Cal nodded, shifting restlessly. His eyes slid to mine, then lowered again. It tore my heart into pieces to see him so helpless while Drei taunted him, like a cat playing with a mouse.
“You brought it to use on me, didn’t you? But I can find a better use for it – on her. And you can watch, my fine mage, because without your vessel you’re powerless to stop me. Are you ready?”
“No!” Cal cried, finding sudden strength in his voice. “Do whatever you like to me, but leave her alone. She’s never hurt you.”
“She has!” he screamed. “She betrayed me! I gave her everything, I took an ignorant village rat and made her a lady, and what does she do? The ungrateful slut runs straight back to you! No one makes a fool out of me!” He stopped, panting, and after a few heaving breaths he calmed himself. “And I will do what I like to you – later. First you can watch me kill this bastard of yours.”
Cal shouted something, but Drei turned towards me, knife in hand, a smile on his face.
I’d already decided what to do. I turned the knife to molten metal in his fingers, and Drei screamed and tried to drop it. At the same moment, flames shot across the room and turned him into a raging inferno, which were instantly extinguished.
A low humming sound. Thunk!
Drei froze, astonishment on his face. Bewildered, he looked down at his chest, where a crossbow bolt protruded by several handspans.
Then he crashed to the floor and lay still.
Stunned, I couldn’t move. I half expected him to get up again, but there was no movement, except for a growing pool of blood silently spreading across the floor.
Cal ran across and bent over Drei’s prone form. That was bewildering, too. How did he get out of the chains? Seeing him free spurred me into action, and I rushed across to where he was feeling for Drei’s pulse.
“Is he dead?”
“Yes, thank the Moon Gods. Are you all right?” I nodded.
He sprang up and held me tight, and I clung to him, tears pouring down my face. I’d been facing unspeakable horror but somehow, miraculously, the world had righted itself and we were safe.
After a while he pulled away a little, stroking my face. “Gods, I was so worried about you, having no magic, not able to heal yourself. But you obviously managed fine.”
“I still had my vessel. But how did you—? And who did that?” I pulled away a little, and pointed to the bolt protruding from Drei’s back.
“I had my jade belt,” he said, grinning. “Drei never knew about that. And the crossbow – that was my backup.” He turned and called, “You can come out now!”
I looked around but couldn’t see anyone. Then a quick movement above us on the stacks and a figure jumped down, landing lightly beside the steps, and walked across to us, a crossbow in each hand. He was vaguely familiar, but it took me a moment to place him.
“Millan? But how—? Where did you even come from? Have you been here all along?”
He smiled. “I’ve been following you ever since you came back to the city. Cal gave me a jade belt and brought me here to protect you, and put a bolt into Drei if things got out of hand.”
“You’ve been following me? I never saw you!”
“Of course not! I’m very good at not being seen, remember? Mind you, it’s been difficult sometimes here, with all these underground passages. When he—” He prodded Drei with a disdainful foot. “—carried you here, I had to go a different way. There’s nowhere to hide in a straight well-lit tunnel. But luckily he wanted to torment you both before he killed you.” Turning to Cal, he went on, “I’m sorry, I know you didn’t want him killed unless it was a dire situation, but it looked pretty dire to me.”
“Oh, you did the right thing, and it was a terrific shot. This was the best chance, while he wasn’t wearing chain mail.”
“I could have got him through the head,” Millan said easily. “I had another crossbow loaded ready. Mind you, those flames of yours were spectacular. Maybe you could have managed him by yourselves.”
Cal shook his head. “He’s a Fire Mage, it’s his speciality. He got my little bonfire put out in a heartbeat.”
“Can I make fire? I’ve got the belt, I should be able to do everything you can do, shouldn’t I?”
“The belt was only to let you move around the city safely. It takes training to use magical power.”
“It must be so much fun!”
“What is it with men and fire?” I said. “If you two can cut short the self-congratulations, we should find out what Drei did with the other mages.”
“Most of them ran away,” Millan said. “A couple fell, but he was more concerned with you two. I think they’ll be fine.”
“You were there? Of course you were.” I began to laugh. “I wish I’d known I had a secret protector.”
“Better you knew nothing about it,” Cal said. “Safer that way. Let’s find the mages, and then, I suppose, we’ll have to tell the Lady Yannassia that we’ve killed her husband.”
44: Afterwards
My daughter was born on a sun of grey, relentless rain, slanting against the windows in a chill warning of impending winter. The birthing nurse silently placed the tiny bundle in my arms. I peered down at her, this little stranger thrust upon me, and she gazed back at me with great dark eyes. Wisps of black hair peeped out from the swaddling cloth.
“She’s just like her father.”
“That’s not her fault,” the birthing nurse said stoutly. “We none of us get to choose our parents.”
