Shadowborn (24 page)

That was not the worst. Across from her, Lord Vladimer had jolted upright in his seat, snatching at his revolver. She had gone utterly still, terrified, knowing what he remembered: that catastrophic breakfast, Telmaine’s uncontrolled fires blazing up around Vladimer’s brother, the archduke. She herself remembered her dear friend Sylvide crying, “Lord Vladimer, no!” and throwing her arms around Telmaine just as Vladimer fired. He had been aiming at Telmaine—aiming to kill her magic with her—but with his right arm wounded and his aim unsteady, he had mortally wounded Sylvide instead.

After a moment, Vladimer deliberately removed his hand from his holster, his bony face a sick mask, pulse beating hard in his temple. He apologized to the Broomes for alarming them, and excused himself—to rest, he said, completely ignoring Phoebe Broome’s efforts to ease the atmosphere or mind his comfort. The mage was as gauche as a provincial sixteen-year-old.
But, then,
Telmaine thought,
how should Miss Broome, mage and social outcast, know how to behave around a duke’s daughter and the archduke’s half brother?

She heard Farquhar Broome tear another strip from the broadsheet and fold it, and sensed another pulse of Shadowborn magic. “Now, my dear”—Telmaine sonned him holding out the unlit taper to Phoebe—“try to set it off. No, don’t take it; I’m not quite sure how vigorous—” The taper burst forth with a jet of flame several inches high; Farquhar Broome promptly dropped it. Magic leaped out from father and daughter and the taper was snuffed, leaving a scorched ring in the broadsheet. Farquhar Broome shook his fingers, then lifted the sheet and explored the hole.

“I wonder that they have not refined it,” he said. “It should be possible. It’s an intriguing approach to latency. I’m sure it could be applied in other areas.”

It already has been,
Telmaine thought. The murder of the Lightborn prince had been carried out with a talisman, spelled to annul the magical lights Lightborn needed to survive the night.

She sensed, passing between father and daughter, a ripple of magic, such as she had sensed passing between Phoebe and her brother, Phineas, when she had listened to—spied on—their conversation with Lord Vladimer. Then Phoebe got to her feet, politely excusing herself so she might check on the well-being of the fifteen or so mages who comprised the rest of their party. As though the group was not well able to communicate even through walls. Telmaine repressed a sour little smile. She could recognize an engineered opportunity.

Farquhar Broome turned his face toward her, his smile now only a memory in the lines of his face, though his expression was gentle. He was as circumspect in his use of sonn as Ish, she had noticed; perhaps magic substituted, or perhaps he was simply accustomed to other people taking care of him. “Dear lady,” he said, “what a shock this must be to you.”

Statements of the obvious were not confined merely to vapid society matrons, apparently. She said tightly, “I have lost my reputation, my place in society, and but for the archduke’s clemency”—belated, secret, and ambivalent clemency—“I would have lost my life. I am well aware that with another man”—Duke Mycene, perhaps, or, Mother of All avert it, Duke Kalamay—“I
would
have lost my life. I don’t deny what I did. I don’t deny my responsibility.”

He nodded, as though none of that took him by surprise. “It was a serious thing you did, and a brave thing in coming back. Your sureness in healing is remarkable, for a young woman who has kept down her magic for most of her life. With your strength, my dear,
someone
should have recognized what you are.”

“I was always careful to stay away from mages,” she said. Until Ishmael, who had guessed within minutes of meeting her. But, then, Ishmael did not allow prejudice to interfere with his perceptions, and
he
could hardly reject outright the notion of a nobly born mage. “My husband is a physician, and I had Ishmael’s—Baron Strumheller’s—guidance, too,” she said, challengingly. Phoebe Broome had come close to expressing the sentiment that Ishmael was not a suitable preceptor for her.

“You do understand, dear girl, that you cannot go on in this fashion. Your magic—well, it is like a ball gown. Once it is out of its box, then it will not be pushed back in again, not without violence to its fine fabric.”

And what could a seventh-rank mage and a man know about ball gowns? But she understood. The magic she had kept tucked well within her skin was restive now. “I know I need to learn how to control it,” she said.

He smiled his imp’s grin. “And I believe you will do well.”

Assuming,
she thought,
we survive what we find in the Borders.

