He had known this contact would come ever since he spoke to Lady Telmaine. Indeed, he had known it would come since he recovered enough to think clearly. Though he had not expected the archmage himself, there was no mistaking that immense strength. The archmage’s replenishing touch across distance had the healing warmth of sunlight. Tam all but groaned in relief as his pain and leaden exhaustion dissipated. He sat up: one did not address the master of the Temple while supine in bed.

<Why?> He cut to the essence. <Why release me?>

<Why not? You told us no more than the truth. You are not our enemy . . . and we need you to do something for us.>

<I won’t leave Fejelis unguarded.> He put force of feeling, if not force of magic, into the statement. He showed the archmage a swift succession of impressions: waking to the reports of bullets, hearing talons scrape the metal roof overhead, sensing that vile aura, hearing Orlanjis cry out and Jovance shout, and then the painfully intense burst of matter manipulation. He was aware of the archduke’s gratification at the last, but he could not have concealed Jovance’s presence, even if he had tried. <The Darkborn are letting us ride one of their trains into Strumheller; we heard over the telegraph. Archmage, they are desperate for our help.>

He felt a moment’s base relief that he could not conceal the information that Vladimer had known about Mycene’s and Kalamay’s plans, and done nothing to prevent it. He was glad not to be tempted.

<It is of no account,> Magistra Valetta said. Unlike the archmage, her magic stung like static sparks. <The earthborn have always hated us.> This close to her, he could tell that she returned their hatred in equal measure. <This is not the first atrocity they have committed, but we have determined it may be the last.>

<You can sense Shadowborn magic, and you are the strongest surviving mage who can,> the archmage said. <We want you to be our envoy to the Shadowborn.>

<To the Shadowborn?> he said in disbelief.

<They are mages, Tammorn,> Valetta said.

<They are murderers,> Tam said—and sensed Magistra Valetta’s startlement at being so fiercely contradicted. <They—not the Darkborn, they—murdered dozens of us. They’d have murdered more, but for Lukfer sacrificing his life. How dare you darken his memory by pretending he lied about the Shadowborn?>

<The Darkborn were the ones who fired the cannon,> Magistra Valetta said. <We cannot know, until we speak to the Shadowborn, who was responsible by law.>

Were they really going to pretend that this had been done according to compact, to pretend that the Shadowborn had been working under the orders of the Darkborn and so were indemnified, even for this? <If you could have sensed what Lukfer and I sensed in the tower—>

<We did,> the archmage said. <Through you.> <But Lukfer mastered that magic. Perhaps . . .> Valetta paused. <Perhaps it was his native form.>

He sensed the calculation in that thought, but even so, Lukfer had been born a sport, and his strength had been immense but dangerously uncontrolled. Ever since he had been received into the Temple’s care as a young child, he had been the high masters’ ward. He had used pain—mostly the pain of living in poor light—to bleed his energies in healing effort. Tam had assumed that he had achieved his final act of mastery because of his mortal injuries, but he remembered how even before, Lukfer had cast fire and effortlessly annulled an ensorcelled crossbow bolt that was killing Fejelis. If the high masters were right, there could be no crueler irony—

<If this magic is peculiar to sports, you have the potential for the same mastery. We know he gifted you at the last.>

He had had neither the time nor the heart to examine that gift yet. It was the gift of the master to his or her favored student—a distillation of the master’s essential knowledge of magic, imparted magically as a nucleus of insight and memory. It was a precious, perilous gift. Given too soon, it could overwhelm the student and distort his maturation. Given maliciously, as the Shadowborn had done to Lady Telmaine, it could induce possession. She should be grateful for Ishmael di Studier’s steady hand.

But given at the right time, the gift could accelerate a mage’s realization of his full capacities. And that, he knew, was what Lukfer would have wished for him.

<You know how strong you are, Tammorn. We have felt how strong you are.>

<No!>

<Would you waste his gift, Tammorn?>

That was rich of her. The high masters would have burned out his magic, Lukfer’s precious gift or no, for the impertinence of exposing their weaknesses.

<That was merely theater.>

What he had sensed, facedown on the floor within the circle of high masters, was not theater. He told them so.

<Tammorn, you broke the compact. And, yes, we remember all the justifications you offered, but you broke the compact. You intervened when Fejelis was poisoned, although you were not contracted to the palace—>

<Fejelis was dying. The contracted mages might not have reached him in time.> He had never said he was sorry and he never would, though they had bound his magic for five years after and seemed set on holding it against him indefinitely.

<You sheltered and encouraged artisans working to import Darkborn technologies—>

<Their work has nothing to do with magic! The compact—>

<Enough,> said the archmage. <Tammorn, you will do this thing, whether of your own free will or not. It is our best chance of a peaceful resolution.>

<Peaceful—with that?> He threw his impressions at them, of that swirl of violence outside the hut, of the corrupted vitality and magic of the Shadowborn.

<The compact reached seven hundred years ago has run its course,> the archmage said. Centuries whispered behind his voice. <We have damaged the earthborn; we freely acknowledge it, and they in turn have damaged us. It is time for us to seek the society of our own kind. We can offer them wealth and knowledge, and they can offer us land.>

<You’d have us move to the Shadowlands?>

<There are older, better names for it; it is time those were brought back into use. It seems a reasonable solution, does it not?>

Not for me, Tam thought. His heart and causes were here, with Beatrice and the children, with Fejelis, with the artisans, with the immigrants from the provinces who trod the road he had trodden a quarter century ago. <What of the people who depend on light?>

<We will make sure they have enough,> the archmage said. <It would be immoral to do otherwise. Perhaps the Darkborn might run one of their Borders trains into the Shadowlands. Or we could build one ourselves. Powering it would be simple enough.>

He was going to laugh or scream curses at them, both equally futile. <I will not do it.>

He could feel the weight of Valetta’s magic, Valetta’s will, readying to bear down on him. Others stood behind her. <You have no choice,> the archmage said, no gentleness in that ancient voice. <We must do what we must to survive.>

<They—>

<Shhh.>

<We will make sure your prince is safe,> the archmage said into his stilled mind. <I promise. He makes me think . . . > of a striding man sweeping across a wide, tiled floor and turning to gesture, every long line of him radiating vitality. A chieftain or prince of an age remembered only by the high masters.

But remembered, Tam thought, as I would have remembered Fejelis a hundred years after his death.

<He would have caused us great trouble in the ordinary way of things, but he is what they will need; we will leave him as our gift to them.>

<It is night out there,> he said, a last, desperate objection. <If I take light with me into their camp, and they are Darkborn by lineage, they’ll die. If I don’t take light with me, I will die.>

<Not necessarily so.> He sensed deep satisfaction. <The Darkborn have given us the means.>

He might have taken the voice for Balthasar Hearne’s, except that it was crisper and more forceful in delivery, and slightly deeper in timbre. Without moving, Ishmael said, “Lysander Hearne, is it?”

He rolled over on the sheets, propped himself up on his elbow, and sonned the speaker. He perched on a stool well out of lunging reach, one foot hooked on the crossbar, revolver resting on his knees. The man’s resemblance to Balthasar Hearne was notable, though he was sinewy rather than slight, and casually dressed in clothes that would let him move freely. There was about him no taint of Shadowborn, only the air of a man who lived hard and wary and on the edge of the law.

“So you’ve met my weakling brother,” the man noted.

“’Twas your weakling brother set your plans in disarray.”

Lysander Hearne snorted. “And which particular plans are those?”

Ishmael, reclining, spread his free hand. “Th’ones upset by the birth of Shadowborn-got sons to Tercelle Amberley.”

Muscles tensed in Lysander Hearne’s face, enough to be noticeable, not quite enough to constitute an expression. “It so happens,” he said, levelly, “those weren’t our plans.” He paused. “You’re very calm. Case you don’t recall, you were dead as mutton back there.”

As an effort to disconcert him, that missed its mark entirely, because he had just realized something far more disconcerting. Carefully, he turned his magic on himself, eased vitality from his bones to his tissues . . . and felt nothing. There was no breathtaking pain, no faltering heart, no sense of his life draining uncontrollably into his magic. He caught a breath, shaken with equal measures joy and fear. Not even Magister Broome had been able to undo the damage done to him. Now he had the measure of the mage who held him prisoner.

And something else was gone, as though it had never existed: the Call.

So he was where the Call wanted him. Nowhere he recognized, in a bedroom easily as large as the baronial suite in Strumheller, furnished with pieces whose style and materials he had met only in museums. There was not a join or a seam in them, not in the curving headboard, the rounded edges of the dressing table, or the bowed front of the wardrobe. More to the point, he thought, none of them can be easily moved. This was no traveling camp.

But the bite of the arid air on his throat had already told him he was no longer in the Borders.

He tossed the covers back, swung his legs over the edge of the bed onto solid floor, and stood. “Now what?”

Hearne jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “There’s the wardrobe. Our lady wants you.”

“Your lady?”

“Lysander’s and mine,” said a woman’s voice from beyond the end of the bed. A long step carried him sideways, away from her, and his pivot placed both of them in front of him.

She came forward with no apparent embarrassment at his nakedness, a lovely, foul-tainted creature in a dress faithfully Darkborn. The gown covered her from high collar to cuffs to ankles in layers of silk and lace, and if he recalled his sister’s digressions on fashion, she was at least a decade outdated. In the Darkborn manner of a mage, she wore gloves. Her face had a sculpted refinement, with full lips, a narrow, straight nose, wide brows, and distinct cheekbones. A face such as he had sonned on celebrated actresses and lords’ mistresses, who were often one and the same.

“M’lady,” Ishmael said, dipping his head.

“Charming,” she said, “but insincere, Ishmael di Studier.” Arms folded, head tilted, she added, “Given that you greeted me by firing point-blank at me.”

He set his jaw, trying to hold his composure at the aura of magic around her. Its mere strength would have set his head spinning, even without the Shadowborn aura of it.

“I’d thank you for saving my life,” he said at last, “if I thought I’d like what you mean me for.”

“Ah, well, Ishmael. That’s not for me to explain.”

“And your name is, m’lady, since you make so free with mine?”

“Call me Ariadne.” She turned her head toward Lysander Hearne. “Sander, if you would?”

Lysander frowned, but pushed himself off his stool and went to the wardrobe, producing from its depths an evening suit in the Darkborn style, more formal than Ishmael would have chosen for himself. “Put it on. Or we’ll do it for you.”

“Need t’relieve myself,” he said, accepting it from Lysander’s hand, and turned his back on them to walk, with studied steadiness, into the bathroom. As he expected, there was no way out, and no weapon more threatening than hard soap and a back brush. He’d go before their lady as stubbled as a vagrant.

He managed the suit, though not nearly as well as his manservant would have. It was tight across the shoulders, but otherwise a passable fit. He gave the cravat his best shot and then let it lie, returning to present himself for their inspection. Lysander Hearne passed him socks and shoes, and he sat down on the bed to pull them on.

