Arts of Dark and Light: Book 01 - A Throne of Bones (36 page)

The Malkanians put them up in a private manor that wasn’t far from the brothel where the Lady Everbright had been imprisoned the previous year. The archbishops, however, were invited to stay at the Bishop of Malkan’s residence, so Theuderic didn’t hesitate to take the opportunity to install his lover in his own bedchamber.

Afterward, he was lying on the bed in a languid post-coital stupor when she stood up, still naked, walked to the window, and looked out over the torchlamps lighting the cobble-stoned streets of the wealthy city.

“Did you kill them all?” she asked him unexpectedly.

He shook his head, not sure he’d heard her aright. “Kill who?”

“You said you were going to kill everyone who made me a whore. Here in Malkan. You promised me.”

He sat up and folded his arms over his knees. Backlit by the light of the outside lamps entering the window, her body seemed more slender and alien than usual. Her breasts were too high and a little too far apart to be human, and the paleness of her hair against her white skin made her look almost hairless. Her very lack of sensuality was itself provocative, a seduction by the innocent. But he was not fooled by her maidenly appearance. And even if her sexual experience was slight, it was colored by an experience of life that exceeded his by nearly forty years.

“Not yet.”

She was silent for a moment, then turned and looked out the window. She raised a hand and tucked her hair behind one pointed ear. Then she turned back to him. She looked vaguely surprised. “I don’t care.”

He was getting better at following the strange way her mind leaped from one topic to the next. “Are you saying you don’t want me to kill all of them?”

She pursed her lips, which like the rest of her, were pale and thin, making them look almost human. “Maybe just the rich man.”

She was talking about Aetias, the owner of the brothel, who had outbid Theuderic for her. But she didn’t know anything about that, and Theuderic was determined that she never would. “Alas, I must apologize, my love. I cannot do that.”

“You can’t?” She frowned. “Or you won’t?”

“I would if I could. Sadly, I inquired at the gate and learned that Quadras Aetias died in a quite tragic fall in his mansion. A terrible shame.”

Her eyes brightened. “You already killed him for me?”

“Well, I paid someone to do it,” he said modestly. She clapped her hands and kissed him enthusiastically, so enthusiastically that Theuderic almost regretted that she had absolved the remainder of her list. “I’m glad that you’re willing to spare the others. It’s not good to hold onto your hate.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you have seen how they call me Comte now, instead of Sieur. Do you understand why?”

“It is your noble title as opposed to your priestly one.”

He hesitated, then nodded. Close enough. She didn’t seem to grasp the difference between religion and magic, between l’Eglise and l’Academie. Was it an elven idiosyncracy, or was it simply her? “More or less. I was born to the title and inherited it, along with the comte of Thoneaux, when my father died eight years ago. Or rather, I would have inherited it, only when I was ten years old, it was discovered I possessed an amount of magical talent. Every boy in the kingdom is tested at that age, and if any significant talent is found, he is claimed by the king and henceforth regarded as the property of the realm.”

“They enslaved you?”

“In a sense, although for those of us who show any real talent, it’s an affront to slaves to describe us as such. The chains we wear are golden, and for nine out of every ten lads, maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred, it is a key to a much better life than they ever would have known without it.”

“And the girls?”

“They are tested too, but not until they are twelve. Those with sufficient talent are claimed and sequestered, and depending upon how strong the talent runs in them, they are required to bear between one and four children to the King’s Own.”

Her slanted eyes narrowed. “Their chains are not so golden.”

“Call them silver, perhaps. I doubt any of them would trade their decadent lives at l’Academie for the peasant drudgery that would otherwise await them. Most of them eventually marry mages, though not always the mages to whom they bear their children. Even nobles have been known to marry vademagiques.”

“That explains why Savondir produces so many mages,” she remarked. “Whereas we elves, despite our greater natural endowment, produce so few.”

“It also explains how Savondir conquered all of the human kingdoms of the north. Even when two or three kings joined their forces together against the king’s knights, what army could hope to stand against twenty, or thirty, or once, even fifty battlemages? Not that they didn’t try. Only your people have been able to defeat the royal armies, but that was long ago and who knows what will happen over the course of another twenty generations, when the king has a thousand or more mages at his disposal. Which is, of course, is something you may well live to see.”

“So you think your Academie will one day defeat the Collegium Occludum?” She smiled. “I doubt that.”

“So do I. The Collegium defeated the Witchkings, before whose dark knowledge and power even our immortels are little more than untutored children. I find it hard to believe even ten thousand battlemages would suffice.”

She nodded. “There are a few who could shatter the world if they wished. Bessarias. Amitlya. Possibly Galamiras, though I’ve never quite known what to make of him.”

“It’s strange to speak with someone who knows such legends personally. I always believed they were more or less myths, until I met you.”

“Oh, I don’t know them.” She shook her head regretfully. “I’ve never even met Bessarias, although I’ve seen him occasionally from the sky. He left the Collegium long ago, before I was born. I do know Amitlya, she substituted for one of my teachers once for a few weeks. She’s very kind and was much more patient than our teacher ever was. You had only to speak to her to realize that her mind exists on an entirely different plane than ours.”

“Probably thinking about sex, I imagine. If I was a virgin for six hundred years, it’s all I would ever think about.”

She stared at him, absolutely dumbfounded for a moment, then burst into a high, elven peal of laughter. It was always vaguely unnerving to him. Her laughter never sounded entirely sane by human standards, and she had been through a rather difficult time before they’d met. “You haven’t been a virgin for years, and it’s all you think about now! We just futtered, and I have no doubt you’re thinking about it again already!”

