The Mageborn Traitor--Exiles, Volume 2

by Melanie Rawn

  Danger. Danger from magic.

  She grabbed her shoes and stockings and ran up the empty beach. The little protective Globe had never done this before—she usually forgot it was anything other than a unique piece of jewelry—and she had no intention of staying around to find out what its insistent warming chill meant. She needed Mages around her for protection.

  As she hurried back up the darkening streets to the library-apothecary-pottery shop, she held the sphere in her fist. It slowly warmed to its usual temperature, just a little warmer than her body. By the time she got inside the shop, it was as if the Ward had never called to her.

  She glanced around at the placid domestic scene and felt foolish. The three girls were eating their dinner by the hearth while their father cooked for the guests, the Scholar was recording the day’s lendings and returns in her ledger, the Healer ground mysterious things into a mortar, and Taguare sat with Dantia Sonne discussing her daughters’ school. So normal, so serene. None of them had felt a thing. Perhaps she hadn’t, either.

  But as she slipped the Globe back into her shirt, she remembered Cailet’s talk of shadows, and how her sister had tried to get her to stay and learn how to use her magic. If she had, she would know how to protect herself without running to the nearest Mage Guardians.

  As she lay restless in bed that night, the round bit of crystal seemed to poke into her whichever way she turned. She should have given it to Taigan long ago—it might have given some warning of Glenin’s presence at the theater that night. Cailet had never provided either of the twins with one of these—she’d trusted to her Wards, and in the end she’d been right. But Sarra had never let her sister set Wards over her. Whatever Gorynel Desse had done to her in the past was enough. Besides, she trusted more to Collan’s protection than to magic.

  And as she turned over yet again to face the empty half of the bed, she knew that the person she really wanted to run to was thousands of miles away.

  4

  “Taigan, honey, you keep lookin’ at that glass ball as if it’d been a snake and bit you.”

  Taigan hated being called honey. She hated the silly glass ball she’d been ordered to treat as if it were a real Mage Globe. She hated Jenira Doriaz’s Dindenshir drawl. She hated the Captal for assigning her education to this fossilized relic of a bygone era. And she most of all hated that in the six weeks since Mother had brought them here, Mikel was surpassing her at every turn. He could not only run the Morning Five without breathing hard, but also hold his own with Rennon Bekke in sword practice and construct a living, shining, power-born Mage Globe and defend himself with both.

  She was beginning to hate Mikel, too.

  Sullenly obedient to the lesson she’d been put through every day for a week, Taigan picked up the glass orb and cradled it in one palm. With the other hand she drew one of the twin Rosvenir knives from her belt. Not the sword lying ready for her on the workbench; knives had always been good enough for her father, who’d taught her how to use them.

  Jenira Doriaz sighed. They’d been through that argument before, with the old Mage insisting on the sword and Taigan stubbornly adhering to her knives—toad-stickers, Jenira called them.

  “Y’know, maybe you’d care for the notion that a sword’s a man’s weapon, not a woman’s, on account of we’re just too dainty in the wrists. But you know what I think? I think a man with a sword’s a more dangerous thing, on account of they’re more likely to use it once it’s took up in their hands.”

  “What?” Taigan tried to picture Mikel as a bloodthirsty, blade-swinging maniac.

  The Mage settled onto a chair, thin knotted fingers clasped around her knees. “In my young day, my cousin Maidi married a big strong boy, as good in the heart as he was in the fields with a plow. They lived in a ramshackle about ten miles from us, and worked and sang and made lots of babies, happy as Dafties on St. Alilen’s Day. But one summer’s day, a no-Name drifter come through, and she saw how many babies Maidi had—eight by then—and decided she had so many she couldn’t miss one of ’em. So the drifter woman took one of ’em—a girl, of course, to pass off as her own First Daughter.”

  Taigan shifted from one foot to the other, glass globe in one hand and knife in the other, wondering if there was a point to this long-winded lecture.

