Balthasar

Malachi Plantageter arrived late in the night, in response to Balthasar’s urgent note. The superintendent appeared weary, as well a man might who had the responsibility for public law and order on a night like tonight. It was a mark of Bal’s elevation by marriage that he merited a personal visit and not a deputy.

“Thank you for coming,” Bal said. “Sit down, please. Can I ask for anything for you to eat or drink?”

Plantageter lowered himself into a chair. “Thank you, but my wife would not forgive me; she has my dinner kept for me, no matter how late I arrive home. Before we come to the substance of your note, I heard that your daughter had been found, alive.”

“Yes,” Bal said, letting his natural joy sound in his voice.

“That must have been a great relief to you.”

“It’s a very great relief, not only for the sake of my daughter and wife, but because it frees me to . . . do what is moral and right.”

A brief silence. “I may need to talk to your wife,” Plantageter said in a warning tone. “There were some additional disturbing events tonight.” His heart rate picked up. “She is resting next door at present, with our daughters. I would much rather she not be disturbed.”

“I understand. I would prefer not to impose on her.” The tone made that, unmistakably, a warning. Bal wondered what Plantageter already knew—more than himself, he feared. And for the first time, he wondered if Telmaine were trying to do more than simply protect him from knowing what dreadful risks she had taken.

Sweet Imogene, had she set that fire?

He said, too urgently, “I believe I know who killed Tercelle Amberley. I have only circumstantial evidence, but I do know that he has killed at least one woman in similar circumstances.”

Plantageter waited a moment. Bal could almost feel him deciding whether to pursue the first topic, or let himself be distracted by the second. Then he said mildly, “Let me decide what is circumstantial and not circumstantial.”

Bal faltered. He had resolved upon doing this, fiercely resolved upon doing this, even before Plantageter had begun asking questions around Telmaine. Even so, it was disconcertingly hard for him to find it in him to betray Lysander. But if he hesitated too long, he thought desperately, Plantageter might start asking again about Telmaine and the fire.

“I have a brother, Lysander Hearne, with whom I had not spoken for seventeen years. I was considerably surprised when he called on me last night. He wanted information about the whereabouts of the children Tercelle bore—he claimed, in fact, to be their father. In exchange, he offered me my daughter, missing these three days. He threatened her life if I did not comply with that and with his other demands. Thanks to the courage of Gil di Maurier and my wife, Florilinde has been found. I am therefore no longer bound to silence. I suspect him of the murder of Tercelle Amberley.”

“And why do you suspect your brother?” Plantageter asked, intent, but revealing nothing.

“Seventeen years ago he killed a young actress he had made his mistress. He did not intend to, but he took her by the throat during a quarrel, and when he let go, she was no longer breathing.” He paused, then made himself go on. “He came to me and begged my help in concealing the murder. He invoked the health of our parents, the reputation of our sister, my own prospects, and his horror of the end he would meet if convicted of murder. I helped him take the body, in secret, out of the city. We left it off the road for the sunrise while we took refuge in one of the wayfarers’ shelters. After sunset we came back to confirm that it was gone.”

“This was never reported, I presume.”

“I can give you the girl’s name and description and the day we left her outside the walls. You should find her in your records as an unsolved disappearance.”

“You do know that if there were charges, you would face them also, though your youth—you were what, fourteen?—would be offered in mitigation.”

“I was well aware, even then, that what I did was wrong,” Bal said. “I will always regret—for the sake of the girl’s family—that it has taken me so long to admit to the doing.”

There was a silence, broken at last by Malachi. “No body, no evidence, only a long absence and the word of brother against brother. I doubt there would be charges merely on the basis of your confession.” Bal drew breath, sensing the shroud of respectability drawing in. Malachi confirmed it, saying, “Your parents may be dead now, sir, but you have a wife and daughters. Consider them.” He did not let Bal remonstrate; he continued, “How in particular does this relate to the death of Tercelle Amberley?”

Bal struggled with his thwarted need for restitution. Plantageter let him, his face implacable. He was not offering to spare Bal, that face said, but leaving him to his conscience.

“From the experience of living with my brother, I developed my professional interest in pathology of mind. Lysander Hearne, I believe, was and is pathologically narcissistic and devoid of conscience. Tercelle Amberley crossed him, perhaps by conceiving by him in the first place, but certainly by not remaining where they, or he, had planned she would have his children, and then by putting the children in my hands. I believe that it was Lysander Hearne, and not Baron Strumheller, who quarreled with Tercelle Amberley about the whereabouts of the twins, and in the midst of that quarrel took her around her throat and strangled her.”

Malachi Plantageter said mildly, “Where did you learn the cause of death was strangulation?”

There was nothing to do but admit it. “Baron Strumheller said so. I presumed—since he found the body—he could tell.”

There was a silence. “It is possible that you may be right. I have gained a certain facility in recognizing the criminal mentality myself, and I thought I recognized a type when I questioned your brother about the statement he had given impugning Baron Strumheller—it being no light thing to charge a border baron with murder.”