As though one of his threads of ambient magic had snagged the thought, he said, “There is another painful matter I must bring up, dear lady. That nasty thing in your mind will give you no trouble in and of itself now, although had Ishmael been less timely and sure with those firearms of his, you would likely not be sitting here.”

“That nasty thing” was a legacy of her battle with the first Shadowborn that had tried to kill Lord Vladimer. She had come away from that encounter with a cyst of Shadowborn presence in her, an infection or parasite of magic forced on her by the Shadowborn. With the Shadowborn’s death at Ishmael di Studier’s hands, the magic in it was extinguished and it could no longer ensorcell her, except that the Shadowborn had also given her its knowledge. Her experiments with that knowledge had awakened her magic in dangerous ways.

“I will not use it again,” she said, a heartfelt wish.

“Dear lady, you must. Or, rather, you may have no choice. Why do you think we have been amusing ourselves with tapers and fire? It is because we must understand this magic before we meet it. We are already under strength—I am quite sure of that. You have not sensed ahead, have you? I thought not.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. In the last few sentences, the fey manner had slipped away. “We may have right on our side, but we simply do not have the numbers or might to match the Shadowborn. We are fortunate in Lord Vladimer, who is certain to favor an oblique approach—he is renowned for it. But he will be the first to insist that we need all the information we can get if we are not to blunder into a confrontation we cannot win.”

“I will tell you everything I can,” she said.

“Though it pains me to say, that may not be nearly enough, because your understanding of magic is a novice’s, strong as you are. It would be of immeasurable help to us if you would permit me or my daughter, Phoebe, to examine the Shadowborn’s
gift
directly.”

For a moment, she resisted understanding that he wished to touch the thing in her mind, magic to mind. Through stiffened lips, she said, “I cannot believe you are making such a suggestion to me, sir.”

She hoped—she fervently hoped—that she was convincing in her outrage.

His smile was very sweet. “I am,” he said, without apology.

Should she leave the compartment in umbrage? Order
him
out? She had a distinct feeling that he would not oblige. He could sweep the knowledge from her mind with the barest effort, as she had the knowledge of his plans against the tower from Duke Kalamay, and then he would know. . . . Frantically, she pushed down the thought.

“I know this is far too soon,” he said, as though, she thought dizzily, he were an impulsive suitor offering a premature proposal, “but please give it some thought. Neither Phoebe nor I would ever force you,
especially
now that we face a living demonstration of violation of our principles. Compose yourself, dear lady; we do not want to alarm the good people on this train, or disturb young Lord Vladimer’s rest.”

Then she was alone in the backwash of his magic, for he had not even opened the door to the compartment. She gulped at such a casual display. How could she possibly resist? She thought she smelled smoke and frantically made her mind blank, holding her breath. When she had to breathe, it was only the stale air of the compartment, like old cigar smoke, that she inhaled. Perhaps she had only imagined the smoke.

Sweet Imogene, the thought of Farquhar or Phoebe in her mind appalled her, though not nearly as much as it would have before she had met Ishmael. Ishmael she would, and had, let into her mind without hesitation. Society had not the least notion of all the improprieties possible through magic—
she
had not had the least notion.

If she could only speak to Ishmael, she would have laid her confession before him, even though . . . even though . . . Would he understand how she had come to know about Duke Mycene and Duke Kalamay’s plans to launch an attack on the Lightborn Mages’ Tower, undeclared and unprovoked—except that to such men, the very existence of the tower, and the mages it housed, was an offense. Would he understand why she had misused her magic so? He would understand why she had taken the knowledge to Vladimer, trusting him to act on it? Ishmael was deferential to Vladimer’s greater cunning. And she thought he would understand why Vladimer had chosen to do nothing.

But that was because, after years of service and friendship, he knew Vladimer, and Ishmael’s was not a nature given to outrage or bitterness. He would not hesitate to condemn Vladimer’s silence, but he would understand it. She could not trust that the Broomes, who barely knew Vladimer, would be forgiving.

Vladimer—and she—could not do this alone. They needed the Broomes and their commune. She could not—

A woman screamed in full-voiced horror. Telmaine lurched to her feet, sweeping aside her skirts, and threw open the door as Phoebe Broome cried out,
“Phineas! ”

The mage was standing in the corridor, bracing herself against the walls, her father at her side. “Phineas! Oh, Mother of All,
Phineas
.” She stretched out an arm, back along their track, and Telmaine could feel the magic streaming out of her.

