Linstrom could transport within his walls with just the mutter of some syllables. The man was Vane’s enemy, if he was the king’s, and could even now be inside Vane’s manor. Had Linstrom found Vane out, sent Terrance to the bakery? Vane must return to Oakdowns, must risk Francie’s health transporting her there and entrust her to Kora while he rummaged for that spell to protect his family. Some nights ago—he shivered despite the inferno—any number of nights ago, Linstrom could have stood outside Vane’s grounds, spied the manor, and taken himself by transport to the interior side of any window he saw. He could have made short work of Vane himself, and August as they slept. Of their children, their servants….
Vane must cast that spell. He should have done so as soon as he’d heard of Evant Linstrom. First, though, he had to transport.
The air was clean enough at ground level for Vane to clear his throat and voice the spell he needed to move Francie to safety. He appeared, crouching and with a sputtering cough, on the floor of Kansten’s room in Oakdowns. Kora, he soon realized, was alone there. She had removed any sound barriers, and Vane cast one of his own while Kora threw a red chain off her neck and ran to stoop near her host.
“Vane! Vane, what’s happened? Good Giver!”
Vane realized he was soot-streaked and blood-soaked. Must have made quite a sight. “I’m unharmed,” he assured her. “Francie’s ill, though. She inhaled a lot of smoke.”
Kora helped the duke move Terrance’s victim to the bed. “Vane,” she asked, “what…?”
The duke coughed some more.
“Terrance Vole found us. He killed Howar and I killed him. I…. August, my children, where are they?”
“In the manor, I’d imagine,” said Kora. “Vane….”
“I have to find them, and a spell to protect Oakdowns from transports. My cover’s blown. Linstrom….”
Kora’s face turned gray. “Linstrom suspects nothing as of yet, but you should cast that incantation, and now. I’ll do what I can for Francie. I know healing spells…. The girl was weak already, you said?”
“Linstrom bled her,” Vane muttered with a curse. He glanced out the window to see his family in the garden, August and all four of their children. They were speaking with Zacry and Kansten. Paling, he transported to them.
“I’m all right,” he assured everyone, at the sight of their horrified faces. “Let’s get inside, all of us.” Between Vane and Zacry, the group transported to the parlor, where they found Wilhem and Walten studying spellbooks. Vane ordered Kora’s children, “Go to your mother. Boys, you know healing magic?” They nodded, stiff and speechless. “You can take over for her, then. Care for Francie Rafe so she can use her chain. I need her with that necklace, need to know where Linstrom is. If she has news about him you report it straight to me, understand? I’ll be in this room. Kansten, you stay with them. They can protect you if Linstrom attacks. Where’s Jane Trand?”
Zacry said, “She brought the king to the Palace before going for her students.”
August kissed her children, and Vane spoke some words of comfort. The twins were wide-eyed as they peered at their father in his disastrous state, and little Dalen’s lip was quivering. Seven-year-old Harren had broken into a sweat. Vane swore inwardly to stand before them looking such a fright, and smiled to reassure them, because while he longed to pat Dalen on the head or give him a swing through the air to cheer him up, he refused to cover the boy in soot and blood.
The smile, at least, made Vane’s girls nod at him, while Harren’s panic visibly calmed. Only Dalen still looked frightened, shrinking from his father’s scary figure, so Vane made one of the silly faces that always made the boy laugh. Dalen giggled, his fear dissipated, and Luce took his hand as their mother directed them to go play on the far side of the room, where they had a basket of puzzles and other toys. She didn’t want them out of her sight. Vane had to approve the inclination to keep them close, at least until he found that spell.
“Go to your mother,” Zacry ordered Kora’s children. “You heard Vane’s instructions. Go!”
Walten, Wilhem, and Kansten sprinted off, skidding to a halt when Vane told them, “Francie’s alive. She needs help, but she’ll live, despite how she might look. Tell your mother to get back to her chain. If Linstrom discovers he’s been harboring a spy….” Silence fell, and Kora’s children took off again, Kansten leading. As soon as they were gone, Vane explained the crisis, the need to protect the manor.