“Are you hungry?” she said, the social hostess.

Not with that magic around him. “I’d sooner get m’fate settled, if you’d be so kind.”

Lysander gave an odd smile. “Oh, she is that.”

With Lysander at Ishmael’s elbow and Ariadne at Lysander’s, Ishmael left the room, finding himself in a corridor as wide and fine as any in the archducal palace. Except for one feature: windows with shutters turned back. He tried not to be disconcerted by the gusts of warm wind, and wrestled briefly with the urge to ask what time of night—or day—it might be, but pride precluded that. Lysander Hearne wasn’t alone in his posturing. Otherwise, Shadowborn stronghold or no, it had the feel of any large household. Of all the perils he had associated with capture by the Shadowborn, being run over by a dashing housemaid with a stack of fresh-laundered towels was not among them.

Ariadne’s magic thrust open a door, and they herded him into a wide receiving room. Lysander said, “Ishmael di Studier, my lady.”

His sonn caught movement at the far end of the room. A harsher stroke outlined the woman standing on a raised dais. Her simple dress, a knee-length tunic and trousers suitable for this warmth, was far more revealing to sonn than a Darkborn woman’s. His first absurd reaction was chagrin at the impropriety. He halted.

Lysander Hearne tapped his elbow. “Go on.”

“No need.” The woman forestalled his response. “Thank you, Lysander, Ariadne. Please go now.”

Lysander bowed and withdrew, as quietly as Ishmael himself might have. Ishmael heard a sandal brush tile and sonned the woman as she stepped down from the dais. She was small, her figure described by the straight lines of childhood or age. Her hair was short and untidy, a jumble of crisp curls; her mouth was generous and her nose, almost snubbed, no balance for it; her cheekbones were flat and indeterminate. An ordinary face with a winning smile. If it were her true face, any more than her apparent age were her true age.

“Ishmael di Studier,” she said, pleasantly. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a very long time.”

He had no sense of great strength about her, but that very absence was suggestive. He set his stance, hands relaxed and open at his side. “You’ll pardon me if I say I’ve had no like wish.”

“Apparently not,” she said. “I’ve seldom known anyone to hold out against Ariadne’s Call so long.”

“Then that’ll give you the measure of my will t’cooperate, if it’s cooperation y’want, or submit, if it’s submission y’want.” For all the good it might do him.

“Come here and sit down,” she said, “and we’ll talk.”

A quarter century of rough work had taught him to conserve his strength. He followed her out onto an open balcony, dense with plants in pots and planters, and took the chair she indicated.

“Have my people seen to you?” she said.

“Aye, as much as I’d allow,” he acknowledged.

A feathery eyebrow lifted, but she did not inquire. They sat in silence, each waiting out the other.

“What is it y’want with me?” he said at last. “You’ve gone to some trouble, it seems, to get me.”

“What do you think I want you for?” she said, temporizing.

Ishmael shrugged. “We’ve always thought th’ones who followed th’Call wound up in something’s larder or someone’s belly.” She frowned, but did not contradict him. “It comes t’me now, meeting Hearne there, that you’ve another use for Darkborn. But I’ll not serve you willingly, whatever it is you want of me.”

“And who do you think I am?” she said.

He tapped his abdomen with a lightly closed hand, conveying part of his answer: a mage, and one powerful enough to pull him back from a death he thought assured. “I fought you for twenty-five years. I thought t’die fighting you.”

“You would have. Does that not tell you something?”

“It’s hardly worth you making a point of raising me only t’break me. My people will regret my fate, but nothing you do t’me will weaken them. And if you send me back to them ensorcelled, they’ll know.”

“Ishmael,” she said, gently, “you fear all the wrong things of me.” There was something in her voice that chilled him—not merely that she deflected, but did not deny he had reason to fear. “My name, which you are too stubborn to ask for, is Isolde.” She paused, waiting for recognition. Then with slight resignation, said, “My mother was Imogene.”

As the name of the mage attached to the Curse, the supposed leader of those who had worked the great Sundering of peoples, it had been not been used on either side of sunrise for eight hundred years.

“Think it through, Ishmael,” she invited.

All he could think of was that Xavier Stranhorne had been right.

Yet he could hear Vladimer asking why, if the Shadowborn had such might, would they hide in the Shadowlands all these years. Why only now move against the north, and in such an oblique, chaotic way?

“I’m the younger sister. The one who did not make it into the history books.”

“Aye, well, it’s not usual that the living do,” Ish said, still suspended between belief and disbelief. “And the Shadowborn. What are they t’you? Are they your making?”

“But th’Call. That was your handmaiden’s. As I said, if th’Call’s how you bring people t’serve you, I’m not minded to.” Futile bravado; ensorcellment could make him serve, willing or no. He drew a deep breath and steadied his tone. “Explain t’me what you want, if y’would.”

There was a silence. His sonn caught the small smile curling the corners of her mouth. His mother had smiled so when he pleased her. She had been a sensitive, sophisticated woman who had no patience with childishness.

That, too, she could no doubt pluck out of his mind, if so inclined.

“What do you already know about the Sundering, Ishmael?”

“I’m no scholar,” he said. “A scholar I know”—no need to tell them that Xavier Stranhorne was dead, if they did not already know—“says th’final break had something t’do with geography or perhaps weather. But I’ve th’experience t’know it was probably nothing of th’sort at root. Factions, ambitions, rivalries; whether it’s dukes or dockside gangs or market stallholders or mages, it’s the same.”

“Not quite, Ishmael.”

“I’ll have t’take your word for it. How long have I been here?”

“Less than a day, Ishmael. Be still.” He was not aware of having moved, but inside, yes, he had reared up at the realization that time had passed without him. “They took Stranhorne Manor, but moved no further yet.”

“Not allies of yours?”

“Definitely not allies of ours.”

“Do y’mean t’oppose them, or do y’mean just to stand by?”

“That,” she said, “may depend on you.”

“And how’s that?” he fired back before he could think better of it.

She straightened up. “I’m afraid you will have to put up with some history. At the time of the Sundering,” she said, in a voice that was clear and somehow younger, “I was a child of eight. Imogene and her followers knew that laying the Curse would burn them out, if not kill them. Yet for the Curse to survive them, it had to be anchored in vitality and magic. For the anchoring in magic, they chose nine of their children—younger brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren.”

He could imagine what Phoebe Broome would have said to that. The Broomes were fiercely principled in their use of magic. “Y’make the distinction between vitality and magic,” he said. It had been deliberate enough to catch his ear, whether she meant it to or not. “And th’vitality?”

“In everyone born into it. Could you imagine it being done any other way?”

If he considered only the execution, he could not. A mage, even a low-ranked mage such as he himself had been—was—could draw on another’s vitality as well as his own, whether mage or nonmage. There was a cost; he was always laid up for days if he pushed himself into overreach. The Broomes’ commune’s code of contact prohibited them from doing so except when it made the difference between life and death, and all involved had given full, knowledgeable consent. The Lightborn Temple did not even allow that between mageborn and earthborn, although he had heard rumors of the practice behind mages. But a work of magic that drew on the vitality of all those living and yet to be born, with magic that was anchored in children . . . “And th’purpose of it.” Ishmael growled. “Th’Curse.”

“Revenge,” the woman said, sounding slightly surprised. “Imogene’s revenge upon everyone who failed her, betrayed her, let her daughter die.”

“And was th’Curse meant to turn out this way?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Because it makes cursed”—he caught himself too late to avoid the idiom—“little sense. Why, if they’d t’doom themselves in the setting of the Curse, not simply kill and be done with it?”

“You don’t understand revenge, do you, Ishmael?”

His thoughts glanced off memories: his father’s bitter words, sending him on his road; his words to his father, demanding his inheritance; his thoughts after Athelane had rescued him from the glazen and died in doing so; his realization that a half dozen men of his own barony had set out to murder him on his return for his father’s laying out . . . a dozen other experiences to sear a man’s heart and rouse his anger.

But he realized she was right. Anger he understood, not revenge. He’d always made sure of a merciful final shot, no matter how monstrous the enemy, and no matter the terms of his hire or mood of the mob. It was safer, but that had not been the entire reason. Killing didn’t turn his stomach; torment did.

And surely the object of the Curse had been torment, to leave those who survived the first sunrise, the first sunset, living in dread of the next and the next and the next. He smiled grimly. He had no idea how many Darkborn had survived that first sunrise, or how many Lightborn that first sunset, but they and their descendants had lived to build twin civilizations on either side of sunrise.

He was a son of that civilization, and he was done with being toyed with like a mouse trapped by an overfed lap cat. What did it matter what Imogene’s intent had been, or how she justified herself? She was eight hundred years gone. “I don’t care about the history. What matters is now.”

She rocked back ever so slightly at the change in his voice.

“If y’won’t come to the point as to what y’want of me, then I’ll tell you what I want of you: I want the Shadowborn—th’ones who have overrun Stranhorne, and all their ilk—turned back. I don’t care if they live or die, as long as I never hear of them—claw, bristle, fang, wing, or Call itself—whether in the Borders, th’offshore waters, th’Isles, or the land itself, from this day onward. Do you have the strength and the will t’do that?”

“With your help,” she said, and he thought he might hear a little caution entering for the first time.

He barked a laugh. “I’m a burnt-out, first-rank mage.”

“But I’m not,” she said, softly. The softness chilled him. “I’m not the mage Imogene was, and I’m not the mage my sister was. But with one exception, I may be the strongest living mage.”

“Th’exception being your enemy, the Mother of Shadowborn.”

“Mother of Shadowborn . . . no, you cannot blame her for them. But never mind. Emeya was a couple of years older than me. . . . Well, I don’t suppose you would care what else she was. Her mind did not survive the Sundering. We were able, while more of us lived, to contain her. Now there is only me.”

“And what killed the rest of you?”

“Time. Despair.” Her narrow shoulders shifted. “If I were not Imogene’s daughter, I would have succumbed centuries ago.”

“What is it y’want from me?”

“I have borne nine children and outlived them all. They in turn fathered or bore children, none of whom survived.”

“Survived Emeya and th’others?”

“Until Ariadne came to me, I had no other mage even approaching my strength. I could not risk myself, because without me, there would be no one to stop her.”

“Ariadne . . . came over?”

“She’s Emeya’s granddaughter. It was Emeya’s great-grandson, Jonquil, you killed—though how you achieved that, I do not know. But it gave me even more hope of you.”

“T’do what?”

“With Jonquil and Midora dead, she has only two mages as strong as Ariadne.”

He waited.

“I need you as an ally,” she said, simply. “You are a mage, experienced in fighting Emeya’s monsters, and with abundant vitality. There is no one else quite like you.”

“I’m first rank.”