“My testimony should surely help exonerate Baron Strumheller, should it not?”

Pantageter appeared even wearier. “It is immaterial now. I would much prefer you kept this to yourself for the moment, but it will be all over the broadsheets soon: Baron Strumheller died in his cell this evening.”

“Died?” Bal said in disbelief. “Of what cause?”

“He appears to have suffered some kind of seizure, was heard groaning, the prison apothecary was called, and shortly afterward he expired.”

“Had he . . . had he been ill?”

“He was brought into the prison in a state of collapse, though he seemed to recover well enough. His lawyers were going to arrange for a physician’s examination.” He seemed about to say more, then stopped himself.

Bal tried to steady his voice. “When did that happen?”

He got the answer he feared. “Around two of the clock. Why do you ask?”

At the very time Telmaine was carrying Florilinde out of the blazing warehouse. Bal struggled to keep his responses predictable; this information he could not give Plantageter. “Will there be an autopsy?”

“If the family chooses. The prison has no jurisdiction over the body of a man who dies while awaiting trial, only over those who die after conviction. We have released the body; it will, I understand, be transported back to the Borders for the final ceremonies.”

“Surely the charges will not be allowed to stand now?”

“I think it likely that petition would be made to the court to have the charges set aside. I would support that.”

“You don’t believe the charges, do you?”

Plantageter hesitated, then said, “Certainly not the second, which seemed to me . . . well, desperate opportunism seems the least of it. As to the charge of murder, I will investigate it to the fullest ability of my department, pressed though we are. May I count on your assistance in that, if need be?”

“You may count on it,” Bal said, hearing the grimness in his own voice. “It is my own and my family’s best protection against further threats from that quarter.”

“I will speak to the ducal guard and let them know that I wish to interview your brother, and moreover that he should not be granted admittance here.”

“Thank you,” Bal said, and then, “Wait. Has Lord Vladimer awakened?”

“No.”

“Then that exonerates Ishmael di Studier of the charge of sorcery!” Bal said, pushing himself close to a sitting position. “Magical effect is sustained by the life force of the mage. When the mage dies, the magic dies. If Lord Vladimer is still affected, Ishmael di Studier was not responsible.”

“I have heard that said, yes, but what then of Imogene’s Curse, laid by mages eight hundred years dead?” He paused, but Bal had no answer for that one incontrovertible exception. “And not only has Lord Vladimer not awakened, he is said to be sinking.” Wearily, he pushed himself to his feet. “My best wishes for your recovery, and your daughter’s. Assure your wife that I will be speaking to her only if it is unavoidable.”

Balthasar fell back against the pillows as the echoes of their sonn faded to the vague, constant shimmer of sound. A thump and rustle in the doorway to the inner bedroom brought his head up. Telmaine was there, supporting herself with a two-handed grip on the doorjamb.

“Ishmael is dead?” she said in a raw whisper. “Dead?”

“I fear so,” he said.

He pushed himself up, bracing his straight arm behind him, and held out the other arm to receive her stumbling rush across the room. She fell across the bed, face in his chest, and began to cry. He let himself down onto his elbow, then his back, and took her in his arms while she sobbed as though she would never stop.

In the early years of his marriage, he had wondered why Telmaine had encouraged his suit, had waited out the years of her father’s resistance, and had married him with such apparent satisfaction at her choice. She was so beautiful, and so highly born, cousin to the archduke himself, and on intimate terms with those of his circle. Whereas he himself might be able to trace his own lineage to archdukes, that lineage was filtered through a long succession of younger sons. Hearne might be a name of note in the public service and intellectual histories, but was attached to neither title nor property. He was uncomfortable in the elevated society of her birth, while her readiness to play hostess at his gatherings of scientists, physicians, and councilmen put him to shame. All he had to offer her was his love. He had wondered at times what would happen to make her regret her choice, if she met a man of her own class whom she could love. Had Ishmael di Studier been that man?

Telmaine’s wretched sobbing finally abated. He shifted her on his chest—she was leaning on his still-tender left ribs—and said quietly, “There was something between you, wasn’t there?”

She pushed herself up, dismayed; she seemed hardly to register his involuntary grimace of pain. “I have never been unfaithful to you, Balthasar! Never!”

He had his answer. “But there was, nevertheless, something between you. Something that will burden your spirit if you do not admit it, at least to yourself.”

“Bal,” she said in a voice thick with sobs. “Bal, don’t.”

He wondered if he had a right to go on. As her physician, he would have. As her husband . . . “I won’t, then,” he said quietly. “I don’t need you to tell me anything. But promise me you will be honest with yourself. I’ve known too many people damaged by the guilt of losing someone whom they had unresolved feelings for. I don’t want you to be one.”

He was proud of the steady compassion in his voice. Quite unlike his conflicted feelings as he took the measure of the intensity of her grief. Immeasurable gratitude for his own life and Florilinde’s; admiration for the man’s competence and selflessness; curiosity about and appreciation for Ishmael’s complexity; a sense of inferiority, less to the breeding than the stamina, courage, and resolution. Guilt: for surrendering Ishmael to Lysander’s blackmail, even though it had likely made no difference, and for being, in some small part of him, relieved at the passing of a rival.