  “Now, Maidi was up to town with her First Daughter and the two older boys, seeing to some buying and selling, and her husband was out working their fields, and the other children were under the care of their hired man. The drifter knocked him upside the head and made off with the little girl, and nobody knew anything until the husband came back at noonday. He found the babies howling, and the hired man lyin’ on the floor with an egg-lump at his ear, and the baby girl gone. His hand took up his reaping scythe and he set out after the drifter, and he tracked her down by the sound of the baby crying, and he came up on the drifter woman and sliced the head right off her shoulders. And then he took the baby girl back home.”

  “He killed the woman?” Taigan exclaimed.

  “He did that. On the way back to home, he was thinking about what the hired man must’ve been thinking, to let a stranger into the house—and she was a pretty stranger, so he figured he knew why—he set the baby down with the other children and shut the door, and took the hired man outside, and lopped off his head, too.” Jenira Doriaz rocked back and forth on her chair, hands gripping bony black-clad knees, shaking her head. “It was darkfall by then, and Maidi and the three older children come up the road, and he saw them and realized he was as good as dead for having killed a woman. He—”

  “But if she was a drifter, and Nameless, then how would anybody find out?”

  The old Mage cocked a brow. “Your father’s daughter, right enough. Taigan, honey, people always find out. Don’t you ever have yourself any secrets, because people always find out and use ’em to trap you. Anyway, he thought on what he’d done, and looked at the bloody scythe, and went out the back door down to the creek where nobody would see him in the gloom. And he propped the scythe just so between some rocks, and toppled over onto it like a great big tree. The blade sank into his heart and he died.”

  Taigan waited for more. There wasn’t any. Knowing some sort of reaction was expected, she said, “It was wrong of him to kill the woman—I can understand why he did, but he didn’t have to. He could’ve threatened her with the scythe and taken the baby safely away. But since he did kill her, he should’ve hidden her body and nobody would’ve known.”

  Jenira shrugged. “And the hired man?”

  Taigan went on, “It was his fault the baby was stolen—more or less—but killing him wasn’t justified. And it was stupid, because it couldn’t be covered up. But it was really stupid to kill himself—he left your cousin with eight children and no husband to raise them.”

  “Is that what you get out of it, girl? That yes, he was wrong, but worse, he was stupid?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “What about the scythe?”

  “What about it?”

  In answer, the elderly Mage stood and hefted the sword from the workbench. Without warning—and with speed and strength impossible in someone her age—she swung it at Taigan.

  Yelping, Taigan dropped and rolled. Her knives were no defense against that shining length of steel—which, though blunt at the tip and lacking an edge, could bruise her badly if it connected. The glass globe shattered on the floor. Taigan scrambled away from the shards, but not quite fast enough, cutting the heel of her thumb.

  “And you didn’t even steal my little girl,” said Jenira Doriaz, and set the sword down and walked out of the room.

  Taigan sat on the floor and picked glass from her thumb. What had that crazy old woman tried to do? “What about the scythe?” What was that supposed to mean?

  Ordinarily she would have gone to Mikel to talk it over. But Mikel was beyond this lesson, presumably, and it would be like the two of them had always been wit
h music: he’d look at her with a kind of confused, pitying helplessness, and try to explain without condescension, but he’d never be able to make her understand.

  There wasn’t anyone she could talk to about this. Not Mikel, not the Mages, not the other Prentices—

  Her thoughts leaped to Jored Karellos. But he’d long since learned whatever it was Jenira Doriaz had wanted to teach her today. He’d probably look at her the way Mikel would.

  “Your father’s daughter, right enough.” And just what the hell was wrong with that? Taigan pushed herself up off the floor and glared down at the slivers of glass. This was the ninth such globe she’d broken, one way or another, in the last week. As she found broom and dustpan to sweep up the remains, she felt a dejected certainty that it wouldn’t be the last.

