Shadowborn (33 page)

He was glad she was at his side, though he had not expected to find her so disconcerting. In the sentimental manner of boy and youth, he had presumed she was beautiful, but it was a shock to find that she truly was, even with her hair scraped and netted back and that wary, hard expression. Hers was an elegant, bone-cast beauty that would last into old age. He knew women who had labored all their lives as domestics and at the factories, but he had never met one whose strength had been groomed like a fine racehorse. She asserted herself in space like a man—indeed, like a nobleman—expecting others to yield to her. Only her voice, familiar to him since early childhood, was the same.

Six vigilants, including Captain Lapaxo, escorted them. From Floria’s descriptions of the palace, he knew that the walls had been painted by some of the finest artists in the land. He could even have said what the panels depicted, had he known exactly where he was, from her descriptions. But to sonn alone, they were featureless.

“Who?” Floria murmured to Lapaxo.

He replied, “Helenja.”

The dowager consort, mother of the princess, and descendant of Odon the Breaker, a southern lord reviled in Darkborn history.

“Why?”

“Y’think she’d tell me?” Lapaxo said. And even lower, though not low enough to escape Balthasar’s hearing, “You believe him, about Rupertis?”

So the captain of vigilants knows about the report,
Balthasar thought.
Good.
The more who knew, the better.

“He hasn’t been seen since, has he?”

They finished the walk in silence, passed by a wide double door, and were shown through—threaded through—a narrower side door into a suite of rooms even hotter than outside.

Helenja, dowager consort, was a heavyset woman with a broad, handsome face oddly enhanced by a once-broken nose. Perhaps among the southern clans, such an injury did not merit a healing. Perhaps it was even a mark of beauty or vigor. At her side was a lean man with a fine, crafty face and a caul marking him as one of the highest in the land. His clothing, though of Lightborn style, had panels of lace that Balthasar recognized as Darkborn work and that Telmaine would have priced to the penny. Balthasar suspected he could put a name to him: Prasav, Isidore’s cousin and nearest rival. The young woman with him, whose resemblance suggested she might be kin, wore an expression of covert fascination, her face not quite turned toward him.

He swept sonn over the others, making himself pay attention to their positions, groupings, and alignments to try to distinguish advisers, attendants, and hangers-on. A few he recognized: Mistress Silver Branch, with her clerk, who was trying to make himself as small as possible. Balthasar hoped he had not endangered the man by making him record his testimony. The young mage who had tested him at the door, and—he realized this with a pang of visceral alarm—two of the group whom he had challenged on the streets.

Helenja waved them forward. “This is the one?” she said to them.

An unnerved silence. Then they tried to answer together. “Yes, Mistress Helenja.” “But we—”

“‘Yes’ is sufficient.” To Floria: “Why did you not bring him directly to me?”

“I was stopped at the door.”

“Mmph,” said the dowager, swinging across to stand in front of Balthasar, studying him up and down. “I admit, I expected something a little more impressive.” Her head turned toward the door, then back to him, and she pointed to one side. “Over there.”

He did as indicated. At a hand signal from Lapaxo, two of the vigilants joined him. Helenja did not object to them, but she stopped Floria as she made to accompany him. “I want you there.”

On the opposite side of the room. Floria went, a threat in her expression.

Helenja returned to her place midway between them and waited. There were few chairs, which was in keeping with the Lightborn’s aversion to showing infirmity. He should maybe have accepted Floria’s offer of a stimulant, except he remembered too well the effect of her stimulants on the unaccustomed constitution. He hardened himself to endure.

Some minutes later, the double doors abruptly folded back. “The princess, Mistress Helenja, Master Prasav.” Vigilants and mages filed in, followed by a tall young woman with an elaborately woven cap of hair who stopped three strides in and spun to face him with expression of appalled revulsion.

“So,” Helenja said, with a long sigh of satisfaction.

The newcomer controlled her face, though her throat worked involuntarily with nausea, and turned to face Helenja. “Your message said you needed to speak to me urgently.”