“Bal,” Telmaine wept. “Bal, I think I killed him.”

He took her face in his hands, lifting it so he could brush it lightly with sonn. He smelled smoke on her hair, smoke on her skin, the scorched fabric of her petticoats. She had simply lain down in them, shedding the soiled outer garment, but otherwise too exhausted to change. Despite his grief, and despite the knowledge of the price Gil and Ishmael had both paid, he found himself angry at both of them for the way they had exposed her to danger. It was unconscionable. And even more unconscionable that she should believe herself in any way at fault.

“No, Bal,” she said before he could speak. “You don’t understand. I . . . Oh, sweet Imogene, I can’t . . .” She caught him behind the neck and pulled his lips to hers in a desperate kiss. He felt a sudden shock of lightness, a sudden release of pain, a sudden surge in well-being. He recognized the sensation. He knew it was impossible.

His sonn rang against her face, revealing for an instant the fine bones beneath the skin. She rolled away from him and lay curled up, gasping, with her back to him. <It’s not impossible,> her mental voice said, sweet and clear as the sound of a knife on fine crystal.

If he thought the realization that she had been falling in love with Ishmael di Studier had tested him, he had been much mistaken. This was the test. She was a mage. She knew, she always had known, everything he felt. He rolled toward her, the painlessness of the movement a revelation, rested his forehead against her back. “I did wonder, once or twice,” he breathed. “But I . . . I could not be certain.”

He drew a deep breath and slid his hand down to cover hers—a more intimate touch seemed an imposition—and yielded himself up to her. Yielded up his shock, awe, disconcertedness, satisfaction at the confirmation of odd moments of half suspicion, the fierce debate between defensiveness and rationalization. Yielded up the triumphant, “She knows me,” of the lover, vying with, “She knows everything,” of the man, and a quick, scrambling turning up and pressing down of all those embarrassing or venal impulses, thoughts, and memories that burden every man’s conscience. She rolled over and clung to him, whispering, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” And finally, he yielded up Lysander and the memory of his own crime.

“I knew,” she whispered. “When I came this morning, it was all you were thinking of. That was why—”

Why she went after Florilinde, alone except for Ishmael di Studier. Now it was his turn to be pierced by guilt, and hers to say, “Don’t.”

“Who else knows?” he said.

“Only Ishmael,” she said, and began to weep anew.

He knew she felt that ripple of jealousy from him, jealousy, remorse, and relief that his rival was gone before Balthasar had learned anything. Sweet Imogene, this was harder than anything he’d done before. She flinched back from him.

“Bal, I’m sorry. I never wanted to deceive you—”

“Yes, you did,” he said. He was not going to let her lie to either of them. “Anyone who deceives themselves cannot but deceive others. And I think you did deceive yourself, all these years. With good reason; this must have been a terrible burden.” His hand started toward her cheek, and hesitated. He shied from new self-exposure. It had not taken long. He had reacted as bravely as he could, but he could not but admit to himself that he needed time to reconcile himself. She was not the woman he thought she was, and he was trying not to condemn her. He was not the man he thought he was, and he was ashamed.

“Say . . . what you’re thinking,” she whispered.

“I’m going to need . . . a little time to find my balance, Telmaine,” he confessed. “We’re going to need time to find a new balance, in our marriage.”

She pressed a hand to her lips. “I have so dreaded this happening, ever since you asked me to marry you.”

“Was that it?” Bal said, remembering. In her beautiful young face, he had sonned dismay undercutting a palpable joy. He strove for transient lightness, though it had been deathly daunting at the time. “I thought I’d offended you and was about to be horsewhipped down the drive.”

“I know,” she said with meaning. Before she answered, she had leaned in to kiss him, her lips soft and uncertain on his, her elegantly gloved hand sliding hesitantly behind the nape of his neck. She would have felt all the uncertainty of the young suitor reaching high, the young man committing himself irrevocably to that state that young men uneasily disparaged as the end of their freedom, the young lover whose senses were nearly overset by her nearness, her softness, her fragrance. He’d been too nervous for physical arousal, at least then, but there had been other times when he had not been so inhibited. And she had known. As she had become surer of him, she had teased him with it, the vixen.

Her sonn washed over him, finding him in the best of all possible states, with a reminiscent smile on his lips. She let out her breath and rested against him, careful that only their clad bodies touched. The smoke lingering around her was acrid in his throat, but he did not draw away.

She whispered, “I thought . . . how could I marry you, when you did not know? I thought, How could you marry me if you did know? I wanted you, Bal; I wanted you as much as you wanted me. When I kissed you . . . when I kissed you and felt you offering up that gentle heart of yours, I knew I could not bear to lose you.”

“It was your magic, as well as Ishmael’s, that saved my life,” he said.

She nodded.