Zacry asked, “Where’s the spell you need?”
Vane knew the book, though he had never memorized the incantation. He transported to the master bedroom, where he stored all his spellbooks to keep them from curious eyes: mainly those of his daughters. They sat in a row on a long wooden shelf above a settee. The tome he sought was the third from the right, bulky, leather-bound, and copied by hand some two or three centuries before. He found a towel and a fresh bowl of water on the bedside table, and cleaned the grime from his face and arms before daring to touch an artifact as old as that spell collection. He could wash more thoroughly when he knew his family safe.
Normally a tidy man, Vane dropped the soot-stained linen to fall where it would. Then he took the tome and transported back to the parlor. He forced himself to relax at the background noise of his children playing; the twins were deep in soft conversation as they worked together to arrange a difficult puzzle. Harren sounded out words as he read to himself and to Dalen, who half-listened while he dragged a plush dog around the room, taking it for a walk.
Vane told August, “We should let Hune give Dalen one of that beagle’s puppies when they’re born. He offered it, remember?”
August admonished, “Now’s not the time. Is that the book?”
“The spell’s toward the end,” said Vane, and opened from the back cover to find the incantation he sought. Zacry peered over his shoulder, and when Vane paused at the proper page, they caught one another’s eye. Each knew a spell was stronger when multiple sorcerers cast it.
“Protayha Edfiso.”
Luce and Esper gasped as the walls, the floor, the ceiling—even the furniture—glowed a momentary violet. Harren fumbled his book, and Dalen pulled his plush pup close. The rich coloring faded after some seconds, and as August went to comfort her children, Zacry told Vane, “That should do it.”
Vane nodded. Zacry was a brother to him; he could admit to the man, “I failed to save the baker. Terrance worked around my shield. Stabbed Howar with his own knife, using a transfer spell.”
“No energy reached out from Terrance to the sword, then? No invisible wave?”
“The shield would have blocked that.”
“Good to know how that spell works. A nice experiment Terrance ran for us….” At the horrified look on Vane’s face, Zacry said, “I never met Howar, but I can’t imagine he’d blame you. He’d probably be grateful his death taught us something useful, and Vane, you did what you could.”
“It’s thanks to him I’m alive. I’d have had no clue Terrance was around. The man would have struck me down none the wiser, but I heard Howar blunder up after him. I felt something was wrong….”
“Thank the Giver you did.”
“I should thank you just as much, Zac. Damn you, you know I hated those random attacks of yours back in Traigland.”
Zacry smiled. “They were hardly real assaults.”
“Really? I’d be eating, or studying, or helping Joslyn wash dishes, and you’d sneak up from nowhere and bind me.”
“Only until you could defend yourself,” said Zacry.
“I never understood why you did that.”
“You were fifteen,” said Vane’s mentor. “Too young to be thinking about your future. Returning to Herezoth, joining court…. It was my place to consider that. To prepare you. I knew you’d have strong opposition. Not every sorcerer in the kingdom would be pleased to have you here, reminding everyone of Zalski’s crimes committed in the name of magic.”
“Well, I owe you my life for those annoyance
s. And Francie owes you hers.” Vane paused. “We should check on her. If she’s come to, she’d be glad to see you—you’re a friend. A familiar face. She needs friends right now, more friends than me.”
Vane couldn’t bear the prospect of further transporting, so he and Zacry walked to find the Cason family. Kora was kneeling on the floor, using her necklace. Kansten, as somber as Vane had ever seen her, was cleaning Francie’s face and neck of soot with her wash water, because the woman was still unconscious. Walten and Wilhem spoke in hushed voices about anything more they could do for her.
Wilhem told Vane, “We cast a calming spell, and that one we know to steady breathing and pulse, because her heartbeat was erratic. Before we came, Mom thought to cast a cleansing spell on her lungs and airways, and that multiplication spell we know on her blood, because you’d mentioned she’d lost a lot.”
Zacry noted, “That was brilliant.”