“Ariadne and I can augment your strength, Ishmael.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Am I possible?” she said, distinctly amused. “Is the fact that you are able once more to use your magic possible? They told you it was not, didn’t they? I can augment your strength.”

He found himself standing, driven there by the urge to run from the greatest lure she could possibly cast before him.

She spoke as though she had not noticed his reaction, as though he were still sitting in the chair. “You’re not much use to me as a first-ranker, that’s very true. But I can augment your strength.” She moved her hand; he sensed the first flicker of magic—Shadowborn magic—he had received from her. Out in the corridor, a bell chimed. “I’ll have Lysander take you to get something to eat while you think about what I’ve said.”

Lapaxo sat at ease on a high-backed chair to one side, wall at his back. Balthasar, on the couch, faced the outer door: that much of her instructions he had heeded. The corner of the low glass table was between him and the captain. Bal twisted to face her, and the shift in his expression made her aware that she was untucked and mussed, with her hair unraveling down her shoulders.

“Floria,” he said. “It’s all right. The captain had some questions for me.”

“I told you to wake me if anyone came to the door.” She had left him alone, as he asked, though she resolved she would find a way to tell him she did not despise him for the intensity of his emotion. So when he came back out into the sitting room, pale but in control of himself, she had honored his offer to take watch while she slept.

But she had told him to wake her.

“I would have, shortly.”

“Shortly could have been too late,” she said. The captain seemed entertained, which did nothing to reassure her; Lapaxo was the most serious man she knew. But she put up the revolver. Had Lapaxo meant harm, he would have acted as soon as he heard her stir. She could afford the two or three minutes it would take for her to tidy herself.

She listened through the door as Balthasar continued to describe how the Shadowborn had killed Rupertis, in detail that was brutally clinical even by a vigilant’s measure. Not something she would have expected of Bal—though she would not have expected him to open the door, either, with her safety depending on it. She had to remember that Balthasar had his own purpose here.

As she returned, Lapaxo was saying, “We know Johannes. He was cousin to the servant we lost with Isidore, and to two or three others who work in the palace. He drinks their lager and talks revolution to anyone who’ll listen, and Parhelion took him for a blowhard. But if he knew Rupertis, then that’s my first choice for how Prasav knew that Fejelis had ties to the artisans. We’d had Isidore’s orders to keep it close, just to those of us assigned to Fejelis.” He pounded his thigh with a fist, his mouth grim. “If I’d had the least suspicion Rupertis was suborned, I’d never have left him in charge.” He shook his head. “That mage, he’s the one your father found, isn’t he?”

“Yes.” Tam had arrived in the city destitute, unaware that what had blighted his fortunes for a dozen years or more was poorly emerged magic. He might have struggled on for a dozen more years—if someone had not cut his throat first . . . had he not crossed paths with Darien White Hand.

“Darien thought it was hilarious that he’d see what a city full of mages could not. . . . You know where he’d go, that mage, when he took Fejelis? I heard you told Helenja west, over the border and into the mountains.”

“Last place he’d go.”

“You haven’t switched sides?” the vigilant captain asked, bluntly.

He was entitled to the question, though it angered her to have him, too, question her loyalty. “I was Isidore’s vigilant. His last orders to me were to look out for Fejelis.”

He gazed at her; she returned the gaze levelly. A one-sided smile curled his lip. “I’ll tell you now that my heart nearly stopped when Fejelis insisted on interviewing you alone. I’d have placed even odds you’d have put a knife in his heart.”

“And five minutes later, I’d have been dead, and Fejelis already healed.” If Fejelis had been responsible for Isidore’s assassination, she would have set out to depose him, yes, but she would not have been stupid about it. “Fejelis did not succeed by unrighteous deposition; therefore he is the rightful and righteous prince, and I will do what I must to see him restored.”

“And the Darkborn?”

She glanced at the listening Balthasar. “An old friend.”

“Vigilants don’t have old friends,” Lapaxo said, citing a well-worn maxim.

“Vigilants don’t have lovers, either,” she returned, pointedly. Lapaxo had lived with the same woman for more than twenty years.

He signaled a touch over his heart.

She wondered why he had come. At forty-five, he was old for an active vigilant, and unlike her, had no long family tradition of service behind him. Twelve years ago, he had been a captain in the city watch, and even now he thought like a watchman, paying far more attention than most vigilants to the city outside the palace walls.

“Lapaxo, why are you here?”

Lapaxo turned to look at Balthasar, and Floria’s hand shifted to her revolver as he slipped a hand into his waist pouch and drew out a printed sheet of paper. “Two dozen copies of this came in with the mail bag with the reports from the Darkborn public agents. Every other mail slot accessible to the night has them pushed through it, and I don’t doubt that there have been hundreds more distributed overnight out in the city.”

The sheet was printed in solid black type on thin white paper, Lightborn make—Darkborn paper tended to take ink poorly—but unmistakably Darkborn in content. Typesetting could be done by touch as easily as by eye. In plain language, it laid the responsibility for the burning of the Rivermarch, the murder of the prince, and the destruction of the tower on the Shadowborn, who had influenced people on both sides of sunrise to work for them. It accused the Temple of failing in its contracted duty to protect the earthborn, and their brightnesses of exploiting the disaster to demand that the Darkborn cede their rights to the city. It asked for the readers’ support in resisting this injustice.

She read it aloud for Balthasar, slowly, so that Lapaxo could appreciate how he flushed with anger and then paled as he listened. Bal took it from her hand and ran his fingers over the featureless surface. “So that was what he meant.”

“Who?” Floria and Lapaxo said together.

“The archduke spoke of other measures. What he meant, he would not say in front of me. But we know how restive some of your people are against their brightnesses and against the Temple. This aims to redirect their anger away from the Darkborn, toward older grudges—��

She remembered the mob she had confronted outside Bolingbroke Station and imagined them battering at the gates of the palace itself, howling for the blood of their brightnesses.

“They’ve forced his back to the wall,” Lapaxo said, appreciatively, though whether his appreciation was directed at the Lightborn strategy or the Darkborn response, she could not tell. “This could be very effective. The spark’s already been set to the tinder—we saw that yesterday. This will throw oil on it. Who will burn? We’ll know after sunrise. Tell me, Hearne—and know that I can have it confirmed—were you sent as an agitator?”

“No,” Balthasar said, forcefully. “I knew nothing of this, and if I had, I’d have wanted nothing to do with it. And I will so declare before Mistress Tempe, or anyone else you want.”

She waited, ready to counter Lapaxo’s first threatening move, and aware that he was aware of her readiness. But all Lapaxo did was sigh. “You’d better get him out of here,” he told her. “He’s a dead man otherwise.”

“I am not going anywhere,” Balthasar said.

Perceptive as he was, he had missed the meaning of Lapaxo’s sigh. Balthasar himself was spark to the oil, living proof of the existence of Shadowborn. The more widely he spread belief in himself, the more widely he spread belief in the assertions in these papers. That he had persuaded Lapaxo of his innocence had done no more than make Lapaxo regret the inevitability of his death. Their brightnesses would not leave him alive to lend support to this.

Her eyes shifted to the back of his dark head. One blow would be enough, but, stunned, he would not be able to travel by himself, and she could not carry him out until sunrise. Though Lapaxo might help.

Then Bal’s head came round, and she thought for an instant that he had somehow deduced her thought, but his attention moved beyond her to the door, his head angled, listening. She heard nothing—but he was Darkborn. She raised her hand to stop him from speaking and signaled to Lapaxo. The captain slid from his chair, moving to the door. She pulled Balthasar up, meaning to get him into the bedroom. Behind a wall, he’d be shielded—

She heard the lock turn. As the door burst open, she kicked Balthasar’s feet from underneath him and dropped him into the shelter of the table, snagging the collar of his thick jacket to soften his descent. That consideration earned her a knife in the side and the sting of a second across her neck. Two more knives clattered off the table. She jerked the knife out of her side—a small throwing knife, not dangerous outside eye or throat—even as the mandala on the skin of her abdomen started to burn. Lapaxo flowed around the door with a sweetly economical slash that opened the nearest woman’s body from rib to hip. A third pair of knives fell from her hands.

“Poison!” Floria grunted, half doubled over. If the poison was giving the asset this much trouble, Lapaxo or Bal could die of a scratch. Lapaxo shied from a blade, and two more assassins forced their way through the door. They wore light armor and were armed with rapiers. “Bal, stay down!” she barked, and leaped to straddle the arms of the chair, brazenly exposed—a flamboyant idiocy her father would have whipped her for, but one that kept their attention on her. A knife lodged in the muscle of her shoulder; a second, aiming to split her throat, hissed past her ear. She shot the man who had thrown them above the right eye. With a ceding parry and bind, Lapaxo slipped his blade neatly through the seam of the nearest man’s armor. The downed woman twisted violently with a flash of bluish intestine, and lashed out. Floria’s shout of warning came too late. As Lapaxo sprang clear, Floria shot the last assassin, and jumped down from the chair to land beside the table, revolver swinging from the fallen to the door and back. Her hands were slippery with cold sweat.

Behind her she heard a scrape and a scuttle, and movement caught the corner of her eye—Balthasar dropping to his knees before Lapaxo, who had backed to brace himself against the wall with one hand, rapier still raised, eyes still on the door. The fabric covering his right shin was bloody. Balthasar slashed a strip from his own jacket—Sweet Imogene, with one of those cursed poisoned knives!—and flipped the strip around the captain’s leg below the knee, cinching it tight. “I need water,” he said over his shoulder, to Floria. “Something to wash the wound. And a clean knife.”

“Identify them,” rasped Lapaxo.

There was only one identification she cared about: who was still a threat. Her eyes flicked over the assassins, taking in their attire: that of ordinary palace staff, complete to the red morning jackets, stained a much darker red with blood. Two of the four were dead, or indistinguishable from it. The woman was lying curled up around her spilled intestine. The fourth was sprawled on his back, gargling and trying spasmodically to roll over. The corridor outside was empty for now. She wondered what had become of the guards outside; nothing good, she expected. She flicked away all the knives she could see, and then risked leaning over the assassins to frisk them and strip them of other weapons. There were no apparent firearms, but the rearmost was carrying a rolled-up black tarpaulin. A quiet assassination, then—Balthasar with poison, Floria with poison assisted by steel, and her body, at least, quickly disposed of.

She whirled as Balthasar lunged for the table. Oblivious to her reaction, he caught up the carafe and a glass and smashed the glass and used the broken stem to open the poisoned cut, raising new blood. Lapaxo’s face was gray and he was breathing heavily, but he was still standing, back flat against the wall. Balthasar, his fingers on the pulse at his groin, said, urgently, “Floria, I need some digitalis, some stimulant—”

“I’ve nothing with me.” She would have, she should have, if she hadn’t been knocked from crisis to crisis.