  All right, she was supposed to learn something. The drifter was wrong to steal the child; the husband was even more wrong to kill her for it. And, Taigan maintained, foolish not to hide the body. Killing the hired man was also wrong, and even more foolish. Killing himself—

  Glass tinkled into a waste bucket from the dustpan, and the sound startled her into another thought. She could see her father killing the woman and the hired man. She didn’t doubt that had he caught up with Glenin Feiran she’d be as dead as the drifter and the hired man. That was how Fa was. But he would never have killed himself afterward. He was worth more to her and Mikel and Mother alive, and he knew it.

  So was she supposed to glean from the story that the husband didn’t know his own value to his family? She didn’t think so.

  And she couldn’t fit the scythe into it.

  Back to the beginning. The husband came home, found the baby gone, and went for the scythe. Taigan still thought he should have used it just to threaten. He didn’t have to kill the woman, or the hired man, or himself—

  And then she had it. If the scythe hadn’t been there, three people wouldn’t have died. The husband did the killing, but the scythe made killing possible. A necessary farming tool had become an instrument of murder.

  Was a sword like that?

  No—a sword was meant for killing. It was an instrument of murder from the instant of its forging. So were her knives. Fa had taught her how to use them to defend herself, which included techniques for killing an attacker if it came to it. She was the envy of her friends, whose parents couldn’t envision their darling daughters ever needing to defend themselves against a world that could never be hostile.

  But Taigan knew how to use her knives. They and the sword required hands to wield them, just as the scythe did. And what had the Mage said earlier, about the danger of a sword in a man’s hands because he’s more likely to use it? Was a sword less dangerous in the hands of a woman?

  That made no sense. Had it been her daughter the Nameless drifter woman had stolen, Taigan would’ve killed her with her bare hands if necessary. She’d be dangerous, even without a sword.

  Or was this not about swords at all, or knives, or scythes, or any bladed thing?

  Was it about magic, and the weapon it could become?

  Magic required a Mageborn to use it. Magic could be dangerous, no question about that. What if the husband had been Mageborn, and gone after the drifter with his magic?

  “She’d be just as dead,” Taigan said aloud, “and so would the hired man and even the husband, because killing was what he wanted to do. How he did it makes no difference—”

  And suddenly the glowing thing inside her, still imperfectly sensed and unavailable for her full use, frightened her.

  She fought that. She had never been frightened by anything in her life. She was her father’s daughter—much more so than her mother’s, a thing not to be admitted in a world where the brief spark of a father’s seed was held to be much less important than the steady flame of a mother’s nurturing. Mikel had Fa’s music, his red hair, and his looks, but Taigan had his spirit.

  Thus she repudiated fear. The magic in her was her magic, and she’d use it as she saw fit, and if at some point in her life she decided she must kill with it, then. . . .

  But that wasn’t what being a Mage Guardian was about, was it?

  Mages had killed during the Rising. Warrior Mages were trained for it. Every Mage vowed to do anything necessary to protect the life of the Captal—Taigan had witnessed Ollia Bekke proudly swear that very thing at her Listing Ritual. “Necessary” could include killing; that was implicit. How did that fit an ethic of protection, defense, and beneficial use of magic?

  Well, some people needed killing.

  And who decided who those people were, and how they were to die?

  Fa had killed. He’d made the decision that someone else’s life wasn’t as valuable as his own, that this specific person in front of him needed killing. He trusted his own judgment.

  But he would gladly die for Taigan and Mikel, and Mother, and even the Captal. Hadn’t he resisted Auvry Feiran’s tortures for days and days rather than reveal Cailet Rille’s identity?

  “. . . I know your father too well to believe that he raised you to be self-sacrificing altruists.”

  Taigan slumped in a chair. How did you know when it was time to sacrifice yourself for someone else? How did you decide who it would be? How did you figure out whether or not somebody needed killing? How did you know that you were worth more than somebody else?

