Magic's Pawn v(lhm-1 Read online

  Then he whirled and headed blindly into a corner. He rested his forehead against the cool stone of the wall with one arm draped over his head, pounding the fist of his free hand against the gray stones, cursing softly under his breath.

  Now Savil let him alone, saying absolutely nothing.

  Once you get him worked into a rage, let him deal with his anger and his internal turmoil in his own way, had been Jaysen's advice. Leave him alone until he's calmed himself down.

  Finally he turned back to the room and her, bracing himself in the corner, eyes nearly closed; breathing as hard as if he'd been running a mile.

  "You'll never get me to agree to stop supporting Staven, you know," he said in a perfectly conversational tone. "I won't interfere with the Heralds, I won't help with the feud, and I won't call Evan Leshara a damned liar - but I will defend Staven and what he thinks is right, if only to you. I love him, and I will not give that up."

  There was no sign that a moment before he'd been in - literally - a killing rage.

  "I know," Savil replied, just as calmly, giving no indication that she was still shaking inside. "I'm not asking you to give up loving Staven. All I want is for you to think about this mess, not just react to it. If it was only your two families, it would be bad enough, but you're involving the whole region in your feuding. We know very well that you've both been looking for mages to escalate this thing - and 'Lendel, I do not want to hear a single word about which side started that. The important thing is that you've done it. The important thing is that if either side involves magic in this, the Heralds must and will take a hand. We can't afford to have wild magic loose and hurting innocent people. You are a Herald, or nearly. You have to remember that you cannot take a side. You have to be impartial. No matter what Evan Leshara does or says."

  Tylendel shrugged, but it was not an indifferent shrug. His pain was very real, and only too plain to his mentor; she hurt for him. But this was one of the most important lessons any Herald had to learn - that he had to be impartial, no matter what the cost of impartiality was. And no matter whether the cost was to himself, or to those he cared for.

  "All right," he said, tonelessly. "I'll keep out of it. So. Now that you've turned my guts inside out, what else did you want to discuss?''

  "Vanyel," Savil said, relaxing enough that her voice became a little dulled with weariness. "He's been here for more than a month. I want you to tell me what you think."

  "Gods." He sagged back against the wall, and opened his eyes completely. They had returned to their normal warm brown. "You would bring up His Loveliness."

  "What's the matter?" Savil asked sharply, and took a closer look at him; he was wearing a most peculiar half-smile, and she smelled a rat - or at least a mouse. "

  'Lendel, don't tell me you've gone and fallen in love with the boy!"

  He snorted. "No, but the lad is putting a lot of stress on my self-control, let me tell you that! When I don't want to smack that superior grin off his face, I want to cuddle and reassure him, and I don't know which is worse."

  "I don't doubt," Savil replied dryly, walking over to where he leaned, and draped herself against the wall opposite him. "All right, obviously you've had your eye on him; tell me what you've figured out so far. Even speculation will do."

  "Half the time I think you ought to drown him," her trainee replied, shaking his golden head in disgust. "That miniature Court he's collected around himself is sickening. The posing, the preening - "

  Savil made a little grimace of distaste. "You don't have to tell me. But what about the other half?"

  "In my more compassionate moments, I'm more certain than ever that he's hurting, and all that posing is just that - a pose, a defense; that the little Court of his is to convince himself that he's worth something. But I've made overtures, and he just - goes to ice on me. He doesn't hit at me, he just goes unreachable."

  "Well - " Savil eyed her protege with speculation.

  "That particular scenario hadn't occurred to me. I thought that now he'd been given his head, he was just showing his true colors. I was about ready to wash my hands of him. Foster him with - oh - Oden or somebody - somebody with more patience, spare time, and Court connections than me."

  "Don't," Tylendel said shortly, a new and calculating look on his face. "I just thought of something. Didn't you tell me one of the things his father was absolutely livid about was his messing about with music?"

  "Yes," she said, slowly, pretending to examine the knuckles of her right hand as if they were of intense interest, but in reality concentrating on Tylendel's every word. The boy was a marginal Empath when he wasn't thinking about it. She didn't want to remind him of that Gift just now; not when she needed the information she could get from it. "Yes," she repeated. "Point of fact, he told me flat I was to keep the boy away from the Bards."

  "And you told me Breda let him down gently, or as gently as she could, about his ambitions. How often has he played since then ?''

  Now Savil gave him a measuring look of her own. "Not at all," she said slowly,

  "Not a note since then. Margret says there's dust collecting on that lute of his."

  "Lord and Lady!" Tylendel bit his lip, and looked away, all his attention turned inward. "I didn't know it was that bad. I thought he might at least be playing for those social butterflies he's collected."

  "Not a note," Savil repeated positively. "Is that bad?"

  "For a lad who's certainly good enough to get a lot of praise from his sycophants? For one whose only ambitions lay with music? It's bad. It's worse than bad; we broke his dream for him. Savil, I take back the first half of what I said." Tylendel rubbed his neck, betraying a growing unease. He looked up at the ceiling, then back down at her, his eyes now frank and worried. ''We have a problem. A serious problem. That boy is bleeding inside. If we can't get him to open up, he may bleed himself to death."

