.”
“Whom could we find to do it?”
“Shake Ryka Court a little, and see what rattles.”
“Do you know, I’ve always admired your ability to find the heart of the matter. An inheritance from your dear mother?”
“You forget, I knew Glenin Feiran rather well. Saints, it’s getting cold even in the sunshine. Shall we go in?”
And they departed the Council’s private garden, oblivious to the huddled presence of the girl they were planning to kill.
Cailet heard their footsteps crunch the gravel path back to the gates. When all was silent but for the whisper of a breeze, she let the shivering rule her. Her leg muscles cramped; she fell onto one hip in the dirt; her hands tore at the bush and the flowers in a vain attempt to keep her balance. Several stems ripped apart, oozing milky pinkish fluid onto her shaking fingers. But it was several minutes before she felt the acid sting on her skin, and when she did it was a good excuse for the tears in her eyes.
6
“I gotta get outta here,” Cailet repeated, reverting to the accents of her childhood, the erudite vocabulary of three Mage Guardians obliterated by raw panic. She was eighteen years old, and somebody wanted to kill her.
Elomar finished smearing salve onto her hands. “Milkfire flowers were Anniyas’s favorite,” he said, relevant to nothing that she could tell.
“I can’t be biding here.” She could barely sit still long enough for him to finish his work. “You gotta find me a ship, Elo—they’re gonna kill me!”
“I’m surprised no one uprooted those plantings before now,” he went on, wrapping Cailet’s fingers in gauze.
“Why won’t you listen to me?” she cried, as furious now as she was frightened. “I’m no use to nobody, but I don’t wanna die!”
“Milkfire won’t kill you.”
“Granlia Feleson will!” She slapped him away from her, wishing it was the Feleson woman she struck at.
Unperturbed, Elomar stepped back from her bed, brushing aside the silk hangings. “I’ll change the dressing tomorrow. The swelling will be gone by then.”
“I have to leave! Now! Damn it, haven’t you heard anything I said?”
Elomar arched a brow. “I’ve heard a great deal of disgraceful grammar in a Waster accent thick enough to spread on toast. What I haven’t heard are the words of a rational woman, let alone a Mage Captal.”
Cailet gazed down at her white-swathed hands. She was beginning to hate that color. White meant Malerris to her. “’S all I am to anybody,” she muttered. “Mage Captal. You want me alive, they want me dead—am I s’posed to be grateful for the attention? If I wasn’t Captal, nobody’d give a sandrat’s ass about me!”
“Stop whining,” Elomar ordered. “And lower that bastion of Wards, it’s giving me a headache.”
“Get out, then!”
“Gladly. I’m late for my nightly battle with Sarra over minor details like eating, sleeping, and taking her medicine. You Ambrais. Impossible women. Thank St. Miramili I married a Garvedian.”
“You got one minute to get out,” she snarled. “Walk quick.”
He glared down at her for a moment, his gaunt, narrow, unhandsome face stiff with disgust. She did not have the satisfaction of seeing him hurry; his legs were so long that only a few of his usual strides carried him out of her rooms.
Cailet punched a pillow with her fist. Its yielding softness only increased her frustration. She got up from the bed and tried to pack her few items of clothing, but the bandages made her hands too awkward. At last she sat in a chair by the window and stared out at the rainy night, and after a time perversely lowered all the additional Wards she’d cast this afternoon. If they wanted to kill her, they were welcome. She didn’t care anymore.
She was a good half hour into a fine sulk, ghoulishly considering the methods she herself might use to murder a Mage Captal, when someone entered her rooms.
“Cailet? Whatever are you doing in here in the dark?”
Splendid. Somebody else she was just longing to see: Lusira Garvedian, close cousin of the last truly great Captal of Mage Guardians. All Cailet lacked in life was another lecture.
“I brought dinner,” said Lusira, casually lighting a few lamps with her magic as she entered the bedchamber. “There’s enough for two, if you don’t mind company. I’m starving.”
Cailet didn’t look around from the rainy window. “That’s normal. You’re pregnant.”
Crockery rattled.
Cailet glanced over her shoulder. Lusira’s exquisite dark eyes were rounded with shock and her hands shook so much she was in danger of dropping the tray she carried.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”
Lusira shook her head.
“Past thirty’s old for a first baby,” Cailet went on tactlessly. “But you’re healthy, and your husband’s a physician.” She paused. “You really didn’t know?”
“I’d hoped—there was a chance—but—” She steadied herself. “Cailet, are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. I’m the Mage Captal.”
Stunned as she was, still Lusira reacted to the bitterness in Cailet’s voice. “Elo said you were feeling sorry for yourself. I think he was wrong. I think you’re angry—and frightened.”
“You’re damned right I’m frightened!” She made an effort; it had been unspeakably thoughtless of her to break the news so bluntly. “But don’t you be. You’ll have a fine, healthy baby, I’m sure of it.” She wasn’t, but forgave herself the necessary lie. Then she told another one to pay back the earlier rudeness. “If you can stand being around me, I’d be glad of some company.”
Lusira set the tray down on a low table between chairs. She arranged plates, poure
d wine, doled out knives and spoons and forks, served lamb and mint sauce—all with the simple, silent grace of a truly great lady. Not even Sarra was so instinctively elegant; for one thing, Sarra rarely shut up.
When dinner was laid out, Lusira finally spoke again. “You never asked to be Captal.”
Cailet blinked, a forkful of glazed carrots halfway to her mouth.
“No obligation ensues,” she went on—an odd thing for a Garvedian to say. Her cousin Leninor had died defending those obligations. “It was forced onto you and no Mage living or dead would blame you if you chose someone else to carry the burden.”
Not be Captal anymore?
“Elomar helped Gorsha in the Making. He can help in an unMaking, if you so desire.”
Cailet very carefully set down her fork, bandaged fingers not just clumsy but trembling. Frightened? Terrified. Being Captal was the only thing she had—
“Cailet, you’re so young. I know you hear that in a derogatory way from others. I mean it with compassion.” Lusira picked up her wineglass, looked at it in surprise, then set it down. She was pregnant; she shouldn’t be drinking anything stronger than cider. “I was just a bit older than you when Ambrai was destroyed. I had so many plans for my life—and suddenly all were impossible. My mother saw trouble coming years before it actually arrived. Hers was a very rare gift, and people used to say she ought to’ve been named after Elinar Longsight instead of Falinsen Crystal-Hand. She decided when I was still a child to pretend I wasn’t Mageborn. It saved my life—the way Gorsha’s Warding saved yours. I lived at the Academy with her and learned magic in secret. But no one knew I was Mageborn except my immediate family—and Gorsha, of course.”
Of course. Gorsha knew everything about everybody.
“I understand what it is to be trapped in a life you didn’t choose. You have a chance to escape it, if you wish. Believe me when I say that no one would think less of you for it. No one who matters, I mean.” Lusira reached across the table to touch Cailet’s white-wrapped hand. “Consider it, my dear. You have your whole life ahead of you. If you want to live it without the weight of the Bequest on your shoulders, then do so.”