“Then get me some,” Balthasar said, lurching out of his crouch to catch the captain as he began to slide down the wall. The rapier fell with a clatter. “That or a mage.”

Arguing the matter was pointless if Bal couldn’t see that moving them from a defensible position could kill all three of them more surely than lack of help would kill Lapaxo.

The sound of running footsteps from outside sent her back behind the table. She’d have grabbed Balthasar if she’d thought he would come, but—“Quiet!” she barked at him, and in a burst of adrenaline-fired strength, heaved the glass table on its side. It made an inadequate shield, but its crash was enough to command the attention of the new arrivals.

Who were half a dozen vigilants wearing judiciary badges, with Tempe Silver Branch at their back. The lieutenant in charge swiftly assessed her and the casualties, and then directed two of his men to clear the way for Tempe and the young mage who had questioned Balthasar. Tempe walked, seemingly unaware, across the tacky floor, while the mage followed her with mincing step, her face working in horror and revulsion. Adamantly, Floria pointed to Lapaxo. Tempe said to the mage, “Him first,” and the mage went. Balthasar ceded his place with profound relief, whispering urgently to her.

A ferocious cramp bent Floria over. Hands braced on knees, she grunted out an assurance that she’d be fine. Tempe scowled; she hated it when appearances contradicted the truth told her. “You’re bleeding.”

“Scratches,” Floria rasped. Tempe took her arm, examining the wound, and unstuck the side of her tunic to check the other, carefully avoiding the blood. “Bitch of a poison.” If it had come to her against the assassins, she’d have been fatally off form, even if no poison could kill her outright. She freed a hand to knead her abdomen, willing everyone to go away and leave her to her misery. Maybe she could deflect their attention. “You’d better get the mage on to them soon if you want answers.”

“Helenja or Prasav? Take your pick. The two who were posted to guard you are dead.” She put a hand on Floria’s shoulder, knee behind her knee, and pushed her down onto the mesh couch. “We’ve been having an interesting night, while you two were snug in here.” Her suggestive tone earned her a sour look, which she met with a quizzical expression. “Been two letters for him, heavily ciphered—and, yes, I know they’ve not been delivered. We want to know what’s in them. Also leaflets”—she nudged the paper on the ground with a toe—“pushed through every available mail slot and newspaper drop in the civil-service sector and servants’ quarters. Variety of texts, all the same theme—the Shadowborn are your enemy, we’re not, their brightnesses and the Temple are obstructing our alliance. You can say this for the Darkborn: they’re thorough. I’d venture to say this wasn’t all thought up in a night; someone had it planned ahead of time.”

“Lord Vladimer,” Balthasar said, from beside Lapaxo. Lapaxo’s eyes were closed, but his skin had already warmed several tones from death gray. Then Balthasar noticed Floria’s hunched posture and came quickly to his feet. “Floria!”

“I’m all right!” she said, sharply. “The asset protects me.” If he couldn’t read her eyes, she willed him to read her expression: Watch what you say. Both for her sake and his.

He started around to the rear of the couch, but was intercepted by Tempe’s outstretched arm. “You don’t want to get behind a vigilant just coming off a fight.” She looked him up and down. “Vladimer? Word came to us that he had lost it mentally.”

Floria, craning her neck, saw him realize that he had spoken too freely, particularly to a woman with an asset of veracity. He said, “Lord Vladimer would have thought about the implications of tension between Darkborn and Lightborn before. He received the council’s reports, and it is his job to assess and deal with threats to his brother’s rule.”

“I’ve read some of your council’s writings. This isn’t without precedent.”

“We—the council—write leaflets when we feel we need to inform, not to agitate,” Balthasar said, adamantly. “Floria, won’t you let me—”

“There’ll be poison mixed in with the blood,” Floria said, straightening up. “No point having you poison yourself now.”

The mage drifted over to them, leaving Lapaxo with two of the vigilants. Tempe glanced toward the door. “If you would see to the survivors, Magistra.”

“I cannot, Mistress Tempe,” she said, stiffly. “They attempted to harm a mage.”

“A mage—,” said Floria, baffled. Tempe said to Balthasar, “Are you?”

“Not by any useful measure,” he said, quick mind visibly working. “I can sense anything on the scale of weather-working, but nothing smaller. I never thought it amounted to anything.”

“It doesn’t, ordinarily. Well, well, well. So now you’re under Temple law.” Tempe looked at the mage, a glitter in her eye. “Magistra, does this man look harmed to you?”

“No,” the mage said, warily. Floria had heard that same tone in a junior vigilant greeting a veteran’s invitation to play a friendly dice game or practice a no-fail fighting move.

“Exactly. The vigilants are the ones who are poisoned and bloody, while he hasn’t a hair out of place.” Not strictly true, but any further bruises and sprains were strictly Floria’s doing. “How do you know their intent was to harm him?”

The mage opened her mouth. Closed her mouth. Said finally, “You want to know,” and turned and picked her way across the tacky floor to the fallen.

“She’ll go far,” Tempe predicted. She glanced toward Lapaxo, who was being lifted to his feet by two of the vigilants. “Good not to lose another captain tonight. Nice work with the tourniquet.”

“Yes,” Floria said, obscurely resentful that she had not been allowed to say it first. “It was.”

Tempe drummed her fingers on her knee. “So, did whoever ordered this do it before or after the Temple had laid claim?”

“I don’t understand,” said Balthasar, perching on the edge of the upturned table, his worried attention more on Floria than Tempe. She was irritated; she had survived much worse, and she needed him not to assume Tempe was an ally.

“Several possibilities. The Temple wants you completely under their control. Ordinarily, they don’t bother themselves with less than first-rank mages, but you are unique.”

Floria had a sudden, uneasy feeling that she did not want to hear the rest, not with a mage likely to lay a healing hand on her in the next few minutes.

“The compact prohibits mages from using magic to either benefit or harm earthborn, except under a negotiated public contract and at the request of an earthborn. You understand?”

“Yes.” By the tight tendons in Balthasar’s neck, he did not like the way this was going, either.

“The compact does not apply to mages, although there is governance on the use of magic by stronger against weaker mages.”

Governance, Floria thought. That depends upon strength. She suddenly discovered an unwelcome sympathy for the princess, a mere second-rank mage in possession of knowledge that her superiors were determined to deny. Little wonder she seemed hardly more than a puppet.

The mage approached somewhat warily. “Two of my colleagues have arrived,” she said, primly. “They’re seeing to the prisoners.”

“Was it Prasav gave them their orders?” Tempe asked the mage. “Or Helenja?”

“Sharel,” said the mage, pointedly. “And they were to kill him, too.”

“Of course,” Tempe said, relaxing slightly. This was retaliation against Floria and Balthasar for that incident in the night, not some wider political scheme. Floria wondered if she could possibly cozen the Mother of All Things into letting her be there when Helenja found out that Sharel had ordered the assassination of a man claimed by the Temple. At the very least, there would be a substantial fine.

“Mistress Floria,” said the young woman.

Floria, resenting the need, gave the mage her best intimidating stare. Tempe scolded, “Don’t bully the girl.”

She was good for a third-ranker. She dealt with the trivial wounds and left the poison and the asset to fight it out without interference. Her eyes widened, though, at the strength of the asset. Neither of the mages maintaining it had been in the tower last night, or this skirmish would have had quite a different outcome.

“You can go and report now,” Tempe said, watched the mage leave the room, then turned back to Floria.

“What are the other possible reasons for the Temple . . . adopting me?” Balthasar said.

Tempe smiled thinly. “Control, of you as a source of information and a source of disruption. Possession, of an example of some very interesting magic. I understand magic only as much as the next nonmage.”

Disingenuous of her, in Floria’s opinion, given her asset and her relentlessly inquiring nature.

“But I do know that until now, nobody has known how to keep a Darkborn alive in light, or a Lightborn in darkness. I don’t think your archduke quite grasped the implications of this, for the Temple; if I had been him, I would not have let you come over. It may even have bearing on our understanding the nature of the Curse itself, a puzzle for eight hundred years. . . . Yes, I think they’d want you alive.”

Assuming , Floria thought, that the high masters have not already learned everything they needed from Balthasar.

“That makes it less likely they’d use you as bait,” Tempe added. “Though not inconceivable.”

“Bait for whom?” Balthasar said with strain in his voice. “And for what?”

Tempe gestured suggestively toward the door. “Enemies of the Darkborn. Enemies of the Temple. Enemies of the status quo. This court is riven with factions, but in the main, enemies know each other; we exist in a balance of tensions and oppositions. We do not like them to be disturbed. Now Isidore is dead, Fejelis has vanished, and you have come in from outside, bringing with you rumors of unseen forces of unknown potential—This isn’t a simple place you have come to, Balthasar Hearne.”

“I’ve known Floria for decades,” he said, by way of answer.

“Yes,” she said, with that annoying glint of speculative amusement.

Floria bit her tongue; she did not want to invite Tempe’s curiosity.

“It’s different, being on the same side of the wall.” He turned his face to her, then to Tempe—sonning, Floria realized. “Please advise me.”

“Next time I say, ‘Stay down,’ stay down,” Floria said. “Save me grandstanding.”

He looked abashed. “I . . . understand.”

But wasn’t sorry; she heard that distinction. And she’d be a hypocrite if she pretended she’d respect him more for cowering under the table.

The corner of Tempe’s mouth drew down. “My advice: get out of here. The Temple’s protection goes only so far, particularly now that they’ve torn up the compact. Tell your archduke this is not a good idea, trying to stir up the populace. Their brightnesses won’t forget it.”

“And the Shadowborn?” Nothing in Balthasar’s face betrayed his feelings—so he could do it if he needed to.

“Are magical, yes? Therefore the Temple’s problem. Or their brightnesses, should they choose to contract with the Temple to deal with them.”

“That’s not enough,” Balthasar said.

Tempe sighed. “That man Johannes—his cousin was summoned to his bedside, found him raving about Shadowborn who could turn a man into a flare, burn him to char in seconds. Half the servants had heard that story, or versions of it, by the time we knew.”

“Did he mention Balthasar?” Floria said.

“Not in any version I heard—but who’s to know who else from that household will be talking—or the group he’s part of?” She stood up and said, deliberately, “So take your lover home and leave him there, if you want him alive by tomorrow’s sunset.”

“We are not lovers,” Floria said, not looking at Balthasar.

Tempe snorted. “Woman, I’ve an asset of veracity. Whether you’ve lain with him or not, you’ve loved this man as long as I’ve known you. While he was on the far side of sunset, you were safe to be the perfect vigilant. That kind of accommodation has the habit of breaking down, though seldom as spectacularly as this.”

“Thank you for your counsel, Mistress Tempe, and for your intervention tonight,” Balthasar said, steadily, though Tempe’s words had brought a flush to his pale skin. “But until the Shadowborn are dealt with, I shall stay. May I have the letters addressed to me now?”

