Lightborn

by Alison Sinclair

  “No,” the archduke said, quietly. “You already have been.”

  Her panicked stroke of sonn made him flinch; the flinch angered him, but at himself, not her, she realized as, deliberately, pointedly, he leaned forward in his chair, toward her.

  “I have had no trial. No defense. My husband—” And then she pressed her hand to her lips in shame. Law might hold Balthasar as her husband responsible for her deeds, as under it he and she were one. Should she try to shelter behind him, she might drag him to her fate. “You can’t,” she blurted, through her fingers. “Balthasar didn’t even know. You cannot condemn him. This is all my fault.”

  “I don’t,” said the archduke. “I don’t condemn your husband. I don’t even condemn you.” He smiled, strangely. “Arthritis of the joints is a family weakness. Even at my age, I no longer knew what it was to leap out of bed. Now my knees feel as though they belong to a man of twenty. And as for this being all your fault—dear lady, this one took a committee.”

  “But I am the one condemned,” she murmured.

  “I will deal with the rest in good time,” the archduke said. “Even, the Sole God help me, with my brother, who told me the truth at last. But if I am to do that, there must be no question whatsoever that my will is my own.” A pause. “Do you understand me, Lady Telmaine?”

  Oh, God. Sorcery, the very charge that pursued Ishmael, carried a penalty of death—for magic died with the mage and only thus could sorcery assuredly be lifted. “I did not ensorcell you!” she whispered.

  “Can you prove it? Can I prove it? Can I even know it?” In that last question, in that raw undertone, she heard her fate. It was his own fear of magic that condemned her, as it had condemned Ishmael.

  He said, steady again, “What Mycene and Kalamay have done, what Vladimer permitted them to do, could start a civil war with the Lightborn. I do not know whether the mages are satisfied with their retribution, or whether there will be more. But if I am to deal with the Lightborn, and Mycene and Kalamay, I must have the unequivocal support of all my remaining dukes and barons, and of most of the lesser nobility. And I will not have that if there is any question of a magical influence.”

  She was utterly numb, insensitive to either feeling or heat, the dreadful power of her fires as remote as the never-felt sun.

  “A trial for sorcery,” the archduke said, “would allow unacceptable publicity. Because you are Anaxamander Stott’s daughter, the law allows for an in-camera judgment of your peers in a case prejudicial to the interests of the archdukedom. Which this surely is. Of his own volition, and bravely so, Claudius spoke in your defense.”

  He did not state what the judgment had been. He did not need to. “Balthasar?” she whispered.

  “You have my personal guarantee that any charges against him arising from this will be stricken. He will, however, remain responsible for his own actions; I cannot spare him that.”

  “Amerdale? Florilinde?” She would not pray to the Sole God, who had renounced all bonds of family. And she could not pray to the Mother, patroness of Lightborn and mages. So who would watch over her children?

  “I will do everything I can for them,” he said. Perhaps he might be thinking of his own children, younger than her daughters when their mother died.

  “Mama . . . ? Merivan . . . ?”

  “I doubt,” the archduke said slowly, “they will be blamed.”

  Ensorcellment, she understood. She would be blamed for ensorcelling them to help her escape. Once she was dead, so, too, was their guilt.

  Her brothers? Her sisters—Anarysinde . . . ? Surely Anarys would have no appeal as a bride to Ferdenzil Mycene now. Except that his father . . . but she could not think of that. Sylvide—but Sylvide was dead. The people she had known, well and less well, liked and disliked, in society . . . to whom else did she owe a plea for the archduke’s mercy?

  Ishmael? She whispered, “You’re wrong about him.”

  “About whom?”

  “Baron Strumheller.”

  The archduke said nothing. He did not agree; he would offer neither hope nor forgiveness there. Perhaps he even blamed Ishmael for her disaster.