“Princess,” Helenja said, “I presume you have not yet had a copy of that extraordinary report prepared by Mistress Tempe’s clerk. Meet Dr. Balthasar Hearne, Darkborn.”

So this was the usurper princess. Floria had cast aspersions on her courage and honor, but Floria was a woman of slow-shifting loyalties, and one who preferred her world ordered, and all those in it predictable. The mage princess offended both loyalty and order, and no one could have predicted her ascent. To his sonn, the princess seemed far too young for her role, tired, nervous, and overburdened—another person rolled over and harried by events and others’ wishes. He felt a great empathy for her.

She tried to recover her balance. “That’s . . . not amusing, Helenja.”

“No, it’s not amusing at all that the Temple has lied to us.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said on an exhale.

“Of course you do.” Helenja’s waving hand scattered hard echoes of metal and gems. “Fejelis claimed that lineage mages could not sense Shadowborn magic, but that sports could. For that, the Temple allowed his unrighteous deposition, because they could not afford to have us believe that they were unable to defend themselves or us against Shadowborn magic. You, however, are not a lineage mage. What do you sense about that man?”

“He cannot be Darkborn,” the princess said, a little desperately.

“I have witnesses who found him walking the streets without lights,” Helenja said. “Shall we try that?” she said to Balthasar. “Put him in a darkened room.”

“If that is what you have to do,” Balthasar said, “do it.”

Helenja rewarded him with a smile. Floria’s stance gave the impression of a cat about to pounce. “She”—Helenja gestured toward the young judiciary mage—“tested him at the door. She thought his mind had been broken by the horror of the tower’s destruction. But you have another explanation, don’t you?”

“Mistress Helenja, Mother, I can’t—”

“You can’t
what
?” The dowager’s voice was a growl. “Two-thirds of the contracts held within this palace are contracts to protect us against hostile magic. If the Temple cannot protect us—as the attack on its own tower showed—then those contracts are invalid.”

Balthasar drew a breath. “Princess,” he said, “Mistress Helenja. Forgive me, but the integrity of your contracts is an internal matter between the Temple and you. I am here to prove the existence of the Shadowborn, and to assert Darkborn innocence in crimes you have held them responsible for.”

Helenja’s expression was one she would have turned on a potted plant that had rustled its leaves and spoken aloud.

“Princess,” Balthasar pressed. “You may be the only person in this palace able to sense this ensorcellment, but you
can
sense it. Your reaction showed it.”

“It was Floria—”

“You turned toward me, not Floria,” he said gently. “My ensorcellment is the more recent, and probably the stronger.”

A shiver passed through her; her face changed. “Come with me,” she said, in a voice deeper and more authoritative than before. He had taken a step forward before he recognized that there was magic behind it, magic working on him. In sudden panic, he struggled against it. From the far side of the room, Floria shouted, “Under whose contract do you use magic against us?”

The compulsion stopped. The princess said in her own voice, “The high masters will see you now. Please come with me.”

“Take him,” Prasav said swiftly. Helenja merely gave a sour smile at his preemptive gamesmanship. “We will speak again,” she said to Balthasar, a statement that had the quality of a threat—though against whom, he could not tell. He forced himself to walk steadily forward and not even to turn his head toward Floria. Pride and honor precluded his taking her into danger with him. Then he found her at his side once more, her face showing something of his own panic and resentment at being overpowered so—when she shouted out, she had said “magic against
us
.” He tried to take her hand, but she shook herself free with a frown and set her hand on the hilt of her rapier.

Three men and two women waited for them in an upstairs suite. The most remarkable of the men was a small, wiry man wearing nothing more than a loincloth and sandals. The less remarkable of the women was a plain, middle-aged woman in a featureless tunic that covered her to midshin.

He dipped a bow to the man in the loincloth, as though to the archduke himself, taking a bold guess at his identity. “Magister Archmage.”

The high masters also regarded him as they might a speaking plant. There was no revulsion in their reaction, despite their far greater strength than that of the second-rank princess, further confirmation that they could not sense the Shadowborn ensorcellment. He felt a movement behind him, and Perrin passed by him, her face working, to stand between the archmage and Valetta. The archmage glanced aside at her, questioning; she gave a jerky nod. And then the nausea and the personality in her face simply drained out, and she stood silent, swaying slightly.