From his pocket, he slipped a cipher. Tempe’s irritated glance at Floria rebuked their collective negligence in not finding it and questioning him for the key. He worked the cipher one-handed with some dexterity, reading the messages with the fingers of his left hand, lips moving slightly as he committed the translation to memory, and apparently quite oblivious to the activity around him as Tempe’s people gathered up the dead and wounded.

He lacked most of the basic instincts of survival in the Lightborn court, she had to admit. She had to assume that was nurture, not nature: with the exception of his brother Lysander, his lineage was sound, producing generations of civic-minded, intelligent men. Quiet men, with the kind of courage that was proven only on testing, as Balthasar had proven his. The women were less distinguished, but she suspected the diminishing effects of Darkborn expectations of their sex; Balthasar’s small daughters were promising enough.

A daughter of hers would be spared that impediment. Her lineage offered the health and athleticism and survivorship of ten generations of vigilants, plus her asset. The Mother of All determined how those offerings would be endowed—except the last—but at least they would be on offer. Even if a child inherited Balthasar’s blindness, the example of Ishmael di Studier and the Stranhornes had proven that was no handicap.... Though if a child required an ensorcellment to live under light . . .

And there was Telmaine, and Darkborn expectation of sexual fidelity in marriage, which Balthasar, unlike many of his peers, practiced. She did not need Tempe to explain to her that in a court of alliances that formed and dissolved overnight, governed by contracts that could be torn up even before the signatures had dried, that she had learned to prize, even idealize, such loyalty. If she asked him, would it lessen her in his eyes . . . thoughts . . . or herself in his? Think highly of yourself, don’t you, woman? Assuming he’ll be yours for the asking . . .

His movement drew her eye as he returned the cipher back to his pocket, and folded up the letters. With a shake of the head in response to Tempe’s extended hand, he pocketed the letters as well. As he drew breath, she converted the silent request into a staying gesture, and motioned forward the secretary who had just arrived. “I think it best we enter this into the record under a judiciary seal.”

Balthasar began to explain how Lord Vladimer had taken the Darkborn mages—and Telmaine—south to the Borders to contend with the Shadowborn, and were requesting Lightborn assistance. Floria, listening, thought, And first we all three have to survive.

Jovance was a step behind him as he threw open the door to the small bedroom, on the empty bed and empty room. He turned to face her, and she put a strong hand on the center of his chest and firmly pushed him backward over the threshold. “Give us a moment,” she said, over her shoulder. “Get everything together, and tell us as soon as you hear the train.”

As she kicked the door closed, he seized her shoulders, answering her disrespectful handling of her person with his own. “Where has he gone?”

“He has been sent”—she laid stress on the word—“to negotiate with the Shadowborn.”

He should not have such difficulty understanding simple words. He looked around at the bed, its covers trailing off the edge, the sheets still creased with Tam’s restless movements. If he touched it, might it still be warm? “. . . I didn’t even know he’d gone.”

“You’re not a mage, Prince Fejelis.”

The title—reminding him who and what he was, and why this might be a disaster much larger than betrayal by a friend. “. . . Gone to the Shadowborn?”

“Sent,” she reminded him, forcefully. “It wasn’t voluntary, that I can tell you.”

“But Tam’s—”

“Very strong. My grandfather said seventh-rank potential, sixth-rank fulfilled, fifth”—a sour expression—“acknowledged. But against the high masters, he had no chance.”

“. . . He got us away.” He felt dazed and blundering, and knew it showed.

“Only with the archmage’s help, he told me. They anticipated needing him to do this—and the archmage had taken a liking to you. You remind him of someone from his past.”

“. . . And the Shadowborn?” Fejelis said, disregarding anything else for the moment. “Has he a chance there?”

Her eyes asked him not to make her answer that question. “Not . . . if they’re hostile. Tam . . . said to tell you good-bye, to give you his love, to give you his regrets. He made me promise I’d look after you. Said you’d look after me, Beatrice and his children, the artisans. . . .”

Fejelis felt his shoulders bow under the weight of all Tam’s love and lost hopes.

She tipped her forehead forward, bouncing it lightly on his chest. With him pinning her arms, she could move neither forward nor back. “He didn’t have a choice, Fejelis. If nothing else, you must understand that.”

“. . . Could we go after him?”

She lifted her head, honey-colored eyes narrowing. “No, Fejelis. He . . . gave me an impression of what he sensed just before he lifted. It’s ugly and it’s very, very strong.”

“Where?”

“West of us. I’d say close to the Darkborn barony of Stranhorne. Directing or driving the force that overran Stranhorne. No, Fejelis.”

Can I believe her? he thought, with a sudden and too-welcome suspicion. Suppose it was the Temple who had found Tam, seized him, and took him unwillingly—Fejelis believed that, at least—back to Minhorne? He’d rather have her a willing traitor and a liar than Tam a traitor, a tool of the high masters, and a prisoner of the very monstrousness that had produced the things they had fought.

She was still in his hands, and he realized that through his grip on her shoulders, through the coarse weave of her sleeves, she could know everything he was thinking. He let her go, like a coal that had fallen into his hand, and at the flicker of pained emotion in her eyes, promptly regretted that. “. . . I’m sorry.”

“I know.” She hesitated. “I should have cloaked my touch-sense, but . . . I had to peek.”

His lips formed something that was not a smile. “Now you know.”

She sighed. “I too wish it had been that way, Fejelis.”

“. . . Is there nothing—nothing we can do for him?”

“No. If the Shadowborn kill him, then we can try to avenge him. It didn’t occur to him to veto that.”

Her smile was wondrously cold, but in her eyes was the knowledge that death was not the worst that might await Tam. The silence was punctuated by a chime. “We need to go,” she said quietly. “The train’s coming.”

He opened the door just as Jade was raising his fist to knock.

“We wait until they stop and blow the whistle twice,” Midha said, as they gathered around the door. “That’s the usual routine if we have to come down to a train in the night. Either the caboose will have been cleared for you, or someone in it will shout instructions.”

They had Jovance’s assurance that there was nothing living nearby except for those on the train and themselves, but Orlanjis was still shivering slightly at the thought of going into the night. Fejelis put a hand on his shoulder, drawing his gaze, full of unspoken questions and uncertainty. Fejelis managed, from somewhere, to summon a grin. “Have you ever actually ridden a Darkborn train?” His brother had shown a surprising—perhaps lifesaving—knowledge of the Darkborn railways, and admitted to a desire to escape court to the railways. “This’ll be a first.”

Orlanjis managed, from somewhere, to summon a pout. “Don’t tease.”

Then the whistle sounded, and Midha opened the door. They dropped a rope with lights down either side of the ladder and climbed down one at a time, with only Jade staying on guard above. Orlanjis suddenly blurted, “I have to get something.”

Midha, frowning, nodded to Sorrel. “Make it quick.”

Lights in hand, she flanked him on his dash underneath the platform to a tarpaulin that, from its profile, covered a stack of drums. He reached underneath and withdrew a bundle of red: Fejelis’s ceremonial caul and jacket, which Orlanjis had hidden in a futile attempt to disguise their identities. He was sweating when he returned, his arm blanched with exposure to shadow.

Fejelis accepted the bundle and tucked it under his arm with a quiet “Thanks.” He could feel the hard wire of the caul against his ribs.

The door to the caboose opened with a crack that made them all jump, and a great fan of light spilled across the gravel and scrub alongside the tracks. A man’s huge silhouette waved at them and a voice barked from inside. “All aboard that’s coming aboard. This train’s got a schedule to keep.” By its pitch it could be man or woman, aged but still strong.

“Les?” said Sorrel. “Les!” Their boarding was briefly obstructed as Midha and Sorrel crowded into the doorway to confirm and shout greetings; then the train whistle blew warning and Midha boosted Jovance aboard. Fejelis and Orlanjis scrambled after. Midha closed the door and bolted it behind them.

“They ordered me out because of this cursed hip,” explained the railway legend in frank disgust to Jovance. “Put Lomand and his gang in place. Didn’t know anything about it until the train stopped and they all got out. I’ll skelp the lot of them if we don’t find our hut entirely as we left it.” She was a small woman whose weight made scarcely a bulge in the netting of the hammock slung for her. It seemed implausible that the deep, forceful voice could be hers, or that the hulking Nathan could be her son. He had an inch on tall Fejelis and at least half his weight.

Then again, Fejelis knew within two minutes of climbing into the caboose that if personality had mass, the engine would have been in for a hard pull on the hills. Celeste inspected them with pale blue eyes, unimpressed. “Who’re these’uns? New blood? Look an unlikely pair. Pair of city lads run away from trouble?”

“In . . . a sense,” Jovance said, with a quick, cautious glance at Fejelis.

Gently, so as to show he had taken no offense, Fejelis said, “. . . I am Fejelis Grey Rapids. This is my brother, Orlanjis.”

She scowled. “If you’re going to pull my leg, my laddie, pull the one that’s not broke.”

His thoughts seemed to hit an unseen obstacle—thump. At his side, Orlanjis started to quiver and sank down to rest against the rocking wall of the caboose. Fejelis realized his brother was laughing. Jovance said, tremulously, “It’s so, Les,” and undermined her assertion by collapsing, giggling, beside Orlanjis.

After that, Celeste could not be convinced, particularly since, when she chose to fire some testing questions at them, Orlanjis had the answers. “Why would a prince’s son learn about trains?” she demanded. To that, Orlanjis had no response. To Fejelis he might confide his dream to flee court for a simple life as a railway engineer, but not to others. Fejelis left them to talk trains, glad to have Orlanjis distracted from the horrors of the night. He had heard the undertone of hysteria in his brother’s laughter.

He had no such diversion. “What am I going to tell Lord Vladimer?” he murmured, as he and Jovance sat side by side on the floor, backs against the rough wall of the carriage.

She made a small hand gesture, one he knew from Tam when he sealed a conversation against eavesdropping. He had always thought it was a quirk of Tam’s, but perhaps it was one they had both learned from Lukfer.

“What can you tell him?” she said, close-cropped head bent close. “He should know he’s reaping what he sowed.”

He twisted to face her. “The only thing he is guilty of, by Tam’s testimony, is inaction. The rest was other men’s doing.”

A flash of yellow eyes, unreadable.

He took his best guess at an answer to that flash. “. . . Jovance, I’ll treat with whomever I have to, to achieve my ends.”

“Which are?” she said, neutrally.

He let out a breath. “. . . My position back, of course.” He bounced the red bundle on his hand and had to snatch at it before it unraveled, sending the caul skittering across the cabin. “Unlike Jis,” he said, “I’ve never given any thought to an alternative occupation.” Then, more soberly: “. . . I have to speak to the archmage again. I’d like to be able to convince him that this is folly, but if it’s not—if it’s quite simply that the Shadowborn are too-strong mages and we have the choice of death, enslavement, or collusion—then I must know that. It may be”—he rolled his head on the rough wall to look at her—“that I too must treat with the Shadowborn, to try to secure the best possible terms.”

