Lightborn (Darkborn Trilogy, Band 2) - Softcover

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Alison Sinclair is the author of Legacies, Blueheart and Cavalcade (nominated for the Arthur C Clarke award), as well as Darkborn and Shadowborn.

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Telmaine

She had never, thought Telmaine Hearne, been so glad to have a train journey over.

Not because the bells were tolling sunset, and the end of the killing sunlight. Not because they had come to the end of their journey without any sign of threat. Not even because, a scant twelve hours before, she and her dear husband had run for the coast-bound train with no certainty that both or either of them would return.

No, it was the company she kept, and the explanations that would be awaiting her at the end of this journey.

Small consolation if her fellow passenger shared her feeling. Lord Vladimer Plantageter, her noble cousin and half brother to the archduke, had all the prejudices of his sex and class, enhanced by a temperament both reclusive and distrustful. Only the urging of a man he respected and who had just saved his life would have made him accept the company of a woman on this journey, much less a woman who was also a mage. And as for Vladimer accepting her protection . . .

Nor would she have done it, except at the behest of the two men who had asked her. She sighed, but silently. Who was it who wrote, “I can mind my enemies, but the Sole God protect me from my friends”? Had her husband been with her, she would have asked him, but even at this moment Balthasar might be boarding a train bound south to the Borders and a threatened invasion.

That, too, she could set against Lord Vladimer’s account.

She heard the door to the stateroom open. Her sonn resolved a man in the blazer and cap of the railway who leaned into Lord Vladimer’s private cubicle to apologize that they could not draw up to their regular platform as two specials were preparing to depart—the hour after sunset being the busiest hour of the night—and would have to use one of the public platforms.

“Have it cleared,” Vladimer said without hesitation. “And have a coach waiting.”

“And for the lady . . . ?” the conductor said.

“The lady comes with me.”

He might at least try to avoid giving the impression that he was taking her in for interrogation, if only for the sake of her reputation.

Which he could ruin with a very few words, should he choose. Amongst Darkborn, mages belonged on the fringes of society, not in its finer families and upper social circles. She had stepped out of her class to marry Balthasar Hearne, whose fine old blood was attenuated through generations of daughters and younger sons, but was still acceptable. To be revealed as a mage would be not a stepping out but an irredeemable plunge.

To her husband, a physician and one insatiably curious about mind and society, the Darkborn aversion to magic and mages was less because of history than because of present society. Eight hundred years ago, magic had divided Darkborn from Lightborn, condemning the Darkborn to perpetual darkness, the Lightborn to perpetual light. In daylight, the Darkborn burned to ash; in darkness, the Lightborn melted excruciatingly away. But eight hundred years ago was a time long past, particularly for the forward-gazing Darkborn; Balthasar thought the aversion was less due to what mages had done than what they could do, even though the knowledge that had underlain the Curse was lost. Even the weakest mage could read thoughts with a touch, and most had strength enough to heal. A stronger mage, such as she seemed to be, could cast her thoughts into another’s mind, influence others with her will, force sleep upon the unwilling, walk—she swallowed at the memory—unharmed through a burning building. Such powers were an affront to propriety, disruptive to the order of society, and a threat to earthly and divine authorities.

She understood that; she believed and agreed with that; yet these were the powers she had, and had been forced to use.

She could hear the sudden change in the reverberation of the engine as the train entered the enclosed space of the station. It shuffled and jolted, switching points, and she swayed gently in place, hand on the writing case tucked beneath her skirts. The case contained the letters Balthasar had written in case he did not come back, bidding farewell to their daughters, his sister, and the Lightborn woman Floria White Hand, Telmaine’s rival on the other side of sunrise, Balthasar’s first, impossible love, and lifelong friend. That last letter, she wished she dared burn. Polite Darkborn did not speak of Lightborn any more than they must, given that they shared the city and the land with them. Lightborn mores were shocking, their politics violent, and rumor held that the Lightborn court was ruled by mages.

But the journey was over. She would deliver Vladimer safely to his brother’s palace, and let him initiate the schemes that he had surely been planning all these silent hours. He was the spymaster who, while still a teenager, had put organized crime in the city docks in such disarray that it might not recover in his lifetime, and had gone on to guard his brother’s back against the schemes of his own dukes and lords. Ruthless and brilliant—even in the opinion of his enemies—but also profoundly vulnerable, alas, to magic.

All she need do, she told herself yet again, was sense and warn, and thwart any use of magic against him. She lacked training, yes, but Ishmael di Studier was convinced she had power in abundance. And as she, and Balthasar, and Ishmael, had just demonstrated, even a mage was not immune to bullets.

Ishmael, she thought. After a week’s acquaintance, she should hardly be so free with her thoughts of a man neither husband nor brother, never mind one with his reputation. But propriety hardly allowed for Ishmael. The man who had saved her husband’s life, her daughter’s life, and not least her own. The man who had recognized her as a mage, because he was one himself, and shaken her magic loose from its lifelong restraint. The man whom she had begun to love, though she loved her husband not a single portion less. She and Balthasar could have no better ally in these strange and dangerous times, and Lord Vladimer and the archduke could have no better servant. Ishmael was born to inherit one of the great Borders baronies, where the civilized lands abutted the regions around the ancient mages’ last stronghold. He had spent his adult life hunting marauding beasts from the Shadowlands, though it had been Vladimer, not Ishmael, who had imagined the prospect of men and women emerging from those poisoned lands to raise chaos with their intelligent schemes. Which made Vladimer the Shadowborn’s enemy, too, and unlike Ishmael, he could not sense their magic. She, Balthasar, and Ishmael had saved Vladimer’s life as he lay unconscious and fading under ensorcellment.

The train stopped with a final, settling lurch. Gladly, she picked up the writing case and tucked it under her arm as she stood, shaking out skirts creased with travel. A bath would be the utmost luxury, even with the slightly antiquated plumbing in the archducal palace. A bath and breakfast with her daughters; what better reward and fortification?

The steward returned to tell them that the platform had been cleared. In the doorway to his cubicle, Lord Vladimer steadied himself on his cane and gestured her impatiently to precede him. She paused in the doorway, taking a careful sweep of the platform with her mage sense, and finding only Darkborn. Their enemies’ magic carried with it a distinctive, repulsive taint. The air was familiar, acrid with smoke from the pulsing trains all around her. Bolingbroke Station, the main interchange of Minhorne, its vast sealed canopy and night-and-day bustle making it a hub of Darkborn business and middle-class society.

Telmaine extended a hand to the...