“You will not lose me,” he said quietly. “That I can promise. I grew up with a mage for a sister; I can get used to a mage wife. I’ve already learned some of the advantages.”

She gave a choked, exhausted chuckle.

“Although with my sister it was a little different: With training, Olivede did learn to cloak her touch-sense.”

“Cloak her touch-sense?” she said, lifting her head.

He remembered how Telmaine had maintained a studied ignorance and studied dislike of all aspects of magic—protective coloration, he realized, along with her “phobia” about microbes that let her remain gloved. He wondered how else she had sustained her masquerade—and laid aside the questions, lest a chance touch expose her to the wondering and the resentment. He, after all, well knew what it was to keep a secret rather than risk losing her regard. She had merely been much more successful at it than he.

“She’s a third-rank mage,” he said. “Lower-rankers are involuntary touch-readers. Upper-rankers can control the sense. It takes considerable practice; she told me it’s like learning to ignore one’s skin.”

She gasped, started to laugh, and started to weep once more. “He never told me it was possible! That rat bastard!”

He was, absurdly, shocked at hearing his genteel wife express herself so.

“It takes a certain strength—”

She propped herself up on her arm. “Balthasar, I have that strength. He told me I might be a fifth- or sixth-rank mage.” The terrible, stricken expression came over her again. “He warned me about my strength. He warned me that I might kill if I drew on him too hard—and I did. Bal . . .” She was shivering violently. “I want to die. And if the Lightborn find me, I will die, or be driven insane.”

He had her in his arms, an instinctive reaction, before he fully appreciated what it was she had said. She cried more wildly as she sensed his alarm, all self-control abandoned. That self-control must be quite formidable to have enabled her to conceal her reactions all those years. “I think,” he said, “you must tell me everything you remember.”

“Why?” she sobbed.

“Because I know quite a bit more about the practice of magic than you do, unless you have been studying it in secret. I suspect, rather than you overdrawing him, that Ishmael di Studier sacrificed himself for you and Florilinde. And that is a noble gift, Telmaine, not a crime.” With his cheek resting against her head, she would know how much he believed and how much he simply, desperately hoped was true.

She eased out of his arms and curled up beside him. In a quavering voice, she told him of the psychic conversation in the coach, and the plan she and Ishmael had formulated. Which made him unfairly furious with the dead man all over again; the plan was insane. Ishmael must have loved her beyond all reason to believe that with no training she could safely approach the warehouse and rescue Florilinde. Her description of her walk through the flames left his heart hammering with terror. She told him of the momentary distraction and fatal collapse of her shield, and how she had felt Ishmael hold back the flames for an instant, and then . . . go out like a snuffed candle.

“It is as I thought,” he said softly. “He offered up his life freely. I think, from what I know of the man, he would consider it well given.”

“That makes it so much worse,” she whispered, and wept again.

“As to why he never told you about the cloaking of touch-sense,” Bal said, drawing her to him again with care, “two possibilities come to mind. He had too little time to teach you much beyond what was necessary to survive the moment. Or, because he never had the strength to master the touch-sense himself, and learned to live with that, it didn’t occur to him that it was a skill you could master.” He paused, then said mildly, “Calling him a ‘rat bastard’ seems a touch strong, my dear.”

She snuffled a laugh, still trembling. “Oh, Bal, you have no idea. He has—he had—the idea that there are Shadowborn involved in all our troubles, and that Vladimer is in danger. He wanted me to go to Vladimer, to help him.”

Balthasar’s immediate impulse was vehement and protective rejection. He controlled that, recognizing that the woman shivering in his arms was in some ways beyond his protection. Fifth- or sixth-rank mage; there might be only ten or twelve Darkborn mages as powerful. It was a profoundly unsettling realization.

“Why do—did he think that?” he asked.

“Because of what I sensed outside your parents’ town house. He said that was Shadowborn magic.”

“And a very little while later,” Bal said slowly, “Lord Vladimer becomes desperately ill.” Her hair tickled his chin as she moved her head. He moved his, very slightly, to prevent their skin from touching. She seemed unaware. “Telmaine, what did di Studier have time to teach you?”

“Some healing, but a lot of that I already understood from you. Oh, Bal, Gil di Maurier—I did what I could for him, repaired the bowel damage and cleared out the infection.”

He jerked his head backward involuntarily and sonned her. That casual description, even more than the fire, shocked him. He knew about the efficacy of magical healing, and how it far exceeded the present capabilities of physicians such as himself, but to hear her so blithely . . . They had to, he thought, suddenly and passionately, they had to break magic free of the stigma that was smothering it, of the barriers placed around it. He’d had such arguments with Olivede, where she had pointed out that mages were too few and in the main too weak to work routine miracles, but in alliance with physicians’ scientific understanding, surely . . .

“I don’t know whether I did enough,” she said. “I knew they’d not accept my healing—”

“Telmaine,” he said, realizing what she meant. “Don’t tell me.” Cowardly of him, perhaps, but he knew Guillaume di Maurier’s horror of magic was as deep-rooted as the survivor’s guilt that had so nearly destroyed him. Perhaps had destroyed him. If Gil died, that, “Tell Balthasar . . . he saved me for a better death” would haunt him for a long time.

