Shadowborn (50 page)

“Too early to say,” Balthasar said. “Mycene came back to the city only a week ago to settle his father’s affairs; he’d been helping the Stranhornes deal with the survivors of the Shadowborn’s army.” His expression was suddenly stark, haunted—remembering what? She thought of what she had sensed from him when he said he had gone to the Borders to find her. Find her amongst the dead and senseless, the dead and the hideously mutated.

She swallowed. “I . . . Could they be changed back? ”

“Not and live,” Balthasar said bleakly.

He drew a breath and resumed, with a self-possession she was beginning to find eerie. “The mages are interested in those territories as well, though Prince Fejelis is working hard to try to prevent the Temple from moving out of Minhorne. They’re feeling vulnerable, I think, and—” He checked himself and left that thought unspoken—
for the moment,
she resolved. “Long-term, I think Sejanus would rather like Vladimer for governor of the Darkborn aspect of the territory.”

“You’re very free with the archduke’s name, all of a sudden,” she observed.

“I’ve got to know him better. He’s a good man. He asked me to offer you his apology for what he put you through, and his thanks for everything you have done. He will, of course, offer you his thanks in person and in public, when you are fit.”

“I’ll forgive him what he did to me, but not what he did to you. He should have
told
you
immediately
that he hadn’t had me executed.”

“In the circumstances, he didn’t know that Vladimer had, in fact, carried out his orders. So what could he say—that he’d tried to save you, and failed? ”

There was obviously no use arguing, but she would have the matter out with Sejanus Plantageter. “This envoy post,” she prompted. “That’s why you have
that
ensorcellment on you.”

“Yes,” he said. “By contract with the Lightborn Temple, the first ever arranged between Darkborn and Lightborn. How much do you know about what happened in Stranhorne, about Sebastien—”

“I know you
beat
him,” she said, fiercely. “I know you freed yourself and saved the archduke. That’s
all
I need to know.” Which was ridiculous of her, she knew, because as they shared a bed, she would have no choice but to know everything, but she would not let him condemn himself for weakness. “And then you went over to the Lightborn side, to prove—” A sudden, frightening thought came to her. “Are you
staying
there? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? ”

“No,” Balthasar said, emphatically. He took her hand, turned it up, cradled it between his hands. “I did not want to get to this until you were stronger, but I suppose it is inevitable . . . given that you can’t help knowing what I think. Telmaine, we—Darkborn and Lightborn, earthborn and mage—came closer to disaster over this than I ever want us to come again. Without Ishmael and you and Vladimer and the Stranhornes, the Shadowborn would have overrun us all.”

And without you as well,
she thought.

“Without the mages, Ishmael’s magic might have destroyed dozens, if not hundreds, more, and perhaps even himself. If Ishmael had died, the Curse would have failed, and we have no idea what the consequences would have been. The best outcome may have been for us to survive, but in a state of civil war.”

“What has
Ishmael
to do with the Curse? ”

“As best I understand it, from Olivede and others, Ishmael has inherited the sustaining of the Curse. Which means it lives as long as he does, if he cannot find a means of either sharing or releasing it. I believe we must work to bring our people to a point at which we can release the Curse. Which won’t happen overnight; I don’t expect it to happen in my own lifetime, but it is what I will be working toward.”

“But you’re not a diplomat, Balthasar. You’re a physician.”

He started to say something; stopped. The animation left his face. “Gil di Maurier died.”

Who ?
The young Borders nobleman whom Balthasar had been treating for his addictions, and whom Ishmael had set to finding out where the kidnappers had taken Florilinde. He had succeeded, too, but in doing so had been badly wounded. She had done what she could to tip his chances toward survival, but covertly and timidly, still trying to protect her social position. Which she had probably lost. And Gil di Maurier was dead. “Balthasar, I’m so sorry. If I had done more—”

“I’m told he just gave up,” Balthasar said, his voice clear with pain. “A version of recent events made its way into the broadsheets, of course, and no one would have thought to restrain their tongues around him. I’m sure he heard his survival being called a miracle. He wasn’t a stupid man. He might have thought it was you; equally, he might have thought it was me. I’d been having some success, after all, when others had given up on him. He had a pathological aversion to magic and mages. In his weakened condition, it was too much for him to suspect that magic had kept him alive.”

