Shadowborn (7 page)

Sweet Imogene, what was happening in the city?

He roused himself at the rattle of small bottles as Balthasar unrolled his medicine pouch. “No need to dose me,” he said. “It’s just th’effects of overreach again.”

Balthasar paused and said, firmly, “You have to stop trying to use your magic.”

“Th’head knows; it’s just slow t’reach the reflexes.” He pushed himself up too soon; he had to lean forward, head in his hands, until his heart rate steadied and the pain in his chest eased.

When he raised his head, Balthasar was waiting for him. “Was it Telmaine?”

The man was no mage, but he had witnessed Ishmael’s previous spasm while talking to Telmaine, and she would be foremost in his mind. In a few words, not sparing either of them, Ishmael sketched what he had sensed.

Balthasar’s shoulders bowed with guilt. “How could we do this to her?” he whispered. “How could we put her in such danger?”

“Th’job needed done, and she’s the best we have.” His choice of tense was deliberate.

“I’m her husband, Strumheller,” Balthasar said. “I promised when I married her to cherish and protect her, and I sent her into danger.”

There was not much Ishmael could say; Balthasar knew what they faced, knew what it had already cost them. And Ishmael knew how he felt—indeed, he envied the other man his right to express it. “We’ll be bound north before sunrise,” he said, half prayerfully. “If Mycene has his way.”

They ate breakfast in near silence, having exhausted speculation as to what might be happening in the city or outside in the snow. Mycene would not release either of them, though they heard Lavender arguing with him in the hall. Nor would Mycene permit the twins to visit them. He was convinced that the young women were plotting Ishmael’s escape, whatever their father said. He was quite right, if Ishmael knew his baronettes. And who was to say Lavender had not been right when she had urged him to ride out before Mycene arrived? If he had, he would have been out in the snow—or beyond the snow, with whatever might be out there.

He persuaded Balthasar to dose himself out of his medical bag to relieve the aches of the previous night’s ride. The dose, breakfast, and lingering fatigue made him drowsy, sparing Ishmael his too-sharp attention and his too-imaginative worrying about Telmaine and what had happened in Minhorne. Like Vladimer and Stranhorne, Balthasar could imagine disasters that might never have occurred to Ishmael. That left Ishmael to listen to the snowmelt running in the gutters and feel the Call dragging on him.

Stranhorne himself arrived while they were eating lunch. His face told them the news was bad. “Roads have cleared enough that a post rider made it through. I’ve had a telegram from my elder son in Minhorne. The archduke and several others were injured this morning in a magical attack. The archduke suffered severe burns; he may not live. A regency council will be instituted for the emergency, and the heir will be recalled from their summer estate. At present, the main suspicion falls on the Lightborn.”

That was what I felt from Telmaine,
Ishmael thought in horror. The Shadowborn’s cursed fire raising again. Were Lightborn involved as allies or agents of the Shadowborn? Or had they, too, opposed the Shadowborn attack, finally involving themselves against these rogue mages? It would be a bitter irony if the Lightborn had been trying to protect the archduke and now were blamed—but that was the way the world worked. And Telmaine—was she alive or dead? If the archduke had been attacked, she would have done what she could to stop it; he could not imagine her doing otherwise. . . . She had abundant power but precious little experience, and what he had sensed suggested her situation had been desperate. All that beauty, refinement, and strength, of personality and magic, burned, perhaps dead—because he was not there. . . . “Vladimer?” Ishmael asked, because he could not ask first about Telmaine—he had no reason to ask about Telmaine—and she should have been close to Vladimer.

“Lord Vladimer appears to have suffered a mental collapse, having shot and killed a lady guest.”

“Who?”
whispered Balthasar, and then in a near shout,
“Who was she?”
He controlled his voice; it shook with the effort. “My wife . . . was a guest at the palace.” His thoughts would have followed the same course Ishmael’s had, likely more swiftly.

“It was not your wife,” said Stranhorne with compassion. “The lady’s name was Lady Sylvide di Reuther. My son made no mention of Lady Telmaine.”

Ishmael remembered the lady, a sweet-faced featherhead, gossiping with Telmaine at the archducal ball—about Ishmael’s reputation, as he recalled. Why Vladimer would have had cause to shoot
her
, he could not imagine. Was this some residual effect of the ensorcellment? Had the Shadowborn ensnared him anew? Balthasar had surmised that Vladimer had not told them everything about his encounter with the Shadowborn, and Ishmael was certain he was correct.