“She’s beautiful,” I said. And she was.
“Are you disappointed?” I asked Cal when he came to visit.
He hesitated just a fraction too long before he remembered that he couldn’t lie to me. “Yes, a bit. I would have liked her to be mine, so that you could have put him behind you. Now you’ll always have that connection to him.”
“At least no one will ask awkward questions when they see her.”
Yannassia was an early visitor too, her own pregnancy just beginning to show. “May I hold her? You have no objection? Oh, so tiny! She is gorgeous, Kyra, so pretty. Does she sleep well?” Then after a pause, “She is almost as dark as he was. I had imagined... something in between.”
“There’s no knowing how these things will turn out.” There was more truth to that than she realised.
“What will you call her?”
“Drei wanted to name her Axandrina.”
“Have you decided yet what you will do? Now that Drei is gone, your contract no longer applies, is it not so?”
“You’re very well informed, Highness.”
“It is my business to be informed about such matters. I want you to know that I would be happy to take her, if you wish. She would be a sister to my own daughter, you know, and I would never make a distinction between them, be assured of that.”
There was no blue flare, so I couldn’t doubt her sincerity, but even if she herself treated the two girls the same, the servants wouldn’t. One was the grand-daughter of the Drashon, the other the drusse-born child of a village girl and a political consort. I knew enough of Drei’s childhood to understand just how miserable such a situation could be. I would have trusted Drei with her at one time, but not so much Yannassia.
Part of me still yearned to have my daughter brought up in the Drashon’s family, to have all the opportunities I’d lacked: the best education, the chance of a good career, mixing with the brightest and most interesting people from all over the sun-blessed lands. When I’d signed my drusse contract, though, I’d known far less of the complexities of political life, and now that I did, I wasn’t so sure I wanted that for her. The endless social functions, the mindless chatter, the insincerity, the constant striving to be noticed, the competition with other factions; none of that appealed. Besides, I was a mage now, and had status in my own right, and a career profitable enough to support as many children as I might want.
So it was a purely logical decision to keep my daughter and raise her myself, and not
hing at all to do with those great dark eyes, her soft skin and tiny fingers, or the way her lips made little sucking movements while she slept. A moon after her birth, therefore, I took the legal steps to ensure her future with me. She would always be Drei’s daughter, in law as well as in fact, and therefore a potential heir for Yannassia, but with luck she would escape notice and enjoy a quiet life.
Cal and I were rarely together at this time. I’d moved back to my rooms in the mages’ house, so we met at board, and he was still my mentor, so from time to time we would meet in the library to study a treaty or a particularly tricky legal ruling. Sometimes he would reach across the table for my hand and press my palm to his lips, gazing at me wanly. It was the only physical contact we had.
Poor Cal had taken the brunt of the nobles’ displeasure after Drei’s death. We’d known that Millan’s role couldn’t be revealed; hiding out in the Imperial City with a crossbow and then shooting the man who’d killed both his brothers would be too difficult to explain, so we’d let him slip away into the shadows, leaving a crossbow so that Cal could take responsibility. As a mage, Cal would only be dealt with by the other mages, and there was no risk of execution.
Or so we thought. It turned out that the nobility took a dim view of anyone killing the Bai-Drashonor’s husband. Even though we explained what he’d done and what he planned to do, enough memory of Drei’s magically enhanced charm remained that they still considered him a pleasant, sensible man, an asset to Bennamore, who must have had good reason for everything he did. So much of what we told them was tenuous, too. The plan to kill the Drashonor, the poison used against the Drashon and me, the murder of Lakkan, my kidnap – none of these could be proved; there were other plausible explanations. Cal spent several uncomfortable ten-suns incarcerated in the bowels of the mages’ house, while the nobles argued vehemently for his execution and the mages tried to dissuade them.
I was regarded as a victim rather than a murderer, a woman seduced by Cal into a misguided affair. We’d had to explain why Drei had been so hostile to the two of us, and there was no point in trying to conceal the truth. No matter how many times I explained that I had never broken the terms of my drusse contract, that I was free to sleep with whomever I liked, I was still seen as a wanton woman.
“It was very foolish, Kyra,” Krayfon said to me sorrowfully. “I would have thought you to have better sense, especially given the sort of man Axandrei was.”
“I know that now,” I said sourly.
In the end, the Drashon and Yannassia intervened to rescue Cal, insisting that the mages must deal with their own. Since the mages weren’t in thrall to Drei, there was no punishment beyond a certain wariness of the two of us. The Drashon had always had a fondness for me, I think, and Drei’s magic hadn’t entirely overcome that. And Yannassia – I’ll be honest, she surprised me. I thought she’d hate us both for killing the man she loved, but she was surprisingly philosophical about it.