  Could she go well to her death, and hope he would think better of her, and spare Ishmael and Balthasar on her behalf? She was not sure she knew how. Death, as she knew it in life, had been sudden and savage, the wrenching loss of a friend from a sickness in the blood when she was a child, the death of one of her young suitors in a hunting accident, the shocking death in childbirth of a girl from her presentation year, not a year after her wedding. Her father’s sudden death, unexpected to her, not to him. She had touched death in others, chance-brushed soft old skin and felt the pain of tumors, the failing of heart or lungs or kidneys. She had sensed, over and over again, the fear of death in her female friends, for themselves and their children, and the grief of death in her grandparents’ peers. During her long labor with Florilinde she had been convinced she would die. A moment before Ishmael had shot the Shadowborn, she had felt her life being uprooted, with her magic, from her flesh; when he had shot it, she had felt its death.

  But none of the deaths she had felt or observed, none of the deaths she had enacted as a child making believe in the nursery, none of the deaths she had even feared, included being shackled to a post before sunrise, or placed in a box with slits in it—the traditional death by blades of light.

  “How will it be done?” she heard herself say, in the cool tones of a lady forced to discuss a most disagreeable subject.

  He made a sound in his throat, as though he had choked back an involuntary protest.

  She had no sense of whether it was light or dark outside, whether she must linger one hour or twelve in this condemned but not yet dead state. “Is it light outside yet?”

  “It is,” he said, in a half-strangled voice. “But—there is an execution room within the palace.” She remembered Vladimer’s grisly tour of the palace’s halls and history and that room that could be opened to sunlight, for the discreet disposal of the condemned. That was what Vladimer had meant, about protections not available to the common-born: in the interests of the state, she would be denied a trial.

  The archduke came to his feet. She did not need magic to feel the effort it took for him to do so without rushing. “I can give you—I will give you time to say good-bye to your mother, write your letters, set your affairs in order. If you need a physician, one will be called. If you need a priest, there is one in the palace. I give you my word that inasmuch as it is in my power, your family will not suffer for your being condemned as a sorceress.”

  But it is not in your power, she thought. You already said so. Nor is it in your power to grant me what I most wish, the chance to say farewell to my husband and daughters. I wonder if you tried to persuade each other it is a kindness that I not speak to them, or they to me. Or a kindness that you have treated me to a swift execution, and not slow death by blades of light.

  I do not like your notions of kindness, my lords.

  “Your Grace,” she said, more firmly, lowering her hands from her face. “Would you please tell me one thing? What was your vote?”

  “I . . . abstained,” he said, his voice very quiet.

  Ten

  Telmaine

  She wrote no letters of farewell, but entrusted messages to Balthasar and the children to her mother. Had they been alone, she would have left a message for Ishmael, too, but Mycene’s guards would not leave them.

  They did not touch until the last, until the archduke’s guards came to take her to the execution room. Then Telmaine kissed her mother, and her mother laid her hand along Telmaine’s face, although the turmoil in her mother’s heart and thoughts, and her memories of her brother—all of which perhaps she meant to conceal with her thoughts of love—were nearly unbearable. “Take good care of my children, Mama,” she said huskily. “And Balthasar.”

  Her mother’s brave smile trembled. “Of course, my dear girl. Though I cannot help but wish that he had not ope
ned his door to that woman.”

  “Oh, I, too,” Telmaine said. “But had he not, he would not have been my Balthasar. Do take care of him, please. Don’t let anyone blame him. He has made me very happy, all my married life.”

  Her mother pulled her into her arms, embracing her with a ferocity Telmaine had not expected to find in that small, placid body. “This is so unjust,” she said, not troubling to lower her voice.

  “Pray for me, Mama,” Telmaine said, just loud enough to carry, and then, as though her voice had failed her, breathed, “I mean to escape if I can.”

  In the long walk through the corridors to her place of execution, she discovered for herself what Ishmael already knew, that while the determination to resist required courage, it also lent courage.