“Did your son say anything about whether . . . Lady Sylvide’s form changed in death?” Balthasar said.

“He did not,” Stranhorne said, slowly. “Is that possible?”

“Aye,” Ishmael said, grimly.

“It has to be Shadowborn,” Balthasar said. “If the archduke dies—”

The archduke’s heir, being his youngest child, was only twelve, little older than Sejanus Plantageter himself had been when he succeeded his own father. “The regency council’ll be Imbré, Rohan, Mycene, and Kalamay,” Ish said slowly, thinking aloud. The three other major dukes, and Claudius Rohan, who had sat on the regency council for Sejanus’s own long-ago minority and was Sejanus’s closest friend; no one would deny him that service for Sejanus’s son. Imbré was the only other one of that long-ago council still alive.

Balthasar Hearne understood the political implications as well as either baron, perhaps better, for he had served several terms on the council mediating Lightborn-Darkborn affairs and understood the stress points intimately. Neither Mycene nor Kalamay had any tolerance for Lightborn. Sachevar Mycene—Ferdenzil’s father—coveted the land they held, and Xerxes Kalamay found them and their magic to be an offense to the Sole God.

If their neighbors had turned against them, the Darkborn were terribly vulnerable. As they had been a hundred years back, when the genocidal Lightborn Odon, styled Odon the Breaker, set out to rid his lands of Darkborn.

Stranhorne said, “I’ve commissioned a special train to take Lord Mycene and his men to Strumheller, now the thaw is well advanced. It’ll be faster than the coastal express, but you’ll likely have an overday stay in Strumheller or some point north—with Lightborn unrest, the railways won’t want to risk day trains.”

Ishmael agreed. Balthasar’s face was grim. Likely recalling the abortive attack on the day train taking Telmaine and him to the coast to save Lord Vladimer. Lightborn, Telmaine had said. “We need to go north as soon as we can now,” Bal said.

“Father,” Lavender’s voice came from outside. “Get
out
of my way, you knucklehead. This is an emergency.
Father!
”

Stranhorne himself crossed over and opened the door. “Let my daughter pass,” he told the guard. “If she says it is an emergency, it is.”

Lavender half fell through the door, muttering not entirely under her breath about the guard’s habits and antecedents. “The inbound post coach just arrived,” she said, anticipating her father’s reproach at her language. “The post riders from Upper Eastbridge and the Heights didn’t make their rendezvous. Several carts of wool were due into Lower Eastbridge from the Heights; they didn’t arrive. A midwife who went out in that direction last night to attend a childbed hasn’t been heard from, and no one who lives in that direction has made it to work or market. Dyan’s mustering and mounting a double squad to take the road to Lower Eastbridge, to scout. Post coach is going on to the Crosstracks—”

“Under escort,” Stranhorne said.

“Yes, a squad—Carlann’s taking them. Laurel’s writing the telegrams to send t’Strumheller and points south along the wires.”

“Strumheller Manor and Crosstracks, both,” Ishmael said. His brother had to get the word, with no dithering. If Stranhorne weren’t so obdurate, they’d be able to send the telegrams from here. Ishmael had had Strumheller Manor wired the month he inherited, although nine years later, his engineers were still working against skeptical villagers, distance, gales, rain, and frost in their efforts to string and maintain a working network along the hill roads. “The railway head office, too: they’ll need to decide on th’trains.” Which likely meant that he would not be heading north under guard tonight, if the trains were stopped and Stranhorne could not spare fifteen horses. “And Lord Vladimer in Minhorne. Plain text; no cipher.” If Vladimer were incapacitated and couldn’t read it, others would; it might push them into action.

Though, given the regency council, that action might not be what he wished. Mycene, for one, might take advantage of the archduke’s incapacity and the pressure on the Borders to make his move on the island territories. Unless the archdukedom itself proved the greater plum.

The Plantageters would have to look to their own interests. Ishmael had all he could manage in the Borders.

“I need a telegram sent to my wife,” Balthasar slipped in. “She was staying at the home of her sister, Lady Erskane. Ask her to wire that she is all right.”

