by Carol Berg
“DANTE!” I CALLED, BREATHLESS AFTER pelting down corridors and stairs to catch him on his way across the Great Hall.
Staff in hand, he paused, his glare a heated poker between my eyes.
I kept my voice low. “You use the impression on your perimeter and the signature on the Registry to develop a pattern, yes—this keirna that identifies a person?”
“Yes.”
“And magical artifacts can tell us a great deal about the practitioner who enchanted them. Like a signature of another kind. You could use it to explore keirna, as well?”
“Yes.”
“Try this.” He recognized at once what I deposited in his hand, altering his course abruptly for one of the entrances to the Great Hall. I retreated to an adjacent entry and pretended to review the entire day’s guest list, while watching Dante.
Holding what I had just borrowed from Ilario in one hand, he planted his staff on the gray stripe that crossed the threshold. As the guards, the registrar, and scattered guests watched in awe, the silver sheen spread from his staff like a stiff curtain to either side, smudged and layered with shapes of every shade of purple, gray, and blue, as if a crowd stood just beyond it.
Moments stretched. Tame applause echoed from the Rotunda. The gawkers and stragglers remained quiet as if the mystery would ultimately be revealed to them, only to sag in disappointment when Dante lifted his staff and walked away without anything exploding, melting, or catching fire.
Eyes and mind yet dazzled with magical residue, I awaited him behind a cart loaded with tables and crates marked VACUUM JARS and PUMP. The mage dropped Ilario’s crocodile charm into my hand. “Cleverly reasoned, student,” he said. “It appears Adept Fedrigo has not drowned after all.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
25 CINQ THE ANNIVERSARY
“Sonjeur de Duplais!” The swordsman in red and gold livery hailed me from across the Great Hall. “We found the young man.”
“Adept Fedrigo?” I bit eagerly at the possibility. “Already?” Having just spent half an hour passing along his description, I was astonished.
“No, sonjeur,” said the guardsman, reversing course as I fell into brisk step beside him. “The Conte Ruggiere’s lad. Scholar found him hiding in his cart. Rousted him, and the boy bolted. Door guard chased him into the west wing, where we caught him squeezing into a closet.”
The west wing. The king’s residence. The guard’s livery should have told me. “A closet?”
“Captain said we should inform you before questioning the boy.”
“Exactly right.”
After traversing innumerable ever-wider stairs and more elegantly appointed galleries, the guardsman turned from the broad, well-lit corridor, which I recognized as leading to Philippe’s study, into a clean, spare servant’s passage. Two soldiers flanked an open door. Standing inside the cramped mop closet, his gangling limbs in a knot, his tanned cheeks exhibiting a distinctly scarlet cast, was a fuming Ambrose de Vernase.
“Am I under arrest, librarian?” Much to his disgust, his voice chose to display its erratic timbre, sorely diluting his attempt at scorn.
A gray-bearded soldier passed me a sleek dagger with an ivory inlaid handle. “He carried this.”
“What would you suggest we do with a man found sneaking into the king’s residence with a weapon, Lord Ambrose?” I said evenly, slapping the weapon on my palm. Inside, I was cursing politics and hotheaded children and greedy, ambitious men who made children their pawns.
“I wasn’t sneaking anywhere. I was going back to my residence, my father’s apartments, where we’re being held prisoner by our betrayer kin—”
I clapped my hand across the boy’s mouth. “Are you an entire imbecile? Think where you are and speak in a civilized manner.”
The ruddy color drained from his complexion. My suspicions that Michel de Vernase’s children knew facts of importance ran high, and I would have their secrets from them. But I’d no time for coddling a fool just now, and I’d not see a rightfully troubled youth imprisoned for thoughtless words.
As he stewed, I turned to the guards. “Was no watch placed on Conte Ruggiere’s family when they arrived here?”
“Two men outside the door, night and day, sonjeur,” said my escort. “We’ve no idea how he got past them.”
“But here he is, not a spit from His Majesty’s own rooms,” snarled the bearded guard. Clearly he believed the worst. “The conte’s apartments, where his mam and sisters lie, are two corridors over.”