“I was very much in love with him, naturally,” she told me, “but I married him as much for my own ambitions as for sentiment. We were a good match in that respect, and it was a useful political alliance, too. It was all very pragmatic, even though I was thrilled with him. But the speed of events began to concern me – the rush to war, in particular. I could see his reasons for that and I was not at all comfortable with it.”
“That’s surprising. No one else seemed concerned.”
“Ah, but they were all under his spell. He took care to enchant them to his way of thinking. With me, however, he assumed I was already secure and that he had no need to exert himself. Besides, it is difficult to live so intimately with a man and not know his true nature. Once or twice—” She stopped, and looked almost ashamed. “There were times when he did or said things that made me a little frightened of him. I remembered what he did to you – locking you in a cellar to get what he wanted. Such ruthlessness! Almost I came to talk to you about him, but I was too proud. If I had…”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” I said. “Even if you’d known everything, you couldn’t have stopped him. Only mages can deal with another mage.”
“At least it is over,” she said with a deep sigh. “He will not be forgotten, though. He leaves behind three children, and the port holdings are secured to our advantage, with little bloodshed, thanks to Axandrei’s foresight. We will have stable supplies now, without the onerous taxation, and the coastal people will have the benefits of our greater civilisation. And magic. We are to send mages there, did you know? High Mage Krayfon has found a new way to use vessels, one that will work more reliably than at present, so he is to recruit many more mages to supply to the coast.”
That made me smile. Cal had confessed rather sheepishly to Krayfon that his jade belt was not the only one, that there were, in fact, scores of them scattered around the Imperial City. Krayfon had seen the possibilities very quickly. They could be supplied fully powered to any mage, without the need for a renewal, and they could be varied in strength – only one or two jade vessels would replicate the power of a normal vessel, but more could be added as needed. They would make it easy to train new mages, and although there was resistance to giving up the rituals of the initiation and renewal, it was also a relief that there would not be so many failures. In truth, it wouldn’t be possible to provide mages for the port holdings without them. But that was all mage business, and I said nothing to Yannassia.
“Perhaps such a position would suit you, Kyra?” she said. “The coastal towns are quite different from Kingswell, far less formal.”
It was a subtle hint that I wasn’t welcome at Kingswell anymore. No one would be so discourteous as to snub me openly, not when I was a mage, and had the favour of the Drashon, but they didn’t know quite how to deal with me. I was inextricably linked with the whole sorry affair of Drei’s death, and it would be a relief to many people to have me gone, no longer a painful reminder of a difficult time.
Cal asked me the same question, more than once. One sun when we were wrestling with the intricacies of the Icthari treaty, he sighed and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, as if he wasn’t sleeping properly, and I ached to take him to my bed and let him lie in my arms.
“Have you thought any more about what you will do?” he said. “Where you will go? Because if you want a place on the coast, you’d better speak up soon. Krayfon is about to make his dispositions.”
My gaze drifted to the window of the little room we’d hidden ourselves away in. It was warm in the library – the whole Keep was always warm – but outside the snow fell steadily. “The port holdings are a long way south, aren’t they? So the winters will be worse.”
“It doesn’t quite work that way. The holdings we deal with are sheltered from the wildest storms, and the sea makes it less cold in winter, and less warm in summer.”
“Does it? How does that work?”
He laughed, and I was pleased to have given him some amusement. He was always subdued at that time. “Trust me, it does. Further west, there are ports where the sea freezes in winter, and further east are some that never get snow but ten moons in the year have incessant rain. We have similar oddities in Bennamore. Ardamurkan is further south than Kingswell, but gets less snow because it’s sheltered by hills to the east. Would you like to move back to Ardamurkan?”
There were attractions in that. Deyria was there, for a start, and amidst the frequent messages she’d sent telling me excitedly about the progress of her pregnancy, she’d more than once said wistfully that she wished I were closer. I had friends there, too, and happy memories. There were difficulties, though, the main one being the Kellon, whose anger at his son’s death had driven him all the way to Kingswell to find out for himself exactly what had happened. I wasn’t sure that he would forgive me.
“There are plenty of other towns to choose from,” Cal said. “You could go anywhere you want.”
“Will you come with me?” I blurted out. “Wherever I go, will you come too?”
“If you’d like me to,” he said evenly, but I thought he looked a little brighter. Then, hesitantly, “I’m still your mentor, after all, and you still have a lot to learn, I think. About climate, if nothing else. So if you want me, I’ll come.”
“But what do you want?”
“What I’ve always wanted, for you to be happy. And to be near you.”
I caught my breath. We’d rarely been open with each other. There’d always been some reason for dancing round the truth, but no longer.
“Will you sleep with me?” I asked. Another abrupt question. Oh, for a little subtlety.
“Of course, if that’s what you want.” No hesitation there.
“I want to know what you want.”
The Fire Mages Page 48