  That husband who had killed the drifter and the hired man and himself—his daughter was obviously worth more than the drifter’s life. More than the hired man’s. But his own life?

  And what if the scythe hadn’t been there?

  What if Taigan didn’t carry a sword or knives?

  What if she didn’t have magic glistening inside her—still just out of reach even though the Wards were gone?

  She knew only one thing for certain: she’d never thought learning to be a Mage Guardian would hurt so much.

  5

  “ARE you sure this is a good idea?”

  Mikel turned a fierce look on Taigan in the midnight dimness. “I got put through that blunt-sword-and-fake-Mage-Globe routine, too.”

  “You don’t know what a relief it is to know you feel the same way I do about all this.”

  He shrugged and touched her arm. “If we can get this done, then they’ll stop treating us like children. Come on.”

  They left the corridor outside her chamber and stole downstairs, heading for the stables. In the last few days, Taigan had managed not to break any more glass balls and Mikel had managed to Warm a huge kettle to boiling as well as Fold a quarter-mile of the road to Heathering. But the truth of it was that not only were they convinced they were being held back from learning real magic, they missed each other’s company at lessons. Except for the wall, they’d been taught nothing together. They were so accustomed to sparking each other’s thoughts and ideas while learning the same things at the same time that they felt off-balance.

  But Mikel now had the basics of Mage Globes, and he’d offered to teach Taigan, and so they were headed out to the stables in the dead of night. Taigan intended to dazzle Jenira Doriaz by getting the Globe right; Mikel wanted Taigan to bounce ideas off for more advanced versions he’d so far only imagined. Her instincts were almost as good as their mother’s.

  They had chosen the stables primarily because at this hour it was populated only by horses, barn cats, and furry vermin. They had also heard the tale of the Great Mage Globe Mishap, and what better way to show everyone they were ready to learn serious magic than by succeeding where others had failed?

  Some years earlier, two Prentices had decided to see if they could encase a living creature within a Mage Globe. Their first attempt used a cricket; it chirped, hopped, struck the glowing magic, and then refused to move. Releasing it, none the worse for the experience, they chose to try something bigger—a mouse, for preference. But catching mice was much harder than catching crickets, so one of them made friends with a barn cat. In due co
urse, she was presented with a little brown bundle of fur—stunned but still living. The cat, having received due tribute, sat grooming herself while the Prentice conjured a Mage Globe around the mouse. All well and good—until the mouse, realizing it was in no immediate danger of becoming lunch, started to run.

  Around and around the sphere it galloped, like a kitchen boy in a turnspit wheel—the Globe rolling right along with it. The Prentices chased frantically after it all over the stable. The cat, vastly intrigued by this glowing new toy, joined in—hunkering down in hunting mode, batting the sphere with a paw when it got within reach. Mouse-in-magic, fascinated feline, and horrified Prentices dashed about, bouncing off hay bales and seriously annoying the horses.

  Then the second Prentice had the bright idea of putting a large Globe around the smaller one. But she was a little too enthusiastic: she caught both scurrying mouse and stalking cat within the sphere. The cat was more than seriously annoyed. Denied escape by the large glittering ball around her, denied as well the prey within the small glittering ball, she, too, began to run. And because a cat is bigger than a mouse, and the Globe around the cat was bigger than the Globe around the mouse, her speed across the stable floor was astonishing.

  Now the first Prentice gave it another try. She caught sight of the Globe’s glow behind a hay bale, and created the largest sphere yet to trap the two smaller ones. She did so without checking on the location of her friend—who happened to be kneeling beside the double orb that had just fetched up against a corner.

  Ensphered with dazzling suddenness, she fell over—and the great Globe rolled every which way, the trapped mouse and the trapped cat and the trapped Prentice tumbling over and over inside their respective Globes, knocking into stalls and the door of the tack room and the appalled Prentice, who couldn’t for the life of her remember how to cancel the spell.