Walten said, “Couldn’t make the effect too strong, for safety’s sake, but even a little more blood in her would help.”
Vane agreed, “In her condition, that helps. It helps significantly. She was weak even before the shock of that second attack.”
At Vane’s words, Kora stirred. They must have provoked her to break her connection, because she stood and lifted the chain from around her neck. “Terrance paid a social call to your baker,” she told Vane. “Linstrom didn’t send him to kill anyone. He knew nothing about the visit. I’d have warned you if he had. It was just bad timing, with Francie upstairs. Howar must have tried to keep Terrance away….”
Vane said, “That hardly matters now.”
Kora said, “Perhaps. The fire’s spread to twelve other buildings. The smoke could be seen from the cobbler’s shop, so Linstrom went to investigate. People know the blaze started at the bakery, and if he saw you again, Linstrom would grill you about where Howar might be. You can’t go to any more plotting sessions, Vane. It’s too dangerous. Let him think you died in that inferno, because that’s what it’s become, an inferno. I’ve seen it through Linstrom, and there’s no way there’s a fragment left of any person in that bakery to be identified.”
Vane sighed. “Howar was a decent chap. Right kind to Francie, and her a stranger…. I don’t know how I’ll tell her he’s dead.”
Kora threw a motherly arm around Vane’s shoulder. The gesture meant more to him than he could have described, as grimy and stained as he was. Zacry suggested, “I’d begin with the news of Terrance’s death.” Vane gave him a somber nod.
“He was a beast.”
The duke never would have thought a second memory could sear his soul like that of Francie tied to a stake in the Hall’s library, the woman voiceless, beaten, desperately denying who she was. Just as soul shaking was that shriek from Howar’s bed reverberating in Vane’s mind.
Walten and Wilhem had drawn back, out of the scene, observing with an intensity Vane marked even in his state of distraction. Kansten, on the other hand, seemed not to hear a word of Vane’s conversation with her mother and uncle. Having cleaned the unconscious Francie as best she could, she had moved on to braid the woman’s hair in a single plait. The battered councilor had awakened an air of mixed pity and respect in Kansten that Vane had never seen.
Once Kansten had secured Francie’s braid, she wet the councilor’s forehead to keep her cool. Then she told Kora, “I finally see why you care about this place. It’s because of the people like you, people like her, who work so hard and give so much to make things better and end up beaten down. You came back because you hope that, someday, those brave souls won’t meet rejection like you did. Eventually, they’ll have to succeed. They have to, Mom. Knowing Francie’s career like I do, as much as I admire her, to see her like this….” Kansten turned to her brothers. “You see this woman? This is why you’re here, why we’re all here.”
Walten nodded, his Adam’s apple bouncing down as he gulped a breath of air. Wilhem told his sister, “We’re here for her, the same as you are. They can’t do that to someone and get away with it to threaten more people. Not while we can stand against them.”
Kansten sent her brother a weak but grateful smile. Kora took the damp towel from her daughter; she placed it on the table by the bed before taking Kansten in her arms and holding her tight, holding her in that way only a mother could. Vane had known many such embraces from his Aunt Teena, most especially when the local thugs had forced them to leave Fontferry over Vane’s sorcerer’s mark. He had always wondered whether his actual mother’s touch would have granted him more solace. He could not imagine so, could not slight the good woman who had raised him by thinking that, but still, each night, he reveled in the knowledge that his children had their mother beside them, and their father, when he himself had known neither of his parents. Terrance Vole had come so close to leaving Vane’s children fatherless….
Vane shivered despite the sticky heat of summer, and transported away to wash before anyone—mainly, Zacry—could comment on the involuntary movement.
CHAPTER TEN
Lottie
Kora soon returned to her chain, though in the room next door. She left Zacry to tend to the unconscious Francie, so the woman would wake to someone she knew, and took her children from the sickroom.
Rexson’s spy found the stocky, black-haired Linstrom in an elegant, femininely furnished sitting room. The space was small; a rug with a floral pattern covered most of the floor. Yellow roses filled two vases on the table. A painting of wildflowers hung above the door to the kitchen, while wooden shelves against the wall held bottles of colored glass.
