Dust and Light

by Carol Berg

  Pons, cool and efficient, laid one hand on my forehead and one hand on the painting. “Open the true image.”

  As soon as the image shimmered in the front of my mind, a cold hand enveloped it. The astringent burst that followed felt quite like a pureblood healer cleaning and sealing a wound. The hand withdrew. Naught seemed changed.

  “A test only, lord,” I said to Perryn, and laid a finger on my signature.

  Not even that, the most personal detail on Scrutari’s portrait, responded to my touch. Once the internal image faded, would I even be able to retrieve it?

  “I’ll create the tongue block if you wish, prince,” said Pons, “but I’ll not excise paint, ink, portrait, or any other common word or phrase that properly belongs in a pureblood artist’s vocabulary. So you must give me a particular phrase—Prince Perryn’s brindle cow or the like.”

  Perryn considered for a moment. How could he forbid a secret without admitting to it?

  “I forgo the tongue block. I’ll know if Remeni speaks of my privacies.” The eyes of a basilisk could not be so murderous as those of our king-to-be.

  Indeed, the sooner I removed myself from the festering resentments around me, the better. Four curators might have supported my actions in the face of public scrutiny, but I had forced their hand in the same way I had Perryn’s, and their retribution was like to be far more serious. I believed Gramphier and Albin partners in conspiracy and murder.

  “As you say, prince.” I touched my forehead but did not bow. “Our business is done and we can take our leave. What greater honor could we have done my grandsire, who served Crown and Registry so faithfully, than to dispense justice in the murder of both purebloods and ordinaries?”

  Perryn didn’t seem to appreciate the balance. He shoved a young courtier aside so viciously, the young man crashed down three steps before grabbing the rail. As the prince and his retinue marched down the stair, the unfortunate baronet clutched his ribs and hobbled after them.

  The curators summoned guards to clear the remaining gawkers from the stair and the atrium. Hoping to take advantage of their preoccupations, I sped across the gallery toward the back stair.

  “Hold him, Pluvius.” Gramphier was near spitting in his wrath.

  “Arriet, Lucian!” A sharp, nasty enchantment nailed my feet to the floor. The shadowed arch to the stair taunted me, only an arm’s length ahead.

  “Do you imagine you can walk away from this disaster, plebeiu?” said the First Curator. “You’ve shamed the Registry before ordinaries, transgressed rules that that have maintained us for two centuries. You will answer for it.”

  No unlocking, unraveling, or freeing spell I knew budged my feet from the marble floor. So I spat over my shoulder. “When will you answer for your deeds, Gramphier? You have solicited murder and harbored its instrument, a man traitor to everything we revere. All to preserve—”

  No, I could not list every grievance. To reveal what I knew of the Xancheiran secret could end my life right here.

  “Do you forget, First Curator? As long as I breathe, I must serve my contract. My master has not given me permission to be gone all night.”

  “Oh no. Not this time. If he’s allowed you to come here without silkbinding and chains, then he’s violated your restrictions. Your contract is void.”

  “So am I to be murdered right here or shall I be buried in the cellar, where you can corrupt my magic yet again?” Rage, not fear, made my voice shake.

  I had thought I would be satisfied once my family’s murder was explained, the treachery exposed, and Tremayne punished for his crimes. I had believed I could accept whatever Serena Fortuna parceled out, whether death or imprisonment. But here at the brink of ending, I could not bear to leave it at this.

  If it was divinities who sparked the magic in a person’s veins, then who were we to constrain such a blessing, much less to punish that person . . . or kill him? If my family had been slaughtered to protect this secret, hundreds of others had suffered the same throughout two centuries. Others, like the Cicerons. Someone should hold us to account for that.

  “You are far too much trouble to be allowed to live, Lucian.” Gramphier’s breath scorched my neck. “Insolent boy. You think you know so much. But your perverse magic cannot unmask a soul, not even those you know best.”

  “Gramphier, no!” yelled Pluvius.

  I dropped to the floor, twisting and reaching behind to grab Gramphier’s knees. But my arm flailed empty, as others converged and dragged him backward. At the same moment, my boots broke free of the floor.