Telmaine began to cry. “I meant to help him.”

He drew her against him, tucking her head against his cheek. “I know. So did I. But the wound and the cure were equally mortal.” She could feel his grief, read his memories of the laying-out service. When everyone else had taken shelter at the tolling of the sun bell, he had waited outside by the bier as the sun came up and turned the body of Gil di Maurier to ash.

He seemed to have momentarily forgotten she knew what lay behind his words as he said, “Unfortunately, others feel and will feel as he did. I have already had letters declining my services. So I will think of this envoy post as an extension of my work with the Intercalatory Council—which it is—and know it is something that desperately needs doing. . . . And, Telmaine.” He rested his forehead against hers. “Others lost far more.”

She wanted to cry out the protest that he would not give up so readily, but she sensed, too clearly, that he did not want that. He had changed. He had always been dutiful and intensely civic-minded, but there was a new hardness and purpose to him.

“What will they do to Ishmael if they find him? ” she whispered. “Try him for murder and sorcery?” She heard the edge to her voice as she named the charges, false when they had been laid, but now, in a cruel, twisted way,
true
.

“
Shh,
” Balthasar said. “We’ll find a way. The archduke signed a formal pardon for the original charges, and we’re working on preventing any more from being laid. When it’s safe, we’ll find him. Vladimer’s started working on it already.” He kissed her, a light brush of the lips, and she was not displeased to sense the claim in it. “I could use your help with the Lightborn Temple. You’ve at least had some contact with them, and your being a mage is more than a convenient fiction. They regard women differently on the Lightborn side.”

And he had been spending entirely too much time in their company. “I am
not
a Lightborn woman,” she reminded him, dangerously.

“I know that. But you’re also one of the strongest surviving Darkborn mages. If the Darkborn mages had a representative in the courts—”

“I’d rather have a baby,” she muttered.
I’d rather have my ordinary life back
. Unlike Merivan, she enjoyed the months in confinement, when it was not proper to be in society—assuming, of course, that society would ever admit her again. It was cowardice—she knew it was cowardice—but she could long. . . . Abruptly, through the touch of his skin on hers, she read his thought and reared back.
“Floria?”

His expression was far less penitent than it ought to have been. Alas, surging to her feet and stalking out of the room needed more energy and muscle tone than she had. She started to rise and fell back. “Balthasar,” she protested, detesting the waver in her voice.

“I did hope to wait until later, but yes. Floria has made a request of me, which I am considering honoring.” She snatched her hands pointedly away from his touch; he was lucky her magic was spent. “I love you, Telmaine,” he said. “It tore the heart out of me finding you in Stranhorne, and hearing what you and Ishmael had done. I don’t want you ever to go through that again.”

She pushed down the thought of her and Ishmael’s intimacy. Nagging conscience refuted her argument that it was
not
the same. “What does your being unfaithful to me have to do with that? ”

That made him flinch, as he deserved. “Perhaps it doesn’t, but a child born across sunrise will be one more tie between Darkborn and Lightborn. I owe her my life, three times over, already. I . . . We’ll have to talk about this. . . . I don’t love Floria, not as I love you; I am sure of that now, but I am, and probably always will be, her friend.” He paused. “You’ll know that I’m telling the truth.”

And you’re
still
a rat bastard, Balthasar Hearne,
she thought. “And what about when we find Ishmael?” she flung back at him. “What if
he
still loves me? ”

“Telmaine,” he began, and stopped, and for the first time since she had awakened, that composure of his wavered and she realized how tired he was. How much rest had he had, as envoy between Darkborn and Lightborn courts, and then worrying about her? “You
know
how I feel about you,” he said in a low voice.

Which was true,
curse
him.

“I will take you on
any
terms,” he said, softly. “Because, even without magic, I know you. I know that, angry as you are, you wouldn’t do anything that would truly break my heart.”

“But you would break mine.” She growled.

“No . . .”

There was a long silence. “Do you realize,” he said, slowly, “that as a sixth-rank mage you might outlive me by one or two centuries? And Ishmael by even more. Isolde and Emeya were eight hundred years old when they died.”