  The room to which they led her was the one Vladimer had pointed out. The air inside it was warm, warm with the sun on the outer walls. It had a bare wooden floor and a single wooden chair with no padding or covering—the easier to sweep away the remains, Telmaine realized. She gasped shallowly for air, and nearly shied as the guards told her to sit down. But her faintness decided for her, and probably sensibly so, though her skin crept away from contact with the wood. The guards might have forced and shackled her otherwise. She had hardly noticed them until now; now, listening to them, she wondered what made them so willing to conduct a woman, even a mage, to such a death. Phineas Broome had been noticeably absent during these last hours. Had he objected that she, an outrage to his pride but a mage nonetheless, had been sentenced outright to death? Or was it delicacy of feeling on his part? Or cowardice, pure and simple?

  She could but hope he was nowhere near, or that he had rethought his service, because she could not think of a way out of this trap other than by magic.

  As soon as the door closed behind the guards, she was out of the chair, sonning around the room. All the walls were solid, but the ceiling—the ceiling had a large recessed area, like the sealed windows in a house once Lightborn. It would open to flood the room with sunlight, and it was far beyond her reach. She set her ear against the door, listening with all her being for sound outside. Nothing. She pressed bare hands against the metal of the lock, concentrating on the structures within. If she could sense the working of a body through her hands, and heal tissues with her will, why shouldn’t she realign the mechanism of a lock? Though the anatomy of locks was another thing Balthasar had not thought to learn, or Ishmael to teach her—surely his eclectic knowledge included that—and she would be sure to tax them each with that when they met again.

  She prodded frantically at surfaces. Oh, sweet Imogene, let this work; let her live, to tax them.

  She felt something shift within the lock, and pressed deeper, and felt the soft vibrations as cylinders fell and the pronounced click as the shaft dropped back. She groped for the handle, turned it. A thin sheet of cool air, redolent of darkness and safety, washed over her fingers as the door cracked open. No shouts of alarm came, no heavy shoulder jammed the door closed. She eased the door just wide enough, and slid through, and closed it very quietly behind her.

  No one sonned or seized her. For several breaths she simply stood with her back against the wall, coming to believe both that she had been put in the room to die and that she had escaped it.

  Escaped it, but not the archducal palace itself. They would be back to confirm her execution. She must find somewhere to hide until sunset, when she might escape in truth.

  Then she heard a door close, very softly, at the far end of the corridor. Someone had come into the corridor, someone moving as stealthily as she. More so, because the murmur of skirts would be audible. A man, therefore, and alone.

  She heard a click against the baseboard, as though a shoe had tapped it. The brush of a foot on carpet, close. A breath, almost at her ear. She swung her bare hand up, clouted a head with her forearm. Sonn rang off the bones of her skull, but she had him, her hand gripping the side of his face, her magic pouring into him. Recognition came with the touch of the feverish heat of his skin, the feverish workings of thought. She caught him as he slumped against her, unable to do more than slow both of them in their fall, and shield as best she could his right arm. They sprawled together on the bare floor, his cane toppling heavily across her skirts.

  She struggled up on her elbow, her fingers reaching for his face. Vladimer. He was dressed for travel in a long coat and stout boots that would give his ankle support, his right arm held in a sling. Her sonn resolved a revolver in a waist holster, and a bulky bag of something soft in his left pocket. His blood was sour with drugs, the strong sedatives that had surely been used to subdue him and the stimulants he must have taken to counteract them. Within the wound, the torn muscles were beginning to heal, but the bullet had cracked bone, and the inflammation around that was still fiery. She had to struggle not to extend healing. She did not want him fit and able to thwart her. And for Sylvide, he deserved to suffer.

  What could she do with him? The moment she released him, he would start to wake. Once he woke, he would raise the alarm, if he did not hunt her down himself.

  But if anyone knew how to hide in the palace, and to leave unobtrusively, he did. She slipped her left hand into his coat and eased out the revolver. She remembered the gunman at the station, dying with a bolt from Vladimer’s cane in him, and nudged its weight off her skirts. Oh, sweet Imogene, she was not Vladimer’s equal, in speed or cunning.

  Should she simply compel him? If anyone deserved it, he did. And she still had her touch; she had just proved so.