  "How do we get at him?" Savil asked, taking him at his word. Her weakness - and what made her a bad Field Herald, although it was occasionally an asset in training proteges - was in dealing with people. She didn't read them well, and she didn't really know how to handle them in a crisis situation. This business with Tylendel and his twin and the feud, for instance -

  I would never have thought of this solution - desensitizing him, weaning him into thinking about it logically by bringing him to the edge over and over but never letting him slip past that edge. Bless Jaysen. And damn him. Gods, every time we play this game it wreaks as much damage on me as it does on poor 'Lendel. I'm still vibrating like a harpstring.

  Tylendel pondered her question a long time before answering, his handsome face utterly quiet, his eyes again turned inward. "I just don't know, Savil. Not while he's still rebuffing every overture he gets. We need some time for this to build, I think, and then some event that will break his barricades for a minute. Until that happens, we won't get in, and he'll stay an arrogant bastard until he explodes."

  She felt herself grow cold inside. "Suicidal?"

  To her relief, Tylendel shook his head. "I don't think so; he's not the type. It wouldn't occur to him. Now me - never mind. No, what he'll do is go out of control in one way or another. He'll either do it fast and have some kind of breakdown, or slowly, and debauch himself into a state where he's got about the same amount of mind left as a shrub."

  "Wonderful." She placed her right hand over her forehead, rubbing her eyebrows with thumb and forefinger. "Just what I wanted to hear."

  Tylendel made one of his expressive shrugs. "You asked."

  "I did," she said reluctantly. "Gods, why me?"

  "If it's any comfort, it's not going to happen tomorrow. ''

  "It better not. I have an emergency Council session tonight." She sighed, and rubbed her hands together. "I'll probably be up half the night, so don't wait up."

  "Does that mean the interview is over?" he asked quirking one corner of his mouth.

  "It does. You can have the suite all to yourself tonight - just don't leave crum
bs on the floor or grease on the cushions. I wouldn't care, but Margret will take your hide off in one piece. And don't look for the lovebirds, either - they're out on a fortnight Field trial with Shallan and her brood. So you'll be all alone for the evening."

  "Oh, gods, all alone with the beautiful Vanyel - you really want to test my self-control, don't you!" He laughed, then sobered, shoving away from the wall and straightening. "On the other hand, this might give me the chance I was talking about. If I get him alone, maybe I can get him to open up a bit.''

  Savil shrugged and pushed away from the wall herself. "You're better than I with people, lad, that's why I asked your advice. If you think you have an opportunity, then take it. Meanwhile, I have to go consult with the Queen's Own."

  "And from there, straight to the meeting? No time for a break?" Tylendel asked, sympathetically. She nodded.

  He reached for her shoulders and embraced her closely. "See that you eat, teacher," he murmured into her hair. "I want you to stay around for a while, not wear yourself into another bout of pneumonia, and maybe kill yourself this time.

  Even when I hate you, you old bitch, you know I love you."

  She swallowed down another lump in her throat, and returned the embrace with a definite stinging in her eyes.

  "I know, love. Don't think I don't count on it." She swallowed again, closed her eyes, and held him as tightly, a brief point of stability in a world that too often was anything but stable. "I love you, too. And don't you ever forget it."

  The emptiness of the suite almost oppressed Tylendel. With the "lovebirds" gone, Savil due (so the dinnertime rumor in the kitchens had it) for a till-dawn Council session in her capacity as speaker for those Heralds teaching proteges, and Vanyel presumably entertaining his little coterie of followers, there was nothing and no one to break the stifling silence. It closed around him like a shroud, until the very beating of his heart was audible. Outside the windows it was as dark as the heart of sin, and so overcast not even a hint of moon came through. His scalp was damp, hot, and prickly. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck and soaked into his collar. It felt a whole lot later than it actually was; time was crawling tonight, not flying.

  Tylendel gave up trying to read the treatise on weather-magic Savil had assigned him and switched to a history instead. A handwritten pamphlet on weatherworking was not what he needed to be reading right now, anyway; not with a storm threatening. His energy control often wasn't as good as he'd like, and he didn't want to inadvertently augment what was coming in. He was a lot better at controlling his subconscious than he had been, but there was no point in taking chances with Savil out of reach.

  That storm was at least part of what was making the suite seem stuffy; Tylendel Sensed the thunderheads building up in the west even though he couldn't see them from where he was sprawled on the couch of the common room. That was the Gift that made him a Herald-Mage trainee and not just a Herald-trainee; the ability to See (or otherwise Sense) and manipulate energy fields, both natural and supernatural. His Gifts had come on him early and a long time before he was Chosen; they'd given him trouble for nearly half of his short life, and only his twin's support had kept him sane in the interval between their onset and when his Companion Gala finally appeared -

  :Are you tucked safe away, dearling?: he Mindspoke to her. :When this blow comes, it's going to be a good one.:

  The drowsy affirmative he got told him that she was half-asleep; heat did that to her.