  I scrabbled forward and lunged to my feet.

  “Wait, Lucian!” called Pluvius.

  “Stop him!”

  “Pons, alert the guards!”

  Without a backward glance, I dashed around and through the archway and onto the back stair.

  CHAPTER 35

  Not three steps down the back stair and I knew the hidden door was out of reach. Leather creaked below me. Boots scuffed—ascending. Of course, the Registry commander would have men guarding every way out.

  So I reversed direction and raced upward. But to where? One thing certain: The higher I went, the more surely I was trapped.

  The fourth level was familiar ground. They’d certainly come looking for me in the Archives, but a drainpipe descended from the roof just beyond the window of my former studio into a long-neglected well yard. Gilles and I had forever joked about using it to escape Pluvius’s inspections—a ludicrous thought for two privileged portrait artists, whose greatest adventures had consisted of hunting expeditions or hiking across country to a historic ruin. Yet if the pipe was solid . . . if I didn’t think about it too much . . . if my bruised shoulder would hold up . . . No one would be guarding the well yard.

  I crept quietly through the grillwork doors, then sped through the deserted labyrinth of nooks, shelves, and worktables, only to stop short and strangle a breath. Candlelight gleamed through the open door of the studio. Gilles sat at a worktable, his dark head bent over a page, pen in hand, though not moving. Gilles, whose uncle had just been hauled off to his death on my word.

  I couldn’t attack; Gilles was no Harrower. But the drainpipe was my only way out.

  “Grace of the Mother, Gilles.”

  His head popped up, his expression blank, as if deep in thought or magic-working. “Lucian!”

  The pen dropped to the floor as he leapt to his feet and examined me head to toe, smiling. “Grace of the Mother, indeed! You look a wreck. Does your master not feed you? And what in Magrog’s realm are you wearing? Lest you’ve no looking glass, the bird’s nest”—he wriggled his ink-stained fingers under his chin—“it just doesn’t suit. I thought your family discipline was clean— Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’d no idea you’d be allowed to attend the celebration, else I’d have come down. But I’m so behind on all this.” His shoulders lifted helplessly at the same jumble of portrait folios I’d seen here before the fire. Before the cellar.

  On a normal day, I’d have swallowed his disconnected ramble. But the smile had not touched his dark eyes and his left hand twitched, picking at his doublet—a very fine velvet doublet—and his jewels and his lace, fitting garb for the scion of a great pureblood house meeting a new king, not a junior portraitist catching up on his work. His cloak and mask were tossed on my old stool, as if he’d just come in.

  “He is guilty, Gilles, your uncle Albin. He corrupted his position, consorted with Harrowers, ordered them to slaughter my family. He brought a Harrower here tonight—brought a murderer to the Tower to do his bidding. But his taint won’t reach you. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Did you come here to tell me how fortunate I am?” Bitterness crackled like frost. “I was out there on the stair and heard it all. You’ve won the day, you and your perfect discipline and your superior talent.”

  “What did I win? Friends? Hardly. Safety? Do you know what the curators did just because they were afraid I might expose their corruption? Your uncle�
��s Harrower burnt the house where my sister and my servants were sleeping. Six innocent people died that night. . . .”

  I kept talking, hoping to find a friend beneath the deadness in his eyes. But I edged toward the window, as well. Purebloods weren’t allowed friends.

  “. . . and your uncle and his constable made it look like I did it. They buried me in the dark for half a year, Gilles. They corrupted my magic, corrupted my memory. I was on the verge of madness. Tonight I need your help, because you are not a murderer, and if the curators take me, they’re going to kill me this time—one way or another, fast or slow.”

  Shouts rang from the stairs, much too close.

  “Please. You know me better than they do, as I know you.” I waved at his cloak and mask only an arm’s reach away atop the wooden stool. “If you lent me those, I could walk out of the Tower. You could say I threatened you. You’re a good man.”