  But if she did so, it would make her the sorceress she was accused of being.

  His sonn caught her as she backed away, his revolver in her right hand, trained on him, his cane in her left. Her sonn caught him as he pushed himself to a sitting position. His hand went to his empty holster, clenched, and twitched away. “Lady Telmaine.” His expression was angrily ironic. “Congratulations.”

  “I’m leaving. Don’t try and stop me.”

  Vladimer levered himself to his knees, and climbed slowly to his feet, bracing his elbow as he leaned against the wall. The posture was painfully reminiscent of Ishmael. “May I have my cane, please?”

  “Not unless you help me.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the bulky roll of soft material. “That’s exactly what I came to do. Take off your jewelry, open the door, and spread this”—he held out the roll—“on the chair. Hurry! ”

  She propped the cane against the wall, well out of his reach, and inched forward to take the bag. It was surprisingly heavy and filled with a soft fine powder that smelled of ash. Vladimer’s expression shaded from sardonic into savage at her recoil. “It’s a cursed poor reward for Blondell to be used this way, but do it, woman! Spread him out, drop your baubles on top of him, and let’s go.”

  “But why—”

  “Because Sejanus ordered me to.”

  The ferocity in Vladimer’s tone told her how intensely he resented those orders, and how much they bound him. That made her believe him. Nevertheless, she used the cane to jam the door, knowing that mere threat of death would not deter him from her destruction. One-handed, she spilled the residue of a man on the chair and on the floor, and then fumbled Bal’s love knot from her neck, her wedding rings from her hands, and dropped the necklace on the chair, the rings on the floor. As she did so, she heard from overhead a heavy mechanical thud and the grinding of gears. Vladimer lunged for her, caught her gloved wrist, and heaved her out of the room. The door slammed.

  The sear on her skin faded. When he lunged, she had been convinced she was dead, there and then. She scarcely believed that he had chosen to pull her from the room rather than trap her there. She scarcely believed, again, that she was alive.

  “Pick up the cane,” Vladimer said hoarsely, leaning against the door.

  She crouched, and did so, handing it warily to him, lethal tip leading. He had shot Sylvide, betrayed herself, deceived his brother, and just risked and saved her life. Was he now
playing out a cruel, subtle game of revenge that would still end in her death in an unknown place?

  “The Borders are under attack,” Vladimer said. “Janus just had a telegram from Stranhorne.”

  “Bal?” she said breathlessly. “Ishmael?”

  “Would you move, woman? We can’t stay here to debate it.”

  She leveled the revolver. “Mistress White Hand. We’re going to let her out.”

  From his poised stillness and his intent expression, he was considering his options. Anger steadied her hand, lent her expression a hardness he must believe.

  “If that woman were Darkborn, she would be your husband’s mistress.”

  He knew how to cut deep, Vladimer did. She was not going to explain to him that this was the obligation of one prisoner to another. “That is my business,” she said with a lady’s cool disdain, “and none of yours.”

  Grimly, he yielded. “We need to get out of the corridor, anyway; they’ll be down any minute.”

  There was no sound from the other side of the paper wall when they entered Floria’s room. Suddenly dreading the implications, she whispered, “Mistress White Hand?”

  “Telmaine?” The Lightborn woman’s voice was husky, with fear or shouting. “Telmaine, my lights are orange. I could have less than an hour before they go out completely. If your being here means anything, please, get them to open the skylight!”

  She had thought as much. “That’s what—” A signal from Vladimer changed a we to an I. “I’m here to let you out.” She waved to Vladimer, resolved that if he did not understand, or refused to understand, she would repeat her request aloud. He was at the desk, feeling under it; she tensed, but he came up holding a key. She said, “I’m going to put the key to the outer door into the passe-muraille. The rest is up to you.”

  “Thank the Mother, Telmaine,” Floria breathed. “I thought I was going to die like . . .”

  You need not tell me. She took the key from Vladimer, laid the key inside the passe-muraille, and closed the hatch. “Done,” she said.