“For whom? For you? Their brightnesses?”

“. . . For myself, their brightnesses, the palace staff, the artisans and craftsman and merchants and indigents . . . for us, the Lightborn. I would count it my failure if Minhorne suffered what Stranhorne Manor has and I had done nothing to avert the stroke.”

Jovance’s hand opened and closed. Something moved in her face, something grim, powerful. Despite himself, he remembered the viscous red rain of a body ruptured in midair.

“Fejelis,” she said, slowly. “If it’s death or enslavement, I’ll take death. I’ll not have done to me what’s been done to Tam.”

He felt the words physically as a pang in his stomach or beneath his heart. He drew up his feet, bracing himself with his angled legs, and wondered what to say to her. Her determination would not change his decision—could not, even if he knew that by some choice or conciliation of his own, he could save her. Yet to say so aloud seemed cold, and he did not feel cold toward her fate.

She said, quietly, “I didn’t tell you that to influence your decisions, or make what you have to do more difficult. It’s difficult enough. I told you so you’d not be taken by surprise.”

“. . . ‘Difficult enough’?” he picked up from that bleak tone. “Do you mean ‘hopeless enough’?” A hesitation, longer than his usual. “. . . What do you sense?”

She shook her head. “I also told you,” she said, “so we’d not waste the time we have.” She slid work-hardened fingers under his jaw, turned his head, and kissed him.

“That’s playing dirty,” he said, huskily, when she drew back.

“So it is.”

“You’re not going to tell me.”

“No, I’m not. It’s a matter for mages, and it would do you no good to know.”

He chose to accept that, for now. At least she had not pointed out that none of the mages were under contract to him on this matter.

A far too few minutes later, the train drew into Strumheller, giving them no opportunity for more than that kiss, an interlude of the desultory, uncertain conversation between two people exploring a mutual attraction, and another kiss. Celeste gleefully observed, “That’s no prince, though the lad’s got taste.” Orlanjis looked worried, as well he should. Neither tradition nor compact allowed for a mage consort to the prince, and the Temple would still want Jovance’s strength for their lineages. Fejelis doubted he would meet the obscure fate of her first earthborn lover, though, who had been lost on his travels, possibly through the Temple’s doing. Whatever Fejelis’s fate was to be, it would not be obscure.

And if they escaped death or enslavement, the relations between princedom and Temple would change. He would see to that.

They listened as doors slammed open, so forcefully the train rocked, and the people inside spilled out. He heard bellowed orders from men, and shouts from men and women—if Darkborn women were submissive and meek, he did not hear much evidence of it—and children crying. At one point, there was a shot, followed immediately by a thoroughly profane rebuke from one of the voices in charge. Someone knocked hard on their door to tell them that they’d hear the bell when it was safe for them to come out. They waited more or less in silence. Talking was difficult with the racket outside, and flirting inhibited by tension, and by Orlanjis sitting on the floor on his other side. Though his young brother made a negligent chaperone, since by the time they heard the bolt slide back, Orlanjis had dozed off, propped against Fejelis’s shoulder.

“Wait until y’hear the bell,” the voice said from outside. “Lightborn quarters are off the west end of the platform—you’ll know from th’signage, if y’haven’t been here before. When you get inside and th’door shut and all, throw th’switch t’turn off the bell t’let us know. The baron and some’ll be down to join y’, very shortly.” He rapped on the door again, and they heard his booted feet move away.

Nat helped his mother to her feet, and she tucked crutches under her arms. He could have carried her effortlessly, but Fejelis had no doubt, even on this slight acquaintance, as to how she would receive that. He prodded Orlanjis awake and resisted the temptation to tease him with the request that he witness the formalizing of a contract, less on Orlanjis’s account than Jovance’s. They heard the bell, and Nat opened the door on chill night air; shivering, they climbed down.

Strumheller Crosstracks Station was an open station. He did not linger to look around, aware of the courtesy their hosts were extending them, surrendering even so small a portion of their precious hours of darkness on a night like this. The Lightborn quarters were easy to identify, even without the painted sign. It was the one building where the paintwork was truly decorative, not merely functional, the door, trim, and mounted panels on the sides brightly painted in a rustic, slightly garish style. Ordinarily the mounted panels would have held posters, but there was no one to read them here.

They closed the doors behind them, gladly putting the stone walls between them and the night. The building was surprisingly large, accommodating a dozen people in three bedrooms and a six-bed dormitory, and very well lit. The lack of posters outside was more than made up for by the many sheets of notice and instruction inside, which Nat and Les completely ignored. They staked their claim to their favorite rooms.

Jovance threw the lever to turn off the bell, saying, “The meeting room is through here.” She steered them into a modest-sized room dominated by a long glass table and an equally long glass sideboard. Six chairs of Lightborn design were pushed in on one side of the table, so that the occupants would face what looked like a large watercolor painting on paper, with a fine silver mesh over it: the paper wall. The painting would be backed by several layers of opaque black. Orlanjis, who had not had many dealings with Darkborn, eyed it dubiously. It looked flimsy, but any breach would be more dangerous to the Darkborn than to themselves. Jovance said, “Shall I get you something to drink, your brightnesses?”

She was prompting him back into a role; he supposed he should be grateful. “I’m not sure my stomach is up for more bedeeth tea,” he said, “but I need something to keep me alert. It has been a long night.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and left.

Orlanjis said in a low voice, “Fejelis, she’s a mage.”

“. . . I’m fairly sure there’s no ensorcellment involved,” Fejelis said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Orlanjis said. “I mean, she’s not eligible to be consort. And if you’re not serious, I mean—” He flushed deeply, to Fejelis’s well-hidden amusement. So his indulged younger brother had a sense of ethics in romance.

“. . . I could be quite serious. And if it comes to that, we will deal with it then.”

“But why should she—”

“Who’s he insulting?” Jovance interrupted, coming into the room with a tray. “Me or you?”

She must have used magic to heat the water that quickly. She offered them their choice of cups and dispensed tea from the common pot. Orlanjis’s scowl dissipated as he fell on the bannocks and cheese. Self-appointed food taster or ravenous adolescent? Finding himself in a losing race for the spoils, Fejelis concluded it was the latter. Jovance helped herself to a portion and then simply watched the scrum with a sisterly smirk. She never did get an answer to her question.

Fejelis was halfway through his second cup of bitter Darkborn tea and wondering if there was any more cheese in the stores when they heard the door open on the other side. He put down the bannock he had been holding, and, wanting a napkin, wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

Jovance leaned down to breathe in his ear. “Eight people. Three mageborn. Two pretty strong.”

A voice from the other side of the wall said, “Your brightnesses?” A prompting murmur. “Magistra?”

“Yes,” Fejelis said. He made himself speak steadily, without his habitual hesitation. “This is Fejelis Grey Rapids, prince of the Lightborn; my brother, Orlanjis; and Magistra Jovance.” He realized he had no idea how she styled herself on such occasions. Earthborn Lightborn clung to a fashionable minimalism in using titles, although they were as prideful and hierarchical without them as the mages with their ranks, or the Darkborn with their layers of nobility. It did help, when dealing with either of those, to have a title to brandish, but he was not sure she would want to use her Temple rank, even if he knew it.

“I am Baron Reynard Strumheller,” the Darkborn on the far side of the wall said, in an aggressive, light baritone, as though daring Fejelis to dispute his claim. “I have with me Lord Vladimer Plantageter, the brother of the archduke”—Jovance’s face hardened at the name—“Baronet Boris Stranhorne, Baronette Laurel Stranhorne, Lady Telmaine—Mrs. Balthasar Hearne, formerly Lady Telmaine Stott.” That a woman, but not a man, could gain or lose rank by marriage was one of those Darkborn nuances that had taken hours of study to understand. “Magister Farquhar Broome”—he saw Jovance nod in recognition—“and Magistra Phoebe Broome.”

Jovance leaned over to whisper, and he pointed to his ear and the wall in warning, and indicated the paper and pens and ink laid out on the sideboard.

“My companions and I are deeply grateful to you for your timely retrieval and hospitality, Baron Strumheller,” Fejelis said.

Jovance dealt out pens and paper. Orlanjis eyed his dubiously. Incongruously, the pen was of Darkborn manufacture, the wooden barrel carefully carved, with a metal nib and hidden bladder that stored ink. The first time one of these had been laid before Isidore, the prince had laughed himself breathless at the cheek of the Darkborn, out to best the Lightborn there as well.

Fejelis uncapped the pen, tapped it to start the ink flowing, and scribbled, 3rd mage lady T. He had not named her when he told Jovance and her colleagues the background to Tam’s, Orlanjis’s, and his sudden arrival beside the railway tracks, and he did not think Jovance or Orlanjis would connect name and account now. Even so, Jovance gave him a searching glance.

Vladimer Plantageter said, “I expected that the mage—Magister Tammorn—would have been with you.”

Straight to the heart of the sticky questions, Fejelis thought. “So did I,” he said. At least he had had a chance to decide beforehand how to meet said. At least he had had a chance to decide beforehand how to meet it. Which was directly. “Magistra Jovance tells me that he has been sent by the archmage and high masters to open negotiations with the Shadowborn.”

There was a reverberating silence from the other room, no spurious or stalling questions as to his meaning.

“That is not news I wanted to convey,” Fejelis said, “any more than it is news you wished to hear. Magister Tammorn did not go willingly—he is a sport, and able to sense Shadowborn magic in a way that lineage mages do not, and his sense of them was of something hostile and dangerous—but being under Temple law, and being fifth-rank, he had no choice. If he had defied the high masters’ orders, he would have been coerced into it.”

“Well,” they heard the baron mutter, “that’s that, then.”

“That most decidedly is not that,” Vladimer said, his voice gritty. “That is not welcome news, but not, perhaps, unexpected.” And what exactly did he mean by that—that he expected treachery of the mages? Or the Lightborn? “However, Prince Fejelis, your being here in the Borders is unexpected. The report I had from Minhorne is that you had been deposed.”

And in the usual course of such things, should have been dead, yes. “My survival was Magister Tam’s doing. He lifted my brother and me out.”

“Why bring you here?”

Despite himself, he hesitated a half beat. “. . . He brought me to someone he trusted—Magistra Jovance, granddaughter to his master, Lukfer. Magister Tammorn is more than a contracted mage to me. He is a good friend.”

“That is not the usual relationship between earthborn and mageborn,” Vladimer said, crisply. A slightly reproachful murmur from the other side. Jovance scribbled, F Broome.

“You’re not the first to tell me that, Lord Vladimer.”

A woman’s voice spoke up, slightly hesitant but determined. “Lord Vladimer, neither my father nor I can detect any sense of Shadowborn about them.”