“I should not have, I know. I just couldn’t . . . He’d found Florilinde.”

He tucked her hair back. “I know. I understand. Gil would not.” He paused. “If we leave soon,” he said quietly, “we can catch the day train to the coast. The ducal station is underground, and there’s a courier’s entrance to the house itself from the concourse, as well as the main guest entrance. I delivered a few messages there myself, when I was acting as an amateur courier in Flo—Lightborn—business. We could be in the house itself by midafternoon.”

“Bal, I can’t—”

“Lord Vladimer is failing, Telmaine. The superintendent told me so. If his affliction is not magical, you can do something about it. And if it is . . . Do you remember what I said just before we left the town house: that we were the ones who must resist this evil? If not ourselves, then who?”

“What . . . what about the children?” she pleaded.

“We must leave them here, in the nursery,” he said, his voice thin but resolute, “under guard by the household agents, who are already aware of the risk to us. I will send an urgent note to your mother to come. If all goes well, we will be back before tomorrow’s sunrise. If the worst happens, to both of us, our wills are in order; she will stand as guardian, and they will not want for love or comforts.”

“Bal, we cannot leave them like this! What about Flori? I’ve dealt with the food poisoning, but she’s been horribly used. And Amerdale, what she’s witnessed . . .”

He hesitated: It was another unconscionable act to desert children as traumatized as theirs. She sensed his wavering. “We’re ordinary people, Bal, ordinary parents with little children who need us. Surely there’s someone . . . Casamir Blondell. The mages. Even the Lightborn.”

“Casamir Blondell chose to sacrifice Ishmael to keep the peace. The mages . . . this accusation of magical sorcery will have terrified them, and they’ll be overspent in healing survivors of the fire. As for the Lightborn . . . I fear they may be as beset as we are. I have not heard from Floria. The light breach in my house may not have been a trap for us, but the result of an attack on her.” His voice shook; he’d not fitted it together before this moment. Telmaine’s anguish over Ishmael di Studier found new resonance in him.

“The archduke!”

“And say what to him? You know Sejanus Plantageter; would he believe even a quarter of this farrago?”

“Ferdenzil Mycene then!”

“Had Ishmael di Studier not been accused of murdering his intended, then yes. But we don’t have time to overcome his resistance.”

“Balthasar,” she said, palpably angry now, “Floria White Hand might have encouraged you to play at being a courier and agent as a child, but you are a grown man now, and it is time to put away those boyhood games.”

“Do you really think this is a game?” he said, knowing it an unfair answer: Her point was that he did not belong in this, not that the conflict itself was a game. He was aware of her struggling to recognize his tactic, despite her tiredness.

She said in despair, “If you insist, husband, I will go, but you have to stay. You’re barely healed, and the children need you.”

Now it was his turn to struggle. He might be physically healed from the beating, but he was emotionally far from ready to confront the men who had beaten him, or their masters. She would know that. If fear paralyzed him, it could be the death of them both.

“If there were anyone else I could ask, I would,” he said shakily. “If I could reach Olivede in time, I would. But Lord Vladimer may not have time. And someone must go with you, to watch your back.” He was at the end of his words and, knowing that, reached out, laid the back of his fingers against her cheek, and, through that, poured all his understanding, conviction, and fear—for her, for himself, for their children, and for their world. She recoiled with a cry. They crouched in shared silence, and then she rolled off his bed and stumbled out of the room, leaving him aching with remorse.

She returned just as he finished writing the letter to her mother, washed and dressed in a plain traveling outfit and cloak, precariously composed, gloved, and perfumed to cover the lingering scent of smoke. He should have warned her against the perfume, he thought too late, but likely the small disadvantage it placed them at would have no effect in the end. He said nothing; there was no sense to it. He held up the letter for her; she shook her head, refusing to read it.

“I’ve told the maid that I am taking you out for a short drive,” she said. “She will call the nursery staff to attend to the children. They will assume when we do not arrive back that we were caught short by the sunrise bell and took shelter.”

He said, “Since I’m not sure how much we can trust Lord Vladimer’s other agents to help rather than hinder us—never mind what our enemies might do—I think we should time our arrival at the station as close as we possibly can to the doors being closed for the day.”

She tugged his collars straight and held his jacket for him, just as though they were embarking on an ordinary late outing. “You’d better not seem too spry outside,” she said with a brittle briskness.

He leaned on her arm as they went along the hall, walking slightly hunched and slowly as an invalid, and letting her sonn guide them. They passed the rooms so briefly occupied by Ishmael di Studier. He did not need to be a mage to know she knew it; the catch in her breathing told him as much. Down the stairs, across the hall, where she gave a few orders to the staff, as her role required. To his ears she sounded strained and unnatural, but perhaps to people who knew her only as one of the archduke’s many visitors, she did well enough. It was still a relief for them to be in the carriage.

