The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy Read online

  “Something tells me it didn’t go according to plan,” Vanyel guessed.

  “Dead in the black,” Tylendel said soberly. “I was ‘with’ him for about as long as it took for things to get interesting. I had been feeling odd from the start, but I tried to ignore it, and concentrated on the link. Then things got—I don’t know how to describe it, except that I started losing my grip on me and started merging with him. And the more I concentrated, the stranger it all got. It was a bit like those times I’d made accidents happen; the room faded in and out, I was in a kind of sickish fever, my heart was racing—and I couldn’t tell what was ‘me’ and what was Stav. Under any other circumstances I think I would have quit and shut everything down, but I was stubborn and I was a little afraid of Stav making fun of me for diving out, after this was over. I kept holding to that link, figuring that if I could just weather it out, things would get fun again. Then—” He shook his head a bit, and his mouth twitched. “Just as things were about to come to the cusp for Staven, something—broke loose in me. I just barely remember the start of it, like I’d suddenly been dropped into a fire. I was in unbelievable pain. It felt like being in the middle of a lightning storm, and from the wreck I made of our room, that’s exactly what I may have created. Something about what was going on, something about the link I had with Staven, triggered all my potential Gifts—explosively. I was unconscious for about a day, and when I woke up—”

  He shuddered. “—nothing would ever be the same.”

  He closed his eyes, and Vanyel stroked his forehead. His mouth was tight, with lines of unhappiness at the corners. Far off in the distance, Vanyel could hear meadowswifts crying like the lost souls of ghost-children.

  “So there I was,” Tylendel continued, his voice thin and strained. “I had the Mage-Gift, Thought-sensing, Fetching, a bit of Empathy—none of it predictable, none of it controlled, and all of it likely to burst out at any moment.” He took a look at Vanyel’s face and read the puzzlement there. “Gods, I keep forgetting you aren’t a trainee. Fetching—that means I can move things without touching them; Empathy means I can feel what someone else is feeling, which is why I knew when you had that nightmare last night. Thought-sensing—if someone isn’t shielding, I can tell what they’re thinking. The Mage-Gift is harder to explain, but it’s what makes it possible for a Herald-Mage to do magic.”

  “You can tell what I’m thinking?” Vanyel said dubiously. He would have liked being able to share Tylendel’s thoughts the way Gala did, but wasn’t entirely sure he wanted the relationship to hold that kind of one-sided intimacy.

  “I can, but I won’t,” Tylendel said, with such firmness that Vanyel couldn’t find it in his heart to doubt him. “Even if it wasn’t so unfair to you, it’s counter to all the ethics that go with being a Herald. Basically I just use it to talk with Gala and Savil.”

  Vanyel nodded, comforted. “So you had all these—Gifts—sort of thrown at you, and no way to control them.”

  “Exactly,” Tylendel said soberly. “And all this at twelve. It was two years before Gala came for me. If it hadn’t been for Staven, I’d have gone mad.”

  “Why?” Vanyel whispered. “What was happening?”

  “What wasn’t? I’d drop into a fit—when I’d wake up again, I’d be in the middle of a fifty-foot circle of wreckage. That was the Mage-Gift and Fetching working together in a way Savil and I haven’t been able to duplicate under control. Seems I have to go berserk.”

  He frowned, and reached up to rub his forehead between his eyebrows. “Staven was the only one who could get near me—who was willing to stay near me, in or out of a fit. They said I’d been taken by a demon. They said that because of what Staven and I had tried to share, I had been possessed. When I—started to show signs of being shay’a’chern, they said I was cursed, too.”

  “That’s—that’s stupid!” Vanyel cried indignantly.

  “They still said it; if they’d dared, they’d have outcast me. But they didn’t; Staven swore if they did he’d go with me, and he was the heir, the only possible heir with me acting the way I was. Mother wasn’t capable of having any more children, Father wouldn’t remarry, and he’d been completely faithful to her, so there weren’t any bastards around. They didn’t have a choice. They had to allow me to stay, but they didn’t have to make it comfortable for me.”