Lavender nodded and said to her father, “We’re sending a squad south toward Stonebridge and Hartman’s Barrow. They’ll meet up with the squad quartered in Stonebridge and swing out by the Barrow.”

“Double squads,” Ishmael said. “Even from here. Same orders as th’ones to Eastbridge. And pass the word to th’post coach to hold their outbound runs.”

“Already done,” Lavender said. Then she said, “Will you lead the squad to Upper Eastbridge. You’re one of the best we have still.”

Lavender didn’t know about the strengthened Call—didn’t know that his risk from it was any graver than at any other time since he’d known her. Balthasar, subject to the constraints of his profession, kept silent, though Ishmael heard the breath he drew.

Stranhorne shook his head. “Mycene would never allow it.”

“Or he’d insist on a guard on me,” Ishmael said. “And the last thing we need is men in the squad who haven’t been trained in the way we fight—or have you forgotten th’hide-stripping I gave you and your sister, all those years ago?”

She said with feeling, “Never.”

“I’ll be put to good use here, getting the manor ready.”

“Do you think,” Lavender said, sounding younger than her years, “it might come to fighting here?”

“Aye, I think it might. Those are ominous signs, as y’rightly understood. But we’ve got solid walls between us and them, and without the walls and the killing grounds, they’ll rue the hour they crossed into our lands.”

Except,
he thought,
they have magic, and magic powerful enough to bring snow in late summer.
Her father knew that. But Lavender—it did not matter whether she knew or not. She could do no more than she was already doing, and would do it less well if she were frightened. “If y’can get me out of this room,” he said, “I’ll do what I can to take Lord Mycene and his men in hand. They’ll be no danger t’anyone but the Shadowborn shooting from snipers’ holes in th’upper stories.” He gestured. “And they may take t’it.”

“And this is good
how
?” Lavender muttered.

Ishmael grinned, despite the weight of his worries and the drag of the Call. “Th’enemy of your enemy, girl. It’ll be all to the good, them knowing what we’ve been up against, all these years. Make them think twice about troubling your kin in th’Islands.”

“Who is taking the squad south?” Stranhorne said, neutrally.

She set her lips, an answer in itself, and then said, half blurting, “Laurel and Boris will be here, and one of us—”

“Not necessarily,” Stranhorne said. There was a silence. “Be careful.”

“As a city lady guards her reputation.” She kissed her father’s cheek, clasped Ishmael’s gloved hand, and made a strategic retreat before either Stranhorne or Ishmael could raise further objections.

“Stranhorne,” said Ishmael. “I owe y’an apology. I promised to keep them out of danger.” If he’d been born a sixth-rank mage, he’d be able to
lift
Laurel from here to safety in a moment—and he would have, even if her father banished him from his manor and she boxed his ears for it. But he couldn’t even argue for sending her to relatives in the inner Borders if the trains were stopping, and he could not pretend the roads were safe.

“Are you?” the baron said, tartly. “I had no idea you were responsible for the Shadowborn.”

“Get me out of this room, please, before I start tearing through th’walls. Hearne, too. Is Linneas here?”

“Yes,” Stranhorne said, the hint of weary amusement telling Ishmael a familiar story. Linneas Straus was physician and surgeon to the Stranhorne troop. As regularly as the turn of seasons, his daughter’s husband was sacked from his latest job, the growing family descended on Linneas’s home in need of shelter, and Linneas took refuge in the manor. “It’s that,” he’d said to Stranhorne, “or y’sit magistrate on my trial for killing th’wastrel.”

Balthasar would no doubt learn all that and more once he met the physician. “Linneas Straus is the physician who takes care of the manor and the troops,” he said to Balthasar. To Stranhorne: “Hearne’s got city hospital training; be useful should things get busy. He might be able t’help us prepare for numbers of casualties. We’ve never dealt with a mass attack before.” It would also keep the physician distracted from what might be happening in Minhorne. If his need was anything like Ishmael’s, he should be grateful.

“And we can only hope we’re not dealing with one now,” Stranhorne said. To Balthasar: “Linneas doesn’t have a city education—he was trained by apprenticeship, as were most of our surgeons—but he’s been physician to the manor for thirty-odd years. Attended on all my children’s births.”