At his murmured direction, she instructed the coachman to take them to the botanical gardens. “Why there?” she said.

“We’ll get off at the west side of the fountains, run over to the stand on the east, and catch a carriage to the station. That should be literally moments before the sunrise bell begins to toll. We should take anyone following us by surprise, and the traffic flow around there is such that they won’t be able to follow us in a carriage.”

“There won’t be any carriages there this late, and they won’t take us.”

“They will, for a surcharge and the surety that we’re going somewhere they’ll be able to safely overstay the day and pick up a profitable fare right after sunset. But anyone who transfers to follow should have trouble, not knowing where we’re bound.”

Her expression was skeptical, but she confined the skepticism to: “Can you run?”

“I’ll have to,” he said. “Be ready.” He leaned forward and lowered the carriage window, calling up to the coachman to stop at the fountains. The carriage stopped with a sudden and unnecessary lurch that nearly landed him on Telmaine’s lap and reminded him that his healing was still very fresh. He opened the door and half slid down the stairs. Telmaine followed with ladylike grace. She passed the coins for their fare to him, and he took her hand firmly in his, while he reached up to pay the coachman. To his left, he heard the slowing clop of a horse and the creaking of an undercarriage. His heart rate surged. “Now!” he said, and cast sonn before them, outlining the shimmer of falling water from the huge fountain, the scatter of starlings and pigeons, the empty seats set in a wide curve.

They ran, she snatching her hand from his to be able to hitch up her skirts, he holding his side. Birds scattered around their feet. Someone said, in a woman’s voice, “Well, really!” as he skipped over a shape that he realized belatedly was a small dog. Sonn laced around them, but thin sonn, as from a very few people. At this hour, the fountain square would be nearly deserted, and in the quiet Bal could hear running footsteps behind them. He cast sonn wildly ahead, trying to visualize the standing coaches and guess from the postures of the coachmen who would be most curious, least wary. Telmaine did not hesitate; she dashed for the nearest. “We’re just going to Bolingbroke Station,” he heard her gasp out, keeping her voice from carrying. “Please, quickly. That’s my guardian behind me; he’s trying to stop our wedding.” Then, without waiting for any assent that Bal could hear, she hitched up her skirts and scrambled up into the coach, stooping to help him heave himself aboard. The coach started with a lurch, pulling out and gathering speed. Bal lay half-on and half-off the seat, his side searing with every heaving breath. Telmaine crouched beside him. He felt her gentle fingertips on his forehead, and the pain eased. “Do you think he heard where we are going?” he asked huskily.

“I don’t think so,” she said, and risked leaning out of the window to call up to the coachman: Were they being followed? He thought not. She slid up onto the worn bench facing him and sonned Bal. “Whom do you suppose?”

“Let’s assume foe. Friends you can always apologize to later.”

“Can you?” she said dryly.

He decided to let that pass. He pushed himself upright, shifted across the carriage to her side, and slipped an arm around her. “I never knew you had a secret hankering to elope,” he remarked.

She made a noise of disdain. “Every girl reads the same silly novels. What do we do when we get to the station?”

The sunrise bell began to toll. They felt the coach pick up its pace. Balthasar said with relief, “We’ll be in time. Buy the tickets, get on the train.”

“A day train,” she said. “Bal, if we’re right about these people, day will not stop them.”

“I know,” Bal said. “I hope that we can outrun them.”

“Why? If . . . Ishmael and I could speak at a distance, why not them?”

The thought chilled him; he had no answer for her.

They arrived at Bolingbroke Station without further incident, pulling in as the sunrise bell stopped tolling and the station attendant called a warning for the closing of the doors. The coachman received their ample payment, saluted them with a knowing grin, and wished them good fortune. He flicked his horse into a trot, bound for the closed garage and its amenities. Balthasar followed Telmaine with all haste, but paused inside the door to wait on its closing.

“That’s it,” he said. “You realize we are quite a cliché. Two decamping lovers traveling by day train.”

Telmaine sniffed. If one were to believe the melodramas of the day, the sealed trains that traveled by day were full of spies, conspirators, jewel thieves, and eloping or adulterous lovers, all dashing to meet their deserved ends in fiery crashes and immolation by daylight. The reality, as experienced by Bal in his student days, was usually more prosaic. The Lightborn ensured that the Darkborn’s day trains traveled safely along cleared tracks, because they must of necessity travel sealed. In the twenty years since the first day train, there had been only one disaster, resulting from unanticipated mechanical failures.

Upper class of the coastal route, at the safer rear of the train, was occupied by ducal couriers, civil servants, and nobility on urgent business. Lower class, at the front, was occupied by students, servants, and other holidaymakers taking advantage of the cheap fares. The journeys were sometimes raucous, with drunkenness and the occasional brawl, but each carriage had one or more public agents present to impose order, and penalties for reckless conduct during daylight hours were high.

He had never before traveled at the rear of the day train, and as soon as they were shown into their luxurious private compartment, he realized that it would be a very different experience from his student days. He sank gratefully into the soft seating.