Ambrose lifted his chin and glared at us all. He could not possibly comprehend the danger his father had put him in.
“You’ve stayed here with your father in the past,” I said. “You know your way about. Why would you mistake a closet—?”
Of course. I would wager my year’s pay that one would find a hidden panel in the back of this closet. Philippe would have given Michel apartments that communicated with the royal suite by way of the palace’s hidden ways. Michel might have shown his son the intriguing passages, but more likely the boy had spied his father using them. It was certainly not my place to reveal them to the guards.
“Well, no matter. It’s easy to get confused in so large a place,” I said. “So you were visiting the Exposition. Have you an interest in scientific advancement? Or is it the magic draws you?”
He didn’t even pretend. “I wanted to see him. The king. My own goodfather . I wanted to ask him how he could believe a man who saved his life ten times and spent most of every year away from home in his service could ever betray him. I wanted him to tell me with his own mouth.”
“And did you see anyone you recognized this evening?”
“I wasn’t looking for any but him,” he spat. Not the least twitch of guilty withholding marred his youthful fury. If raw passion exposed truth, then Ambrose de Vernase knew nothing of the night’s events.
“I don’t think there’s more to do here,” I said. “Lord Ambrose must be returned to his mother, whose welfare he should consider ahead of childish whims. Being His Majesty’s goodson, wise in the ways of politics and royalty, he surely knows that until he reaches his majority, his mother is held equally responsible for any libelous word or treasonous act on his part.”
Ambrose’s rose-gold complexion faded to puking yellow. One would think I had slammed a boot into his groin.
“As for escape, such a noble young man’s word should suffice. Is that true, Lord Ambrose?”
Eyes narrowed, he gave something of a positive acknowledgment with head and shoulders.
“Good.” I held out the boy’s dagger. “Then, of course, you will place your hand on your weapon and swear by your mother’s safety and your own honor that you will not leave your father’s apartments by any route—door, window, or other—until such time as your king gives you leave. Do you so swear?”
“I do—” Ambrose had already spoken by the time he comprehended the “any route” part. When his eyes shot up to meet mine, I made sure he could read my understanding of his evasion. His mouth clenched in resentment. “I do. But I’ll make him answer. Be sure of it.”
Sacre angeli! I gripped his shoulders and shook him. “Treason is not a contest, Ambrose. Nor are you a child, whose thoughtless transgressions can be indulged and forgiven. Cool your emotions and heed reason. Your path is grown exceeding narrow this night.”
His demeanor did not change, which did not mean he failed to comprehend. I hoped.
“Take him back to his mother. Tell her to put a leash on him.”
“Whatever my father’s done, he has good reason,” said the boy, his dark eyes filling with angry tears. “But you and your mage and . . . and the lord who put you up to it . . . have done worse. You think you can hurt people and no one will guess. I’ll see you pay for what you’ve done.”
Though he wrestled and squirmed, the guards marched him away held securely between them.
The young palace aide who’d fetched me shut the closet door. “I may be speaking out of turn,
sonjeur. Forgive me, if so, but you seem to have the lad’s interest at heart. I don’t know that the contessa will talk sense to him. The strain of the conte’s disappearance . . . his situation . . . she is not the same woman as visited here in the past.”
“How could she be?” I murmured as he left me. Confirming that, indeed, a hidden passage could be accessed from the dark corner of the closet did nothing to soothe my unease.
STARS SHONE INSIDE THE ROTUNDA’S dome. Or rather, silver lights dotted the blackness that filled the great vault, some randomly scattered, some clustered into familiar patterns—the Arch of Heaven, the Bowman, the Three Oxen, the Winter Cup. Some of the “stars” above our craning heads whirled and spun. Orviene adjusted a wooden cylinder and a disk of silver in his spell enclosure, made an entirely unnecessary circling wave of his arm, and a fiery chariot drawn by six giant eagles flew across a silver crescent moon. The compact and powerful charioteer was surely meant to be Sante Ianne the Reborn, though the saint of wisdom was commonly portrayed as returning on the back of one eagle rather than driving six. Perhaps Orviene was a cult ist like Ilario, or perhaps the chariot was merely a dramatic image, chosen because the mage couldn’t think of anything more interesting.