P Broome, wrote Jovance. Checking us. Orlanjis shuffled his chair closer, craning his neck to see.

Fejelis decided that he would not acknowledge that they themselves lacked a similar advantage. He scratched, Cn they tell yr lineage vs sport? She squinted, deciphering, and shook her head.

He’d be better reassured if her expression were more certain, though if any of the Darkborn weren’t Darkborn or were Shadowborn-held, he might be dead or ensorcelled before he knew he’d misjudged. The paper wall was a fragile thing. The vigilants would be disgusted with him for sitting still, so his voice could be placed, but instinct told him that he should stay where he was; the tension on the far side of the wall was palpable.

“And what do you plan to do now?”

Orlanjis was frowning at the other’s tone. Fejelis wished he were able to signal that he was choosing to let the Darkborn have control for a while, to let them settle. “Get back to Minhorne,” he said. “Hope to be able to influence the archmage—”

“To do what?”

That, too, he had thought through. “. . . To consider the interests of the earthborn as well as the mageborn in their actions. I don’t know why the high masters have chosen the course they have taken. Perhaps it was anger for your people’s attack on the tower.” He’d get it said, rather than leave it leering through the silences. “For me, I don’t think that in itself was enough, but if they felt themselves weakened by it, so that they did not feel they could fight . . .” Assuming, Fejelis said privately to himself, that they wished to fight under any balance of powers. His fear was that the Temple had decided that their loyalty lay with magic, whatever the nature of that magic. He could not say that to the Darkborn, and deepen their hostility against magic. Or was that what Vladimer had meant when he said that the Temple’s move was not unexpected? “. . . I could continue to enumerate reasons, but won’t know until I ask.”

“Which may satisfy your curiosity, Prince Fejelis, a motive with which I find myself in sympathy. But what will you do when you know?”

Jovance’s pen beat a soft staccato on her paper, leaving dots of ink. He quirked a smile at her; Lord Vladimer was obviously accustomed to provoking a reaction and letting others do the soothing. Sejanus Plantageter was superb at it. “. . . How is your brother the archduke, Lord Vladimer? I had had some bad news of him earlier.”

“If you are asking as to whether I have power to negotiate,” Vladimer said, “I do.”

“I’m glad to hear it, but no. I was asking because, when I return to Minhorne, it will be reassuring to me to know that I have Sejanus Plantageter on the other side of sunset, rather than a regency council.” Composed, he thought, of bigots and old men.

And are those in charge of the palace any better? queried an internal voice that sounded remarkably like his father’s.

“You need not worry about Mycene anymore,” the Darkborn said. “The telegram I had earlier said that he had been killed by a Shadowborn. The present Duke Mycene is fighting Shadowborn in Stranhorne Crosstracks. Kalamay continues alive, but I don’t doubt Sejanus will deal with him. My brother is quite well.”

Which was a relief, but left more than a little unsaid. Fejelis well knew that Plantageter was strongly opposed to having magic in his city, but despite his prejudices, the archduke insisted on scrupulous respect of Lightborn rights under the letter and the spirit of the law. Fejelis could only hope that had not changed. “The injury was magical, was it?”

“Yes . . . Shadowborn, indirectly.”

Gracious—or politic—not mentioning Tam’s part in it. Might Vladimer suspect that Fejelis already knew more than he was saying, from Tam?

Vladimer, suspect? With a name that was a by word for suspicion? Very well. He would put Vladimer’s trust to the test. “What is your plan, Lord Vladimer? ”

“To retake Stranhorne Manor and the territories on the far side,” Vladimer said. “We have reinforced Stranhorne Crosstracks all night by train with troops and reserves from Strumheller and Telemarch, farther around the border, but, unfortunately, our ability to reinforce by day is limited by the design of this station. Stranhorne has also received further reinforcements from the estates and towns on the inner Borders, including Mycene lands, and they are close to the numbers that they can safely shelter.”

Fejelis breathed out: Vladimer seemed prepared to treat him as an ally after all. “Both Magister Tam and Magistra Jovance warn me that these are very strong mages. If you come into contact with them, you will take high casualties, possibly to not much advantage.”

“It has th’full support of the baronies,” Baron Strumheller said—growled, rather.

“If it comes to that, we may,” Vladimer said. “But that does not imply we will lose. Ishmael—the former Baron Strumheller—killed a Shadowborn mage at my bedside, admittedly with the help of Lady Telmaine here.” Rank? he scratched, to Jovance, and she, 6? “Baron Stranhorne’s sacrifice stopped the advance across Stranhorne lands, and we have information that one of the mages present was killed. I ask you: if they are so potent, then why are they employing such familiar tactics of assassination and social disruption—earthborn tactics, not mageborn? Why use people, such as your Mistress White Hand, or the dukes of Mycene and Kalamay? Why take such care to turn us against each other before they emerged into the open? ”

All good questions, Fejelis acknowledged. “You assume that you have seen their full strength.”

“I assume nothing. But we have no choice but to fight or be overrun. By doing so, we may also ease the pressure on the city, which is no small concern of mine, and perhaps provoke your Temple to find its courage.”

“You are not the one to judge the Temple’s courage,” Jovance said, sorely provoked.

“I may have no right, Magistra, but others do: my brother, the archduke, who knew nothing of this until after the tower was down; Baronet and Baronette Stranhorne, who both fought in the defense of their home, though the lady is with child and her brother not yet eighteen; Baron Strumheller and his brother and predecessor, who built much of the defense we are now mobilizing, and who is a mage himself.”

A mage who knew Shadowborn . . . “Is the previous Baron Strumheller still alive?” Among Lightborn, he would almost certainly not be, but Darkborn convention allowed for the deposition of the living.

“Unknown,” Vladimer said. “He was lost in the retreat, but I’ve learned not to discount his survival.”

That sounded as though it was directed to someones else’s address, likely the brother’s. How much did he wish to risk alienating one or another of the Darkborn by inquiring further? And if the high masters would not listen to their own, why should they listen to a Darkborn sport mage? “. . . I will support you in any way I can,” Fejelis said. He decided it was time for a little provocation of his own. “. . . Here we are, three Lightborn, essentially alone in the barony. Why not simply take us hostage? ”

“I thought about that,” the Darkborn spymaster said, unruffled. The muttering this time sounded as though it was coming from Baron Strumheller; Fejelis thought he heard the word “hospitality” in a resentful tone. “But who would ransom a prince they’d tried to depose, especially in the coin I needed? And the mage with you would be more trouble than you’re worth.”

Point to Vladimer. Jovance’s smile showed teeth, and Orlanjis’s eyes on the decorated paper wall were white ringed. Fejelis quickly sketched two stick swordsmen, the cauled one with arms outflung as he was impaled on the other’s blade. As an artist, he would have starved on the street, but the sketch eased the tension along the glass table while leaving the Darkborn listening to silence for a little while. “. . . We will see which one of us is right about my importance,” he muttered, knowing the Darkborn would hear. He raised his voice. “. . . I’ll be leaving for Minhorne first thing in the morning, Lord Vladimer.” And if he had any sense, he should have asked Jovance beforehand if she would take him. He had a mental image of himself riding in triumph into the city on a hay cart, but that was beyond his drawing skills. He corralled his wandering thoughts. “. . . The high masters are mine to deal with, but I’d appreciate any additional information you have on what has happened over the past day and night.”

“Ready to get something to eat? ”

“As long as there’s none of their magic close enough t’turn my stomach, or I’ll get no good of it.”

The corner of Hearne’s mouth twitched slightly. “You’re a rock-nerved bastard, I’ll grant you that. I know what she just put to you.”

He steered Ishmael into an interior room where the air was still and all walls sonned as solid. The hexagonal table in the center was large enough to seat twelve luxuriously, and eighteen at a pinch. Lysander directed the servant who arrived at the ring of a bell to set the table for two. He pulled out a chair for Ishmael. “Sit.”

Ishmael sat. Hearne dropped into the nearest chair on the next edge of the hexagon. “So,” he said, “any questions?”

“Aye,” Ishmael said. “A few.”

“And you’re wondering whether you can trust me.”

“No,” Ishmael said; about that he was quite clear.

Unexpectedly, Hearne leaned back and laughed. Ishmael’s sense was that the laughter was unfeigned, even pleased. “If you know my brat of a brother, I’m sure you’re wondering how I came to be here.”

Ishmael was entirely content to let him tell his story; he’d take what he would out of it. Servants set down fresh rolls, with pâté and preserves, fruit and cheese, and newly made tea.

“I was twenty-one years old,” Hearne said, while Ishmael cut and spread a roll, “and a very bad little boy. I was clever, and I didn’t care who I hurt, and I knew what I wanted. I was well on my way to wealth and I’d have found my way to power, for all there wasn’t a title in the family. But I made a mistake. After that, if I didn’t leave, I’d have to deal with the one person who knew what I’d done. I found I couldn’t. I could make the brat’s life a misery, but I couldn’t kill him—not with the fresh feel of that girl’s throat cracking under my hands. You ever felt that? ” The question was rhetorical; he did not wait for an answer. “So I ran. Nowhere’s far enough when a man’s trying to run from himself, but I didn’t know that then. Down at Odon’s Barrow I crossed some of the local enforcers and was knocked senseless and dumped out in the middle of a field. They’d been feeding troublemakers to the Shadowborn.”

“They were,” Ish said. “We put a stop t’that.”

“I woke up on the march to Emeya’s midden, a prisoner. You’ll hear more about Emeya presently. Over the centuries, she and our lady have pulled in tens of thousands, and those tens of thousands have begotten others. Emeya’s—barony, I suppose you’d call it—is probably seventy, eighty thousand strong now. Earthborn here do what earthborn have always done: farm, hunt, spin, craft, flirt, gossip, intrigue, marry, breed, and die. I’d no desire to be a peasant groveling in the dirt, so I maneuvered my way into her stronghold itself.”

His face was utterly devoid of expression. “I said I was a bad little boy, but that’s all I was—a little boy. Though I expect I’d have grown up and made out all right—but for Ari.

“Besides Emeya, she had four strong mages—and I mean eighth-rank, if not more. That’s the kind of power our lady’s offering you, di Studier. There were Ariadne, Neill, Jonquil, Midora—all of Emeya’s lineage, as mages reckon it. There’d been more, but a while back—a couple of hundred years—they tried to take over and lost. Ari was the youngest, and Neill was Emeya’s favorite, then. Neill wanted to wait for Ari to come round to his wooing, but Emeya wouldn’t have it. She set an ensorcellment on them, meaning to force them together. Ari had enough strength to bind another man in that ensorcellment—me. I could no more have refused her than I could have flown. It made me an enemy of Neill and a target of Emeya’s anger, and I hated Ari for it.”