Telmaine said, “Are you all right?”

“Too much excitement,” he said, more lightly than he felt. He did not want her expending herself on him any more. She settled herself in, deploying skirts, hat, and reticule with her usual grace, leaned her head back against the plush headrest, and sighed.

“I think we should have something to eat,” he said.

“I’m not sure I could,” she said.

“Then you should, because that is exactly how I feel, which tells me I need it to keep going.”

He rang the bell for the steward, who came promptly, suggesting that the carriage was not overly busy. They discussed the menu, and he pressed Telmaine to expand her choices beyond the insubstantial soup she first requested. The steward joined him in solicitude; Telmaine yielded. Once the steward had gone, she frowned. “Are you going to help me eat all that?”

“I am. Merely discussing it makes me hungrier. You do good work, my love.”

She shifted a little, unhappily, in her seat. He drew breath, but it seemed not the time to press her, much as his impulse was to explore her unease.

“We’re moving,” she observed. “I’ve never taken one of these trains before. I’m not sure anyone I know has.”

“I’ve traveled this route a half a dozen times at least, as a student, though never before in such style.”

Over their meal, he gave her an account of one particular journey spent in the company of a traveling theater troupe whose writer-manager was clearly suffering from the kind of mania that was almost indistinguishable from genius—or vice versa. They had barely pulled out of the station before he had the entire troupe and most of the other passengers improvising a melodrama in the grand style under his direction. By the end of the journey, one respectable matron and her spinster daughter had vowed to join the troupe, two students were planning a duel over the ingenue, who had obvious designs on a third, and the railway’s public agent—not a flexible character—had threatened to impose a daylight travel ban on the whole pack of them. When Telmaine choked on her soup and set to coughing and laughing at the same time, he was satisfied. He did not even have to persuade her to eat an éclair, while she intercepted his reach for his fourth with a crisp tap of gloved fingers on his wrist. “Some protector you’ll be if you’re too sick to move.”

When the steward returned to clear away the dishes, Bal remarked that the train seemed not to be particularly busy. This proved so: There was only one other pair of gentlemen in upper class, a gentleman traveling to the coast for his health, and his personal physician. The steward had put them at the far end, so that his coughing would not disturb the other passengers.

“That wasn’t a casual inquiry, was it?” Telmaine said softly, when the steward had left.

“No,” Bal said. “Though I’m not sure what I could have learned by it. I’m somewhat reassured that he seems to find them quite ordinary.”

“I didn’t have that sense of chill and horror when I came on board,” Telmaine said.

Her little frown made him say quickly, “No, don’t try. I thought about making a call—one physician to another—but if we were to provoke a confrontation, we risk being stranded until nightfall.” Or not getting there at all, he thought. “It’s to our advantage to wait. And it’s most likely that they are what they seem to be.” He shook his head a little ruefully. “Three nights ago, all I’d have been worried about would have been the risk of infection.”

“Mm,” she said. “Three nights ago I was on my way back to Minhorne with Florilinde and Amerdale, with Ishmael as escort.”

The silence was heavy with grief and unsaid words.

“Why don’t you put your head down,” Bal said at last. “You’ll need your vitality.”

She nodded wearily and got up, steadying herself against the rocking of the train. “And you? Will you join me?”

“I’m going to write those letters I said I would, and then I’ll join you. I’m feeling much better for those éclairs.”

She made a small sound in her throat that might have been a laugh. “Don’t you dare give the children the idea it’s possible to eat three éclairs at one sitting.”

“Nobody needs to give a child that idea,” Bal said. His sonn followed her as she made her way into their stateroom and lay down.

He called for the steward again, to bring him a writing case, stylus, and paper. How to write a letter to a six-year-old that could contain the sum of everything he had hoped to say to her over an entire lifetime? That would explain his, or his and Telmaine’s, sudden and catastrophic desertion? He held his stylus poised, struggling with the density of his burden and his recognition that what he wanted to do could not be done. In the end he wrote each of his daughters a letter much like the ones he had written them the past two summers, while they were on the coast and he in the city, missing them, keeping it simple and fond for their present understanding. Then he wrote a third letter, one he hoped they would read in fifteen or twenty years. He asked for their forgiveness, reassured them of his and Telmaine’s love, and wished them joy. The words did not say a fraction of what he wanted them to say, but he knew he could do no more.

After that, he fitted another page to his frame and addressed it to Olivede. He had been negligent in not telling her about Lysander’s reappearance, and he must repair that. Of the leavetaking—well, she was a mage, and he her loving younger brother. Love needed but to be reaffirmed, not averred. He folded and addressed the letter and set it atop the others.

The fifth letter . . . He weighed his options for a long spell, while the train clattered on, whistling shrilly. He steadied his pen until the train had finished dancing through a complicated series of switches, smiling wryly at the memory of the discussions that had taken place over training and employing Lightborn switchmen, when the Lightborn’s idea of nonmagical fast transport was still post-coaches. He decided to stick to Darkborn text, since Floria had the advantage of being able to see the punches, but ciphered. She’d never forgive him otherwise. But he could say good-bye, and write what he felt. If it came into her hands, he’d be dead, and past caring if she dismissed it as Darkborn mawkishness.