  He squeezed his eyes closed, pressed his lips together, and shook his head. “Tell me why, Lucian. You didn’t explain why a sorcerer of my uncle’s noble history would do those things. If my uncle is guilty, Gramphier and Scrutari and the others corrupt, and only you are honorable, then tell me what any of them thought to gain. Why would any pureblood want your bloodlines destroyed?”

  The Archive gates clanked. There was no time to explain Xancheira, even if I dared.

  “I will not answer that; I cannot. Help me now. Live to share your gift as the gods intend.”

  Face bleak, he heaved a great breath and pressed a clenched fist to his mouth.

  I dared not trust him. Laying my hand on his cloak and mask, I drew up a bit of true fire and my well-used illusion.

  “Run, Gilles!” I bound my puny fire spell on the clothes and the wooden stool, then raised a curtain of false flame and smoke behind it. Hidden by the illusory blaze, I twisted the latch and threw open the casement.

  Wind whipped the little fire and set pages and portraits alight, whirling them through the smoke-filled chamber. Sleet pelted my face. The dented, rusty drainpipe, just within reach, disappeared into blackness a long way below.

  Just as I slung my leg over the sill, enchantment lanced through my feeble barrier. The air exploded from my chest as if I’d slammed into a wall. Thought disintegrated. Chest burning . . . lungs starving for air. Sleet and night swirled around me, as vision darkened.

  My hand fell away from the window frame. Fire on one side; the abyss on the other. Will not burn . . . cannot burn . . .

  “Stop right there!” A crackle and a thud accompanied the woman’s command.

  The flames—both real and illusory—vanished. A huge whooping breath returned sense, relief, and puzzlement. Pons’s thunderbolt hadn’t struck me, but rather startled the breath back into me. Perhaps she hadn’t as good aim as her colleagues. Pons. Gods of all idiots, save me. I clung to the casement, coughing, just happy I could breathe again.

  “Bring your foot back inside, Lucian de Remeni,” she said, “or my next exercise will topple you right out.”

  While I was deciding whether to jump and save my tormentor her trouble, the smoke cleared enough that I saw Gilles sprawled on the floor, dusted with ash and scorched pages. “Lord of Light, Pons, did you kill him?”

  “He’ll not die of the blow.” She closed the door softly and pressed her back to it. “But I was not trying to pat him on the head and tell him he was a good boy. If you had developed any skill at observation, you might have noticed him preparing the aeroviar spell as he begged enlightenment. Had I not intervened, I estimate your lungs would be entirely ash by now, and your body the height of a griddle cake spread on the cobbles below that window. Now climb back in. Slowly and carefully. And do not imagine you can bewilder me in magical fog or drop me in a hole or terrify me with flames that couldn’t fire a haystack.”

  Would she do as she said? Of course she would.

  I climbed down, but risked her wrath by hurrying to Gilles. He was limp as a rag mop but warm and breathing. I’d no idea what an aeroviar was, although the Aurellian syllables meant air and starvation.

  “Why should I believe you about Gilles?” I said. “Were you not the one who called me a deviant soul who has no place in this world? I’ve seen ample evidence of your own capacity for lies and hypocrisy.”

  “Do you feel better getting that little jab off your chest? Now perhaps you might take a moment to listen to me. We’ve very little time.”

  Her square-shouldered figure blocked the doorway. A wall of cocked crossbows would have been less daunting.

  “Your friend here—who told his uncle the location of your town house, by the way, and assured him gleefully that your sister would burn in Skefil’s fire, too, as she rarely went out—is going to wake up and imagine he and I are allies. And I have to know—”

  “Imagine . . . Gilles assured . . . ?” She might have been speaking in a foreign tongue.

  “I have to know how much you’ve learned. When I heard you were in the Antiquities Repository yesterday, I hoped you’d located Vincente’s painted chest there, a place so obvious I never thought to look. But then I learned you met Perryn to assess blame in a murder of one dead ordinary child. Has any bloodline birthed such a sentimental idiot as you?”

  “The Duc de Tremayne murdered at least six children and was—”

  “He might be Magrog himself, for all I care. Lucian, you cannot leave the Tower without understanding what you are.”