“What is it?”
Vladimer said, harshly, from behind Telmaine. He was framed in the door of one of the two staterooms, supporting himself against the lintel, coatless, hair disordered, and shirt loosened.

Phoebe gave another cry of “Phineas” and fell to her knees, curled palms held up before her, as though cupping water or life. Behind them, mages crowded the corridor; behind Vladimer, the door to the engine opened and one of the engineers stepped through, revolver drawn.

Phoebe lifted her face to her father. “Why didn’t he call on us!”

“It was too quick, dear girl.” He put his hands beneath her elbows and lifted her with an implausible ease. Telmaine sensed magic. Phoebe hung, limp as a pennant, on its prop.

She heard Vladimer dismiss the engineer, assuring him that he would take care of it.

“I just felt my brother die,” Phoebe told them all, between sobs. “I don’t know what happened. Olivede is there, but I can’t get her to respond. I could feel her pouring out magic . . . healing. . . .”

“It is not death you felt, dear girl,” Farquhar said.

“Then why—Oh,
no
. He feels like Ishmael. He feels just like Ishmael. Phineas—”

“Telmaine,” said Vladimer, so close behind her she could feel his breath.

“I
don’t know
,” she answered the implied demand for information. Phineas Broome had been lately in the service of the Duke of Mycene, though exactly why he had taken such service, perhaps only he knew. He claimed loyalty to the state, protecting Vladimer and the archduke from a dangerous mage—Telmaine herself. Vladimer inferred he wanted access to the Mycene armory for his revolutionary associates, and using that inference, Vladimer had struck a deal with the mage: silence for silence on Telmaine’s escape. Telmaine had been immensely relieved that Phineas had not joined them, that his actions appeared to have estranged him from his family, because Phineas
knew
about Vladimer’s silence over the tower.

If Phineas had remained with the Duke of Mycene, and Olivede Hearne had been there, then it was not too far to assume that the archduke was there also. And if by “he feels like Ishmael,” Phoebe meant that he felt dangerously overspent, burned out, that meant the
Shadowborn
—

Vladimer said, “In here,” in a voice meant to be obeyed.

“My dears,” said Farquhar to the rest of his party, “we will tell you as soon as we are able.”

He steered the stumbling Phoebe into the compartment, moving as steadily as if he were walking through the halls of the immense, immovable archducal seat. Phoebe subsided limply into her seat, with a murmured, “I’m sorry.”

Vladimer sat down. “Magister Broome,” he said, in a voice that caused Telmaine’s stomach to clench. “Inform me.”

Farquhar Broome sighed. “I wish I could, dear boy. . . .” Vladimer’s lips thinned dangerously at that, though whether it was the evasion or the solecism, Telmaine didn’t know. “I cannot sense either Phineas or Olivede now; there’s too much Lightborn magic blocking me. They are quite a bit stronger than I.”

“It is customary, particularly when sensitive negotiations are proceeding, to block magical surveillance.”

“Magister Broome, I could order this train to turn around, this minute.”

“Dear boy, what would that possibly achieve? What is happening in Minhorne would be long over by the time we reached there, and what is happening in the Borders very much needs attention.”

Vladimer accepted that with obvious reluctance. “Were the
Lightborn
responsible for the attack on your son?”

“No,” Phoebe said, faintly. “It
was
Shadowborn. It felt stronger than Phineas. He was trying to stand against it. . . . There was fire . . . and he . . .” She put gloved hands to her face. “I’m sorry, Lord Vladimer, but he’s my
brother
—”

“And was
my
brother there?”

She swallowed. “Yes,” she said, more steadily. “Yes, I think he was. I don’t know where they were, but I don’t believe it was in the archducal palace. There were other people there—you’d know who should have been there better than I. But the first thing I sensed for certain was Phineas’s alarm, and panic and pain—agony—as he tried to quench the flames. And then I felt him wring himself out with the effort, and—from Olivede, Dr. Hearne’s sister, and not as strong as Phineas—I sensed only healing effort, on a man. Two men. And . . . emotional turmoil, something to do with family. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, respond to me. And then I lost all sense of them.”