“I don’t
care
about centuries.” What mattered was the here and now. If she could learn how to turn him into a—a
cat
, then she need never worry about Floria White Hand again. But what use would he be as a husband then? If she could turn
Floria
into a lizard, now . . . Poor Farquhar Broome would have been appalled. Or maybe not, if he had all the experience he claimed.

“Telmaine? ” he said, sounding uncertain.

She didn’t have to explain what she was thinking, or what she felt, or why she had stifled a giggle, or why she was now starting to cry. She did not want to think about living without Balthasar. When he gathered her against him, she let him.

Eventually he said, “That young man who was working for you and Vladimer, Kip—”

“Kingsley,” she muttered, rubbing her cheek against his collar. She would not permit the ex–prison apothecary to flaunt his dubious birth in her service.

“I think I can use him as a secretary. He’s very sharp.”

He was that. And impertinent, telling her that the Rivermarch would receive her, if society turned her out. “He’s not trained as a secretary.”

“I’m not trained as an envoy,” Balthasar pointed out. “And I do need someone who is, even if they won’t take the ensorcellment. I thought about speaking to Daniver di Reuther—I know he has been looking for a post—but given the circumstances of Sylvide’s death, I don’t know.”

She would have to visit Sylvide’s widower, express her regrets, try to explain if she could, let him hate her if he must. She remembered Sylvide at the archduke’s breakfast, talking about visiting an aviary with her young son, spending the day there, to the horror of Daniver’s dictatorial mother. She remembered Sylvide throwing her arms around her, understanding nothing except that Vladimer was threatening her dearest friend.

Others had lost more, Balthasar said. Sylvide, Gil di Maurier, Farquhar Broome, Tammorn, the Lightborn high masters she had never met, Tercelle Amberley . . . Ishmael. She had her life and her magic, and the loss of her reputation was a much smaller thing than she had ever imagined it would be, when she was desperately trying to protect it. She had her children and her husband. As he said, she could be sure of that, even if he was no longer as entirely hers as he had been. She would learn how to maintain that ensorcellment on him herself; she was not leaving it to the Lightborn. She would help him with the Lightborn mages. And she probably wouldn’t turn Floria White Hand into a lizard, no matter the temptation.

But she wouldn’t tell Balthasar that quite yet.

N
o
relief map carried the island, or none that he had ever laid hand or sonn on. It was a crumb of rock dropped from the land’s table and forgotten, far to the southeast of the mainland. He supposed, when he regained enough of his reason to do so, that Isolde must once have visited here. Or perhaps one of the others. He must have taken the knowledge from someone.

He did not remember how he found the cave. It was deep enough to escape the sun, had he needed to. From an unknown predecessor he inherited a battered cooking pot and a bent ladle, a small poke of coin, and a blanket gone mildewed and rotten in the damp. The coin suggested that the previous tenant had not simply moved on. He turned it over in his fingers, trying to remember why he would think it at once insignificant and of great importance.

He had not much time for wondering, that first year. He had to survive, which he did by foraging, hunting for anything edible on the scrubby hillsides, under the rocks, and amongst the tide pools. He improvised a hook and a line and he fished, with admittedly mixed success. With a strip torn from his increasingly ragged clothes, he fashioned a slingshot and taught the greedy seagulls to be wary of him.

He knew from the first that there were Darkborn on the island, a village saved from dire inbreeding by the sea and its well-traveled pathways. When the wind was right, he could hear the bells on the buoys rocking in the swell outside the bay, and in the stillness around sunset and dawn, he could hear the sour note of their cracked warning bell. Sometimes he heard their voices as they emerged for their night’s fishing. He did not realize they knew about him until, returning from the rocky beach with his thin pickings, he found a wrapped parcel laid across his threshold: a new-caught fish. Subsequent gifts contained more fish, potatoes, better fishhooks and twine, a knife, a rusty ax, a length of cloth, and even an unsigned note telling him where he could find a derelict dory, his for the mending. The kindness, the knowledge that he was not completely outcast, was the greatest gift of all. There was nothing he could give his benefactors in return but his thanks, not even a name.