  “Leave here?” One would think I had passed into another world as strange as the five-fingered land beyond my visions. But Pons’s obdurate urgency rammed home the truth, leaving a great void where my every perception of the woman once festered. “You—the inquisitor of Montesard—you’re going to let me go?”

  “Despite what you think you know of me, I prefer you neither dead nor a mindless husk. I need you to comprehend the stakes in this struggle—the reasons why your enemies cannot, will not, ever leave off, whether you hide in Palinur or run. If you know what you are, and if you understand why your grandsire cut you off and installed you here in the Tower, and if you take the trouble to learn a bit of magic, you might survive. And that, my young fool, could change everything we know.”

  She could be probing my knowledge of the Xancheira mystery, deciding whether she preferred to kill me or cage me, but somehow . . . my bent had shown her in the Archives with my grandsire and his painted chest, speaking to him with the same urgency I saw here. Gods save me, I wanted to believe her. Of all things in this world, I needed an ally, no matter how unlikely. But one great obstacle remained.

  “Tell me what’s become of my sister.” The other curators yet named Juli dead from the fire.

  “Only three people in the world know that she lives, and now you do as well. She is as safe as anyone can be in this city. And she is a far better liar than you. When I finally got the truth from her—that you had sent her to me—I thought you must finally have grown beyond your childish grievances with me.” Pons threw her head back with a caustic laugh. “She is quite comfortable. Her only sadness is for you and those you’ve lost. She will survive if you do.”

  I wanted so much to believe. “Where is she? I’ll tell you nothing until I know.”

  “Juliana lives in the Temple of the Mother under the personal protection of the high priestess. Now can we—?”

  “You put her in a temple!” Horror near sent me flying through the casement, be damned whatever Pons might throw at me.

  “Think, fool! The Mother’s temple is not Arrosa’s. Yes, the old man told us about all that, too. Believe me, your sister is protected in all ways. She does not share your gifts, but she shares your blood . . . and the hope that comes with it. Now tell—”

  “The old man—the spy—Sexton Garibald.”

  “We’ve already established that you are a fool. But your coroner could use lessons in conspiracy as well. The sexton babbled your every move to Pluvius, who, naturally, being a lackwit on your own scale, shared them with everyone who might loan him a
pinch of salt at table. Now tell me: Was it there in the Repository? The painted chest? Do you comprehend why you are anathema to the Registry? If I’m to help you, I must know.”

  Fear for Juli and relief at Pons’s assurances warred in my soul. After so many years of enmity, how could I possibly trust her? Yet she had not used me in the cellar, and her portrait displayed her grief for an ordinary and a halfblood child. Perhaps her hopes were for the future of her own bloodline. And truly, if Pons wanted me dead or captive, I would be dead or captive.

  “I’ve seen evidence that explains why a strong dual bent and any mention of Xancheira terrify the curators. Pureblood life—the Registry, the breeding laws, our wealth and power—is built on a lie.”

  “Good.” The set of her sturdy shoulders softened slightly. “Vincente’s harsh reaction to your childish misbehavior fit no pattern I understood. Early last year, I confronted him about it. To his dismay, I picked the hour he was attempting to sneak that chest out of the Registry Archives. He had to explain some things to me before I let him take it.”

  “Great gods, you knew? You could have—”

  “I could not have prevented your family’s murder. I was naive, too—a horrific blunder. But sacrificing myself on the altar of indignation would not have brought them back. To keep silent and retain my position protected you—as Vincente begged me to do that day we talked. Think. Your sister lives.”

  “You sent the warning message about the second fire.”

  “Yes. I thought I’d gotten you out of the Tower and into a situation where you couldn’t make things worse.”

  Thus my unnegotiated contract.

  “But then your offended pride brought you whining to Gilles de Albin, confirming Albin and Gramphier’s worst fears. You must survive, Lucian. What you’ve learned is only a beginning, I think, for the story of Xancheira encompasses far more than bloodlines and magical inheritance. Our ancestors did something dreadful at Xancheira, something that left a great wound in the fabric of the world. Vincente was unable to plumb the nature of that wound, but he believed you could. He saw you vanish once while working magic, and believed you truly went somewhere else. Is that so?”