Linstrom sat with a fat-cheeked woman maybe thirty-years-old on a faded settee. She wore her blonde hair cropped, too short to pull back or arrange in any fashion, and her cotton dress, empire-waisted, was in good condition. Linstrom was telling her of the fire on the high street, which had disrupted all business that day.
“From what I’ve heard, it started at the bakery.”
The woman’s eyes grew wide. “Howar’s bakery? Do you think the king’s discovered us?”
“Don’t be a fool, Lottie. He’d have burned my shop, not Howar’s, if he was going for that kind of thing. People are saying it started on the second floor, but that’s ludicrous. It had to start in the kitchens.”
“One would think that’s logical,” Lottie said. She sounded unwilling to let her fears about Rexson Phinnean go, but didn’t mention them again. “Howar could have been using a stove upstairs, you know. Have you seen him since?”
“Terrance left in that direction. I’m not sure where he was going, but perhaps he found himself in the right place to help.”
Lottie’s expression hardened at the mention of the auburn-haired sorcerer. “He’s gotten out of hand, Evant. Terrance has. What he did to that Rafe woman was obvious, and….”
Not this again. Damn it!
“Let it go, Lottie. It’s done. Be the bigger person, won’t you, and leave off antagonizing my most faithful supporters. You spoke up in the Hall, and I placated you there.”
Lottie crossed her arms. “Placated? You made sure to keep the woman happy so she wouldn’t cause trouble, is that what that was? What about mercy? He beat and raped and clearly terrorized that woman, without your consent.” She paused. “He hadn’t your consent?”
“Of course he hadn’t. I sent him to create a diversion. I had no idea what he’d chosen to do.”
“He crossed a line. We’re here to right an injustice, to bring it to the world’s attention, not to assassinate councilors after torture.”
“Lottie, the king spat in your face the same as he did mine when he ignored our applications. You knew this work would involve some unsavory tasks. That’s all this Rafe business was.”
“This was beyond anything necessary, Evant, and you know it. To kill the woman as painlessly as possible, that’s one thing. That I understand. Rafe was the king’s supporter, and a well-known one, with a power so trifling she had no place on that council, not when sorcerers like u
s could have taken her seat. But to torture her as Terrance did…. Would you have sanctioned that, had he brought his plan to you?”
“I would not have,” Linstrom claimed, and truthfully. “I was forgoing the chance to question her about the king, about Ingleton, when I ended her suffering at your request.”
“Thank you,” said Lottie, “for heeding me.” She mastered the slightest of tremors, one so small Linstrom almost failed to mark it. “That woman’s blood is on all our hands.”
This I won’t have. Not guilt. Not doubt.
Linstrom raised a hand to Lottie’s plump cheek. He held her chin gently as he told her, “You knew there would be deaths.”
“I had no idea I’d be requesting them of you.”
“You requested the greatest mercy we could afford to grant the wench. She couldn’t live, not after Terrance brought her to the Hall.”
“Damn that man,” Lottie muttered. “He shouldn’t have brought her to you that way. Made a spectacle, just to boast. Damn him!”
The line of Linstrom’s mouth thinned.
This quarrel will cause trouble.
“I assure you, nothing of the kind will happen again.”
“You promise?” she demanded.
“I swear it,” he said, and she kissed him out of gratitude, her arms around his neck. He decided to change the subject; the less she focused on her resentment of Terrance, the better. Her family, that should be a safe conversation. Lottie was utterly sentimental, to the point it sometimes ate at Linstrom’s nerves. Who cared about her family? Most were magicless, which meant worthless. The ones who did have magic had no aspirations at all.
“Your nephew,” he said. “The free spirit.”
Lottie smiled. “The artist?”
“The one you helped raise.” As good as a son to Lottie. Not a practical thought in the young man’s head, in Linstrom’s experience. “What’s he been doing?”
The King's Sons (The Herezoth Trilogy) Page 19