“In my defense, my lady, you stand before me in your naked elven splendor while I have spent the last two weeks sharing my tent with a pair of church knights in your stead. I am a man deprived of love, and as the poets say, who can live without love? Even if Sieur Osmont and Sieur Gautier weren’t sworn to chastity, they are shockingly hairy, and I fear their perfume is nowhere nearly so delightful as your own, my lady. But we are fortunate that we reached here no later than we did. Another week, and I fear I’d have been contemplating assassinating the archbishops. No one even notices if the head of a royal embassy happens to have a woman in his tents. Or six, for that matter. But bring churchmen along, and I must go without.”

“So the return trip should be more pleasant. What a pity we still have leagues to go on this one.”

“It will go faster now. The road to the south is Amorran, and while they may have a primitive outlook on magic, there is something to be said in favor of their attitude toward transportation. They build good roads.”

“Oh, yes,” she nodded, uninterested. “I don’t understand what any of this has to do with hate.”

He sighed. For all their brilliance and beauty, the elven ability to follow straight lines was limited. “I was just saying that, even though the king took my title from me and made me a slave, I don’t hate him. It took a long time, but I truly don’t. I’ve traveled far enough, I’ve seen enough, to know there are worse kings than Louis-Charles de Mirid. And his son is a good man, maybe even a great one. If I still hated them for what was done to me as a child, I would be blind to that.”

She stared at him then shrugged. “If you say so. I will still kill them if I see them. I just don’t care enough to have you hunt them down. I’d rather you stay with me.”

He smiled and stroked her cheek. “You’re very sweet, in a remarkably savage manner.”

“We built our cities when men were still living like goblins,” she said. But she was smiling. “What will you do when we reach Amorr?”

“For now, what the king has commanded. We won’t return north until the spring. If there is to be a campaign against the wolf-people then, Charles-Phillipe will lead it, and he’ll want me with him. It may be years before I even have to think about it again. Or it may be never. Only God knows what tomorrow will bring.”

His sealed orders made it clear that there was something brewing in Amorr, and his primary mission was to learn what it was before it happened. Bonpensier was no spymaster, but one didn’t reach the position of archbishop to the realm without understanding the importance of information, and his contacts in the Church reached much further than either of the networks belonging to the grandmagicien or the chancelier.

“How about you?” he asked her. “What will you do? If you don’t wish to stay the winter there, I’ll arrange to have you brought safely to Merithaim. Or I’ll take you there myself once the archbishops are safely crowned or whatever it is they do to them to make them celestines. They aren’t familiar with elves there, and it won’t be safe for you to go out without a guard.”

“Are you in such a hurry to be rid of me now?” She smiled and waved away his protests. “No, I have no wish to return to my people now. Even though I will be forgiven for the theft of my magic, I will be scorned by some and pitied by the rest. They simply won’t want to be reminded that even a great magistress like Amitlya can be robbed of her mighty powers by an unwashed man-rat.”

He held his tongue. He still didn’t understand the bond between elven virginity and magic, and he suspected it was little more than a tradition akin to L’Academie’s preference for keeping talented women as breeding stock instead of training them as battle mages. But she had not reacted well to his previous inquiries on the subject. And if there was one thing he’d learned about elves in the past year, it was that they made absolutely no distinction between their iron-bound traditions and the dictates of nature.

She turned around again, her expression half-hidden in the shadows. “What is a year or even a decade in the life of an elf? As you say, only the gods know what the morrow brings, but there are no gods. If we are fortunate, then tomorrow will be the same as today. I thought my life ended with my magic in that whorehouse, but you showed me there were still pleasures to be found in it. Perhaps there are even things worth living for.”

“Yours is a cheerful philosophy, my lady Everbright. How well-named you are!”

“Even where there is no hope, there is always pleasure. We are an old and decadent people, isn’t that what your people say?”

“I’ve heard the thought before. What is it that you find so intringuing about our young and innocent race?”

She loomed over him, as thin as a young girl but taller than most women grown, her hair falling over her shoulders in a ghostly cascade that shined through the shadows. Then she smiled wickedly and pushed him over backward.

“You speak well of the slenderness of elves, Magicien. But since we met, I’ve come to understand that being slender is not always a virtue.”

CORVUS

A rush of mixed emotions filled Corvus’s mind as he walked up the familiar streets leading to his domus. There was excitement and anticipation, of course. It had been months since he’d laid eyes on Romilia, and he was almost trembling, so eager was he to see her again. But there was nervousness too. She had probably heard about Fortex’s death by now, but did she know of his responsibility for it? He didn’t relish the thought of trying to explain it to her.

After facing his brother just this morning, he wasn’t sure if he was up to a long interrogation session or spending the evening attempting to explain the harsh realities of legionary justice to a woman so tender-hearted that she would force the cats to release the rats they caught.

He’d been glad for the company of his fascitors earlier today, but they were beginning to feel more like his jailers than an honor guard. At the baths, he’d practically had to order them to wait in the apodyterium. He had the impression that Caius Vecellius and the rest of the squad would have blithely followed him into the caldarium, still wearing their full armor, had he not instructed them otherwise.

Now they were leading him home, and he found himself wondering if they would actually follow him into his bedchamber if he did not tell them otherwise. Then it belatedly occurred to him that perhaps they were waiting for him to release them from their duty. He slowed a little so that he could address Vecellius without the others overhearing.

“Forgive me, Captain, but as you know, I am unfamiliar with my new status. Would you mind telling me the extent of your duties?”