Was pure illusion the best Orviene could offer? Thanks to Ambrose’s misbehavior, I’d arrived at the Rotunda only at the end of Orviene’s display, but I was already sorely disappointed.
The chariot circled the vault. The air smelled faintly of rain. My hair and limp shirt collar shifted slightly in a wispy breeze, a poor reality out of proportion to the chariot’s size and speed. The children enjoyed Orviene’s work best, squealing in delight as he produced pink and yellow lightning and a rain shower that spattered on doublets and bodices, but felt more like swarming gnats than water droplets. The adult onlookers applauded politely as a grand gesture produced a red-orange sunrise entirely lacking in heat.
As the smiling mage bowed to the audience and made the required obeisance to a stone-faced Philippe, footmen turned up the lamps. The true daylight outside the thick walls had faded. But despite the passing hour and whatever drowsiness might have been encouraged by wine and supper and a less than stirring demonstration, not one soul left the chamber. Guests whispered to their neighbors, and fingers pointed to a shadowed space beside the dais where Dante stood, eyes closed, forehead touching his staff, as if in prayer.
Knowing Dante was more likely to be engaged in spellwork than prayer, I felt my own excitement rise, though reason insisted I should be gnawing bricks by now. Maura was waiting.
I planted my back on one of the columns that supported the vault. Let Dante open his eyes, if he wanted to know where I was.
Orviene left the dais to a scattering of applause. Seemingly oblivious to several scornful comments about “tricks to amuse children,” he began chatting amiably with guests seated on the front rows, as he packed his materials into a bag.
“Get you gone, mage!” Dante’s voice cracked the restive quiet, as he emerged from the shadows, his staff jabbing at Orviene’s paraphernalia. “These folk have serious magic yet to see this night! Take your trinkets with you.”
When some of the guests tittered, Orviene—complexion purpled—snatched up his bag and hurried off, abandoning his enclosure strings and metal chips.
The shocked murmurs quieted quickly, as Dante stepped onto the dais. His blue silk robes rippled, and his collar gleamed, the fine gold inlay reminding all that this was a master’s collar, not the plain silver of a lesser mage like Orviene. His white staff began to gleam of its own light, brighter by the moment, while the lamplight dulled—flames not snuffed or reduced, but muted in quality as if the air grew thicker.
My skin shivered, itched, half numb, half heated, as do pursed lips when one blows a single low note for much too long.
“We’ve been asked to show wonders,” Dante said, leaning on his staff, his ruined hand hidden inside his flowing sleeve, as always, “and I, a crude man, unaccustomed to what noble lords and ladies and celebrated scholars deem wonderful, have watched and learned this night. The astronomers created slotted shades and built apparatus to demonstrate what they cannot explain. But any alley brat lucky enough to find a shard of broken glass on a sunny day might do as well.”
The onlookers gasped as a rainbow of light shot from the top of his staff, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. And they clapped as the colored rays bent and joined together into a single white beam, like a single stem emerging from a spread of colorful roots.
I did not applaud. My gut constricted, because I heard his heated scorn glaring like a summer sunrise, and even halfway across the room I tasted the bitterness feeding his magic. Could no one else sense it? Why were those nearest him not squirming backward? Had my body not been pressed against a solid surface already, I would have done so.
“But I celebrate these academicians of the natural world as you do. They attempt to learn. They map the heavens and theorize about its structure and movements. They quantify and record and seek answers, and create”—his white beam bent and moved, traversing the upturned faces, pale and dark, young and old, smiling, amazed, puzzled, until it reached my own, near blinding me with the glare—“magnifying spectacles, so that lowly secretaries with weary eyes may read the words they scribe for trivial men. Useful things.”
Laughter rippled through the silk- and satin-clad rows and lapped at my shoulders from those behind me. Heat rushed to my cheeks, and my hand came up to shield my eyes, which were not wearing the spectacles at the moment. Was this why he’d wanted me here?