  Heat mostly made him irritable. He had propped every window and door wide open (and to hell with bugs), but there wasn't even a whisper of breeze to move the air around. The candle flames didn't even waver, and the honey-beeswax smell of the candles placed all around the common room was almost choking him with its sweetness.

  He shook back his damp hair, rubbed his eyes, and tried to concentrate on his book, but part of him kept hoping for a flash of lightning in the dark beyond the windows, or the first hint of cooling rain. And part of him kept insisting that all he had to do was nudge it a little. He told that part of himself to take a long walk, and waited impatiently for the rain to come of itself.

  Nothing happened. Just an itchy sort of tension building.

  He gave up trying to concentrate, got up and went to the sideboard for a glass of wine; he needed to get centered and calmed, and a little less sensitive, and he wasn't going to be able to do it on his own. The only wine left was a white, and it was a bit dry for his taste, but it did accomplish what he wanted it to. With just that hint of alcohol inside him, he finally managed to relax and get into the blasted book.

  He got so far into it, in fact, that when the first simultaneous blast of wind and thunder came, he nearly jumped off of the couch.

  Half the candles - the ones not sheltered in glass chimney-lamps - blew out. Wind whipped through the suite, sending curtains flying and carrying with it a welcome chill and the scent of rain. The shutters in Mardic's and Donni's room banged monotonously against the walls; not hard enough to shatter the glass yet, but it was only a matter of time. He dropped the book and got up to head for their door just as Vanyel stumbled in through the corridor door and into the brightness of the common room.

  The boy stood as frozen as a statue, blinking owlishly at the light. Tylendel's stomach gave a little lurch; Vanyel looked like death.

  It was bad enough that the boy was light-complected; bad enough that he was wearing stark black tonight, which only accentuated his fair skin. But his face had no color at the moment; it was so white it was almost transparent. His eyes looked sunken, and his expression was of someone who has seen, but been denied, the Havens.

  "Vanyel - " Tylendel said - whispered, really - his voice barely audible above the banging shutter and the sound of the storm. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Vanyel, I didn't expect you back so - uh - soon. Is something wrong?"

  For one moment - for one precious moment - Tylendel thought he had him; he was sure that the boy was going to open up to him. His eyes begged for pity; his expression, so hungry and haunted, nearly cracked Tylendel's own calm. The trainee made a tentative step toward him -

  It was the wrong move; he knew that immediately. Vanyel's face shuttered and assumed his habitual expression of flippant arrogance. "Wrong?" he said, with false gaiety. "Bright Lady, no, of course there's nothing wrong! Some of the Bards just came over from their Collegium and started an impromptu contest; it got so damned hot in the Great Hall with all those people crowded in that I gave up - "

  Just then the shutters in both the lifebonded's room and Savil's crashed against the walls with such force that it was a wonder that the windows didn’t shatter.

  "Havens!" Vanyel yelped, "She'll kill us!" and dove for Savil's room. Tylendel dashed into the other, mentally cursing his own clumsiness, and cursing himself for letting his reaction to the boy cloud his reading of him.

  By the time he got everything secured and returned to the common room, Vanyel had retreated into his own room and the door was firmly and irrevocably shut.

  "Vanyel," the trainee said, softly, his eyes dark with compassion and understanding, "Is something wrong?"

  "I - " Vanyel began, then closed his eyes as a jit of trembling hit him. ' 'I - the music - I - ''

  Suddenly Tylendel was beside him, holding him, quieting his shivering. ' 'It's all right,'' he murmured into Vanyel's ear, his breath warm and like a caress in his hair. ' 'It's all right, I understand. ''

  Vanyel stood as unmoving as a dead stick, hardly daring to breathe, afraid to open his eyes. Tylendel stroked his hair, the back of his neck, his hands warm and light - and Vanyel thought his heart was going to pound itself to pieces. ' I understand,'' he repeated. ' 'I know what it's like to want something, and know you 'II never have it. "

  ' 'You - do ?'' Vanyel faltered.

  Tylendel chuckled. It was a warm, rich sound.

  And his fingers traced the line of Vanyel's spine, slowly, sensuously. Vanyel started to relax in Tylendel's arms - and his eyes p
opped open in startlement when his own hands at Tylendel's chest encountered, not cloth, but skin.

  The trainee was starkly, gloriously nude.

  "Then again, " Tylendel whispered, looking deeply into Vanyel's eyes. ' 'Maybe I will get it. ''

  Vanyel made a strangling noise, wrenched himself away, and fled into darkness, into cold -

  Into the middle of his old dream.

  First there had been the snow-plain, then as he walked across it, the teeth of ice had begun poking their way up through the granular snow. They'd grown higher as he walked, but what he hadn't known was that they were growing behind him as well. Now he was trapped inside a ring of them. Trapped inside walls of ice, smoother than the smoothest glass, colder than the coldest winter. He couldn’t break out; he pounded on them until his arms were leaden, to no effect. Everywhere he looked - ice, snow, nothing alive, nothing but white and pale blue and silver. Even the sky was white. And he was so alone - so terribly alone.