If there was an ensorcellment of that sort on him now, Ishmael could not sense it. He certainly did not behave as though he hated her—not even counting the bullet he’d put through Ishmael. Head lowered, Hearne said, “That was the way we started, but along the way, something changed. I never thought I’d care about what someone else felt. And when the boy was born—well, I’ve a cur’s way with the small and weak, but this one was different, too. This one was mine.” He sonned Ishmael with a harsh stroke, his expression defensive, and a warning. “I wanted her safe, I wanted him safe, and the only place to look for safety was here. It was cursed slow doing, convincing Ariadne to take the risk, and by the time I did, the boy had will and strength of his own, and Emeya had made a pet of him—they all had. He wouldn’t come. He said he’d bring Emeya down on us. He forced me to choose, and I chose Ariadne.”

There was a long silence. “Ariadne’s strength and knowledge were gifts to Isolde. If the uprising hadn’t reduced the numbers of Emeya’s strong ones, not to mention made her so suspicious she put a choke chain on the survivors, Emeya’d already be the only one left.”

“Emeya’s got one less of the th’strong ones,” Ish said. “I shot th’one called Jonquil at Lord Vladimer’s bedside; two bullets in the body, one in the brain. It’s possible that Stranhorne got others, including your Neill.”

Lysander sonned him with that close attention he recalled from dealing with his brother, though it was plain the two were very different men. “Did you, indeed? ” he said. “Frankly, that surprises me.”

“I’d th’help of a brave mage. And”—before Lysander could ask who—“it’s likely I met your son at Stranhorne.”

The father leaned forward, ready, Ishmael thought, with any of half a dozen ordinary questions. How did he seem? Was he all right? But he eased back without speaking, his lips tight, his expression one of hard-schooled composure.

“I took him for your brother th’first time I sonned him. Seemed t’me as though he could do with steady feeding t’flesh him out, steady labor t’build him up, and no small amount of education. I’ve known street children less neglected. He’s got th’one trick of fire down fine—nearly broiled me—and he’s learned something of ensorcellment.” He would hold back, for the moment, how Sebastien had used that skill, or how the near broiling had been provoked. “I also got th’sense that your leaving had lost him favor,” he added.

“It would,” Hearne said, taking the information straight.

“If Emeya were t’lose this war, you’d have your son.”

“If he lived.”

Ishmael chewed bread and considered. Lysander had all the characteristics of a virtuoso liar—someone who lied merely to keep in practice—but Ishmael could not tell which part of this might be fabrication. The one part he believed was Hearne’s feeling toward his son. Briefly, he entertained the thought of asking the man if he could touch-read him. But he knew the answer, because as sure as sunrise killed, there were things that none of them were telling him.

“If she’s got th’ability t’augment mages, where are th’others? ”

Unease passed across Lysander’s expression. “What do you mean? ”

“Th’question’s simple enough. If she can do this t’me, why not t’others? ”

“It’s . . . not exactly like closing a cut, di Studier. It’s going to be very taxing for both of them.”

“And? ” said Ishmael. Lysander sighed and toyed with a fork, flicking the tines with a nail to make them chime. “They were children when this was done to them. They lost most of the higher knowledge of magic that existed from before the Curse.”

“Seems t’me some things are better lost,” Ish rumbled.

“Isolde knew it was possible; it was done to her, after all. But she did not know how. When Ariadne came over, it filled in what she did not know. Between them, they could do it.”

“You’re telling me I’ll be th’first to have it tried on me,” Ishmael said.

Lysander laid down the fork. “You’re not exactly the usual low-rank mage. You’ve pushed your magic to its limits and beyond, you fought Shadowborn for some twenty-five years, and you held out against Ari’s Call for nearly ten years. If anyone’s got the constitution for this, you have.”

And I’m not fool enough to be flattered into noticing you’ve not answered my question, Ishmael thought.

“Frankly, now, whether you do or don’t do it, whether it succeeds or doesn’t, if Isolde cannot take down Emeya, if she tries and loses, you’re as dead as we are. And if you live, you’re looking at a cursed lot of power. I’ll not believe any man who tells me that makes no difference to him.” He snorted. “I’ve been trying to persuade her to do it on me, but I’ve as much magic in me as a mud pat.”

“So it’s t’the death, her and Emeya. And after, if she wins, what then?”

He committed his attention not to sonn, but to his other senses, allowing Lysander to think himself unobserved, but listening hard for the change in Lysander’s breathing, for the timbre of his voice as he answered. “Trust me, you don’t want to live in a land ruled by Emeya.”

That, at least, sounded sincere. “So th’choice is rule by one or rule by th’other, is it? ”

“If it comes to that—and I’m not saying it will—”

“But y’think it likely,” Ishmael interposed. He was in no mood to indulge prevarication. “I’ll thank you for the feeding and the counsel, Hearne. I’m the better for th’one at least. And now I think I’d best have another word with the lady.”

They found her not in her grand receiving room but on a small balcony that, like the other, was crowded with planters and pots. She was weeding. Ishmael, stepping firmly onto the balcony, suddenly felt a one-sided heat, like the heat of a fire, or the heat he felt through his day shade when he overnighted outside. He checked himself midstride. He had heard neither bells nor dawn chorus to mark the dawn, nor had he sensed his own ensorcellment in the miasma of Shadowborn magic. He did now.

“You’ll get used to it,” Lysander Hearne said with false cheer.

She circled a planter and shook her head reproachfully at her servant. “Shall we go inside? ” she asked, gently.

In the cool of the interior, he recovered his equilibrium; there was nothing to do about the ensorcellment but be glad of it. “You’ll do with me what y’want, m’lady, I’ve no doubt of that. But if it matters t’you that I’m willing, then let me have a sense of you.” He jerked off his gloves, demonstrating, if not conveying, his meaning. It was ridiculous of him to propose this, to pretend that she would be unable to deceive him or suborn his will—but she need not touch him to do that. He said, “If the sense convinces me, then you can have me willing. If not, I’ll fight you with all that I am, puny though that may be.”

“Not so puny, Ishmael,” she said. She extended her hand, as a lady might for a formal greeting. The hand was smooth skinned and evenly fleshed, younger than her face. Even so strong a mage had her vanities. Her hand did not tremble. His, he noted, did.

To have actually taken her hand would have seemed too much an intimacy. He lifted his fingers, offering his palm. She turned her hand likewise, and set palm to palm.

She caught up with him as he intercepted the stationmaster, who had been trying to dodge him. Little wonder, given the way their last encounter had ended, with the stationmaster telling Vladimer there was no way on this cursed earth that he could convert an open platform into a covered station in the few hours remaining before sunrise, and Lord Vladimer must apply elsewhere for magic or a miracle. Vladimer said only, “Will this train be ready by sunrise? ”

“Aye, it’ll be ready,” said the stationmaster, deflating from posture of war. “It’ll leave within the half hour, if I’ve anything to say about it, and be into Stranhorne less than two hours after sunrise. It’ll be stopping for lookouts; I don’t want it traveling without a Lightborn guard.”

“Good,” Vladimer said. “Have someone call me when it’s ready to leave.”

“Aye,” the stationmaster said, and, with no “excuse me” turned away to bellow, “No, you’ll not load that in there, unless y’want to be blown t’very small pieces.”

He sounded so like Ishmael, her heart hurt. She tried for imperious and failed. “Lord Vladimer, did I hear you correctly? ”

“I regret you do not have time to send to the manor for luggage, but I am certain that if you use your charm, some of these gentlemen would be delighted to oblige you.”

Given what she wanted at this particular moment, which had nothing to do with luggage, probably not. “Lord Vladimer, a word, if you would.”

He did not so much find as clear a corner; the quartet of men occupying it flowed out like putty. “Now,” he said. “What is unclear about—”

“What could I possibly do in Stranhorne Crosstracks? The Broomes don’t want me using magic, don’t want me to be part of their group.” Which had been more humiliating than she would have thought possible, given that she had had to be backed, resisting, into magic, and forced into their company. Given that she had let them into her mind, let them explore the Shadowborn gift. The worst of it was that she knew they knew how she felt, and she knew they were probably right. “I haven’t the experience, and I’m too strong to be safe.”

“So I am informed,” he said. “I am willing to take that risk. I know you can communicate over distance without adverse effects on your contact, and it occurs to me that I might need that.”

“You’re not thinking to talk with the Shadowborn ? ” she breathed.

All expression left his face. “No.”

There was a silence. She stood quivering slightly with the urge to apologize, even for a question that had to be asked in this night of betrayals. “If the Mages’ Temple does not repent of its decision,” Vladimer said, in a whisper like sand blowing through dry reeds, “then I shall unrepent of my silence.”

She pressed her back against the wall, fighting the impulse to scramble away—like the nine-year-old Telmaine whom Vladimer had surprised in his private sanctum, years ago. He said in a slightly less deathly voice, “I trust that they will, for if not”—he raised his head, turned as though to cast, but in the end did not; his hearing would have told him everything he needed to know—“it is likely we are all going to death, ensorcellment, or enslavement.”

“Does that not bother you? ” she whispered. “All these people.”

“I recall we had a previous conversation along these lines,” he said. “And while things that have happened since have made me reconsider some of the things I said then, I do not believe that I have done anything to regret, here.” His expression changed, disturbingly, at some thought. She would not have been surprised if he was remembering what Magister Broome had said to him; she certainly was. “If the Temple does repent its decision or find its courage, it will be immensely useful for me to be able to speak to Fejelis or his mage.”

“I don’t . . . think the Lightborn mages will be best pleased with me.” Not if Tammorn was anything to go by. She tried not to sound as frightened as she felt.

“A risk we must both take.” He turned his head, and this time cast over the platform. “They’re nearly ready. You recall that I said—not very long ago, if one merely thinks in hours—that there might come a time to contact Ishmael. I may ask you to do that once we reach Stranhorne.”

“I’d be glad to,” she said. “I’d have done it already, but—”

“I will give you an order, if you wish,” he said.

“I don’t need an order,” Telmaine bridled. “Ishmael may need help.”

“Good.” She expected him to move, aware that the crowd on the platform was thinning, that there was almost no one near them. Aware, too, of the presences of the Broomes and their commune: Farquhar Broome��s vast, quiet power; Phoebe’s tightly disciplined strain; the others she was learning to recognize. She could sense about them the foul taint of Shadowborn magic, from their hurried rehearsals. That sense of exclusion scraped her spirit, but shriveled into pettiness as she sensed something more about them: resolve, almost resignation. They had taken the measure of their enemy and their enemy’s magic, and they did not believe they would be returning.

Then Vladimer said, “I have one more request of you, Lady Telmaine. I will not be made a slave to the Shadowborn again. If it comes to that—if I give you the order, or if I fall to their ensorcellment, I want you to kill me. Shoot me in the head, use your fires, do whatever you must to do it quickly and thoroughly. I will it, and I wish it.”