Even as humiliation burned, I could not but contrast the searing heat of the beam with Orviene’s simulacrum of sunlight. Every person Dante’s light touched must realize the same. After what seemed an age, the beam moved on, and so did the mage’s introduction.
“But even a king’s astronomers cannot lift you into the heavens, any more than they can take you inside their beams of light. Not yet. And so next, we saw the practitioner deemed collar-worthy by the Camarilla Magica attempt such a journey. But he teased you with air painting, no more real than the inhabitants of this ancient dome.”
The white beam and its bright-colored roots vanished. Now the staff, raised high, gave off a broad, spreading glow that illuminated the vault, immersing all of us below in a sea of shadows.
Long before the days of Sabria, a people called the Cinnear had built the Rotunda, choosing the ribbed dome, resting on its ring of glass windows, as a repository of their god stories. Centuries later, a Sabrian king had hired artists to cover the painted scenes of beast gods and legends we did not know. In the arced recesses between the vault’s ribs, the artists had laid richly colored mosaics of our own god and the stories of our hero saints.
Though much of the gold background had since flaked away, exposing the faded paintings underneath, and the pendulum suspension cog protruded from the dome’s peak like an unsightly wart, the luminous figures of the Pantokrator and his servants still had power to awe. In the daytime, the thin bracelet of glass about the dome’s base bathed them in sunlight, revealing the richness of lapis and jade, coral and amber. But touched by Dante’s shuddering luminescence, the angels’ wings seemed to ripple as in a mighty wind, and the eyes of the saints, dark-outlined as prescribed by the Temple, widened as if they had just taken notice of earthly life. Their backs bent, their raised hands reached down toward us all. . . .
The air boiled, thick as a posset. My wind-whipped hair and collar stung my cheeks. Terror wriggled its way into my craw, though it had no name and no shape that made sense.
I shook my head and blinked, and the saints and angels retreated to the ceiling. Shivering, I forced my eyes from the vault.
“Heaven’s gates, so beautiful,” murmured a woman just beside me, her sighs merging with a chorus of awe from the rest of the chamber. What did she see? Did no one feel the danger? Gowns, scarves, lace, and hair riffled, disarranged by the wind of angels’ wings.
Dante lowered his staff, a
nd every eye shifted his way. “Perhaps you would rather travel to places of your own choosing,” he said, and he twirled his staff in his hand, now pointing it at the wooden dais. Spinning in place, he quickly scribed a circle with a rill of blue flame.
As one, the onlookers inhaled, but did not cry out or panic, for the fire did not spread or grow. Inside the circle, Dante crouched down—I could not see what he did—then rose up and settled into his meditative posture, eyes closed, head pressed to the carved hornbeam staff. “Consider regrets,” he said, “those unfortunate things you would change. We could travel into that demesne. . . .”
All around me, people closed their eyes. Like sheep. Like herdbeasts allowing themselves to be led into worse danger. Oh, I knew regrets, but I would not play. I held my eyes open.
But darkness bloomed from his circle of fire, blinding my common eyes. And with night came memory and a fiery wounding. . . .
The knife rips down my left arm, and five different places on my chest and back and side, as if my father is trying to carve the cursed mark—the interlaced S and V—into every part of my wretched flesh. Into my heart.
Get up, get up! On your feet, Portier, or die this moment. Sweet angels defend! Grab the madman’s wrist. Ignore the pummeling; that hand holds no blade. Hold on. . . .
The gut wound, explosive agony moments before, cools. A blessing, save that my legs are losing all feeling at the same time. Blood pulses weakly from my belly and arm. Numb feet stumble sideways, dragging the scrawny madman along with me, his face contorted, bloody.
“Master! Help me! Dufreyne . . . Garol . . . Mother . . . someone!” My calls bring no succor, and he does not stop his flailing. The earth wavers . . . light shimmers . . . fades into gray . . . Let go and he’ll strike again . . . and you’ll die. Retain your hold and you’ll collapse . . . and die. Choose.