  Vanyel thought with wonder that Tylendel’s situation was actually worse than his own.

  “They kept me pretty well isolated; even when I was fine they avoided me. But when everyone else abandoned me in one of my fits, he stayed, he took care of me, absolute and unshakable in the belief that I would never hurt him. Positive that, despite what was whispered, what had happened was not that I’d been possessed, but was something that would somehow be worked out.”

  Tylendel shuddered again, his eyes haunted, and plainly seeing another time and place. Vanyel, feeling his pain, put both his hands on his shoulders, trying to just be a comforting presence without disturbing him; Tylendel looked up at him, patted his hand, and half-smiled.

  “You see? I think maybe that’s why we understand each other. Well, finally Gala came—gods. I cannot ever tell you what it was like, looking into her eyes for the first time. It was—like souls touching. And the relief—knowing that I wasn’t mad, that I wasn’t demon-possessed—I went from hell to the Havens in the space of a heartbeat.”

  He sighed and seemed to sink into his own thoughts for a long while.

  “What did she do?” Vanyel asked.

  “For one thing, she put me under her shielding; got me controlled until we arrived here and Savil took me under her wing. That’s more than enough reason to love her, even without the bond to her. She’s my very best friend and the sister of my soul.”

  He reached up, and touched Vanyel’s cheek. His hand was cool, almost cold. “But she’ll never be what you are. Can you understand what I’m saying, love? I owe her my sanity, but in a lot of ways she’s more than I am; I love her the way I love Savil or my mother—inferior to superior. Not brother to sister, or lover to lover; not ever as equals.”

  Vanyel put his own hand over the one touching his cheek, and held it, warming it in his own. “What am I, then?”

  “You’re my partner, my equal, my friend—and my love. Vanyel, I didn’t say this in so many words last night—but I do love you.”

  Those words were not expected; certainly the implied level of commitment was not what Vanyel had expected. “But—” he stuttered, not sure whether what he was feeling was joy or fear.

  “Van, I know we haven’t known each other long, but I do love you,” Tylendel said, ignoring the “but,” holding Vanyel’s gaze with his own. “And I love you because I love you, not because I owe you anything, or because some god somewhere decided I was going to be a Herald, or because you’re a beloved teacher. I love you because you’re Vanyel, and we belong together, and together we can stand back-to-back against anything.”

  Much to his confusion, Vanyel felt his eyes start burning. “I don’t know—really know what to say,” he replied awkwardly, blinking hard. “Except—’Lendel, I think after last night—I can’t ever remember being this happy. I’ve never loved anyone, I don’t know what it’s like, but if—” He tried to say what he felt. “—if wanting to die for you is love—”

  His eyes burned; he rubbed at them with his free hand, and tried to put his feelings into coherent words. He groped after his thoughts, totally awkward and altogether out of his depth, but he needed to articulate his bewildering emotions. He’d never felt so vulnerable and exposed in his life. “I’d do anything for you; I’d take the sneers, the pointed fingers—I wouldn’t care, so long as they didn’t take me away from you. If I could, I’d give you anything. I’d do anything I could to make you happy. And—I’ll gladly share you with Gala.”

  “Havens, don’t say that,” Tylendel chuckled, though his voice sounded suspici
ously thick and his eyes glistened in the shadows. “She wanted to ‘eavesdrop,’ you know. She’d take you up on that, the randy little bitch.”

  Vanyel’s face flamed hotly, and he laughed, using his own embarrassment to get past that moment of complete vulnerability. “I knew she was saying something that would make me blush, I just knew it!”

  “Well, she is not going to have her prurience satisfied, I promise you,” Tylendel said firmly. “I am not going to share you, and that’s that.”