And last . . . Telmaine. If she outlived him, as she might well do—as he intended her to do, if it came to that—then he wanted her to know that what he felt for her was unchanged by the brief transit of Ishmael di Studier, and by her long deception. He admitted to himself that there was something appealing in knowing he would be represented by his written words alone, and that her touch on paper would never tell her what ambivalence or dissimulation lay behind them.

Over an hour remained once his letter to Telmaine was done. He started to fold up the frame, and then had the thought that if he and Telmaine both died, Vladimer would not know who held each accurate piece of the story they had so carefully scattered around, and would lose valuable time resolving the inconsistencies. With a cramping hand, he carefully began another sheet, addressed to Lord Vladimer, and summarizing events as he knew them. He hardly needed encryption, he thought, lifting his stylus for the last time; his punching seemed little more than random.

He felt the train slowing, and remembered the tunnel it passed through before beginning its final descent to the coast. Since the Lightborn could not comfortably enter its darkness, and the Darkborn could maintain it only by night, the train crept through at barely more than a walking pace. The addition of doors was one of the recurrent questions before the Intercalatory Council.

Sonn washed over him. “I thought,” said his wife, “you were going to lie down.”

He carefully folded that last letter, addressed the envelope, and tucked it into his jacket. “I was. But one letter led to another. I wrote the children . . .”

He held out the single letter for their daughters of the future; this one she consented to read, and handed it back with a subdued, “It’s perfect, Bal. I’d not change a word of it.”

He sensed her curiosity as he gathered up the other letters and slipped them into their folder in his writing case, but she did not ask to whom he had written. He would leave the case in the custody of the steward; if he lived, he would retrieve it later, and if not, the letters would find their way to their destinations.

He wrote a quick note of instruction and tucked it into the case, then set it on the table before him, and reached over it to take her small, gloved hand firmly in his. At their reduced speed, even inside a tunnel, the pulse and rattle of wheels on tracks was muted.

As the sound changed as they approached the end of the tunnel, they heard a heavy thud from overhead, as though a body had landed on a hollow box, feet first. Telmaine’s breath whistled in; her grip on his hand was suddenly crushing. Bal reached across with his left hand to grope for the pistol in his pocket, though the reflex was irrationality itself—a pistol ball through the wall would kill them as surely as any assault from without.

Telmaine said a single, imperative, “No,” and there was a second, sliding thump, and a falling-away screech. Telmaine’s mouth and blind eyes went wide in a silent scream of anguish.

“It’s all right,” Bal said, not knowing whether he spoke truth or falsehood, but responding by reflex to that expression. He returned her grip as firmly as he could without returning the discomfort. “It’s all right. Slow, deep breaths. Breathe in, breathe out. You know how.” If his own heart were not beating like an overwound clock, he would be far more authoritative. As the train gained speed he strained to hear any extraneous sound over the pounding pistons and rattling undercarriage.

Telmaine gave a stifled sob, pulling his crushed hand to her lips. “I had to,” she whispered against it. “I had to. He wanted us dead. I felt . . . He had something with him that would . . . Oh, by the Sole God, Bal, I killed him.”

He slid from his seat, handling himself around the table to kneel beside her and gather her to him, burying her forehead in the crook of his shoulder. She was shuddering, fighting hysterics. He tried hard not to give way to his impulse to offer pure comfort to his wife, the lady he had sworn to love and protect for a lifetime. She was no longer just his wife. He said quietly, “Do you sense anyone or anything else?”

She gasped, swallowed, and said, “No. Just one.”

“Was it Shadowborn?”

“Lightborn, he felt Lightborn.”

Bal swallowed and kept his voice steady with an effort. “And what did he have with him?”

“It might . . . have been explosive. It was going to . . . going to break open the carriage. Oh, Bal.”

“Shh,” he said. “You did what you needed to.” He tried—since her forehead was resting against his neck—to contain his curiosity as to how. She answered his unvoiced question in a muffled voice: “I made ice under his feet, the same way I cooled the handle down in the warehouse.”

He could not spare her his quixotic but profound relief that she had not corrupted her healing talents, and remembered his own jagged thoughts as he crouched beside the sleeping babies, holding the letter opener and rehearsing its placement in a human body.

She trembled. “What’s this doing to us?” she whispered. “Is it going to end if we save Lord Vladimer?”

“I don’t think so,” he whispered, because he could not lie, touching her.

He held her until he felt the train begin to slow. By then she had relaxed a little. “We need to collect ourselves,” he said softly. “I’d still like not to draw attention, but we need to be prepared to run. I want you to promise me that if you have to leave me, you will leave me.”

“No,” she said, lifting her head, showing a face shaken and fierce. “I offered you the chance to stay behind and you did not take it. Now we’re going together, or not at all.”