“Balthasar Hearne,” Valetta said, “we wish to examine the magic that Magistra Viola—Princess Perrin—senses on you, through her. We will try to do you no harm, but we cannot promise that harm may not come to you.”

“Magistra, this is what I came for, in expectation”—he stressed the word—“that my presence here, and the ensorcellment on me, would convince you that what the archduke said to you is true. I consent to your examination.”

He had no sooner finished than a great, disorientating surge of magic rolled over him. He was aware of Floria first gripping his arm and then supporting him. a voice said in his mind,

“I’m not,” he gasped out. All he had ever had was the ability to sense concerted, powerful magic—like last night—and a diagnostic acumen that Olivede reckoned was due to a tenuous sense of the inner workings of the body that might, were it stronger, be magic. But otherwise, he could not even touch-read, could certainly not heal, and could anticipate no longer a life than any other earthborn. Conversely, he had been spared the stigma his sister lived under.

He came back to himself lying on a wide, comfortable bed of stretched netting. His sonn picked out a circular relief on the ceiling above him, a stylized sun whose rays extended to each distant corner. Many Lightborn rooms had such a device, and he remembered Floria telling him that it was a potent symbol even to those who did not associate it with any divinity. This one was as molded and detailed as any Darkborn ceiling decoration. He said, vaguely, “That would be painted gold, wouldn’t it?”

Floria leaned over him, her expression anxious. “I’m all right,” he said, and demonstrated so by sitting up. He didn’t realize until he was upright that he had used his sprained wrist without pain, and that the bandage was gone from his other hand. He felt his face; the tenderness from the scoring was also gone; he could no longer feel the seams. And he did not ache. He felt astonishingly well.

They were not in a holding cell—his swift cast around the room showed a large, strangely furnished suite—but he would study his surroundings later. “What happened?” he said, urgently. “What did they say? What did they decide?”

“To me, nothing,” she said, unhappily.

“I’m all right,” he said again. “No more ill effects than a day of very disturbing dreams, and physically, very well. Did I pass out?”

“No,” she said. “You stood, you walked, but you simply—like Perrin—seemed to disappear from inside yourself.”

“Disturbing,” he acknowledged for her; he would examine his own feelings later. “So you noticed a change in me, and then, even if they did not say anything, could you describe what happened? Were you also”—he could not, he found, say the word “ensorcelled,” could not apply it the actions of those he hoped would be, needed to be, allies—“held as I was?”

“No,” she said, frowning. “I was aware throughout. They were much more interested in you.”

“They’d have had plenty of time to study your ensorcellment, if they’d wanted.” He frowned in turn, a new thought occurring to him. “If the ensorcellment is still active, then it was not due to the Shadowborn Ishmael killed—Jonquil, they called him—or the one called Midora, who died in Stranhorne Manor.”
Was that Sebastien, too? Or one of the others?
Was Floria’s connection to his family the reason the Shadowborn had chosen her to carry the talisman to Isidore? A shudder of sheer rage went through him, unattenuated by the ensorcellment.

No
, unattenuated by
any
ensorcellment.

“Balthasar?” she said, her tone wary, almost warning. She had advised him about keeping his composure. But how else should he react to these . . . atrocities now that he no longer needed to warp his own thoughts and emotions simply to survive?

He heard his voice, distorted by the intensity of his emotion. “They’ve annulled the ensorcellment on my will. They’ve left the ensorcellment protecting me against light, or they’ve assumed it—or I’d be dead by now.”

He had to think. Why should they have lifted the ensorcellment? Why might they have assumed his protection? Was he their chance to practice with Shadowborn magic? Could they do so through the princess? Did that trace of magic in him mean that they cared about the ensorcellment on him? That they had healed him suggested it might. He wished he knew whether they had removed the ensorcellment on Floria. “Did you get any sense of what they might do now?” he asked her, desperate for
some
answer to any question.