  • • •

  Vanyel entered their room through the garden door, blinking until his eyes adjusted to the semidarkness after the noontide sunlight of the gardens. He was carrying his lute by the neck in his right hand, and holding his left, wrapped in a handkerchief, curled against his chest.

  Ye gods, I should have known better, he thought ruefully, as his left hand throbbed. I am such a damned fool.

  “’Lendel?” he called into the outer room, racking the lute with care, still using only his right hand. “Are you out there?”

  “Of course I am.” Tylendel strolled in, a half-eaten slice of bread and cheese in one hand. “It’s lunchtime, you know I’m always here when the food is!”

  Vanyel began unwrapping his hand—slowly—

  Tylendel stopped chewing, then tossed his lunch, forgotten, onto the table. “Gods, Van—what did you do to yourself? Sit!”

  The ends of Vanyel’s fingers were blistered, and the blisters had broken and were bleeding. The muscles of the hand were cramped so hard he couldn’t have gotten his fingers uncurled to save his soul. He looked at the wreckage he’d made of his hand with a kind of pained disbelief.

  Tylendel pushed him down onto the bed, and took the injured hand in both his own.

  “I made a fool of myself, is what I did,” Vanyel told him, regretfully. “I told the girls yesterday that if they’d leave me alone I’d play for them this morning. I forgot how long it’s been since I played—and, well, I’ll tell you the truth, I forgot I lost some feeling in those fingers when the arm got broken. I didn’t even realize what I’d done to my finger-ends until after the muscles in my hand started to cramp.”

  “Stay right there.” Tylendel went to the little chest at the foot of the bed that he’d moved into Vanyel’s room with the rest of his things, bent over it for a moment, and came back with bandages and a little pot of salve. “I’m no Healer,” he said, sitting down and taking Vanyel’s hand back into his, “but I’ve banged myself up a time or two, and this is good stuff.”

  He took some of it on the ends of his fingers and massaged it into the palm of Vanyel’s hand. A pleasant, sharp odor came from it, both green and spicy, and his fingers began to relax from their cramped position, both from the warming effect of the salve and the massage.

  “What is that?” Vanyel asked, sniffing. “I’m going to smell sort of like a pastry.”

  Tylendel laughed. “Don’t tempt me this early in the day, Vanyel-ashke. It’s cinnamon and marigold. Good for the cramped muscles and the poor, battered fingers.”

  He had worked all the way out to the ends of Vanyel’s fingers; the cramps were mostly gone, and the salve, rather than burning as Vanyel had half feared it would, was numbing the areas where Tylendel was spreading it.

  “Now just let me get you bandaged up.”

  “What was that you just called me?”

  “Ashke? It’s Tayledras. Hawkbrother-tongue. All those feathered faces and masks Savil has on the wall out in the common room are from the Tayledras; she studied with one of their Adepts, Starwind k’Treva, and they made her a Wingsister. That’s like a blood brother for them.”

  Tylendel was wrapping each finger carefully and taking his time about it. Vanyel didn’t mind in the least. Now that he wasn’t in much pain, there was something a bit sensual about Tylendel’s ministrations.

  “She uses a lot of their expressions when there isn’t a good word for the thing in our tongue. Like shay’a’chern—it translates as—oh—‘one whose lover is like self,’ with a sexual connotation to the word ‘self’ that makes it clear that they aren’t talking about incest or similar interests. It’s a very complicated language.” He looked up from his bandaging, and Vanyel could see laughter-glints lurking in the depths of his eyes. “You smell delicious; are you sure you have lessons this afternoon?”

  “We promised Savil we’d be virtuous today,” Vanyel reminded him, feeling greatly tempted anyway.

  Tylendel heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Too true. Well, ashke translates simply to ‘beloved.’ And it’s part of your name already—ashke, Ashkevron. See?”

  He tied off the last bit of bandage with a flourish.

  “Ashke,” Vanyel mused. “I—like it.”

  “It suits you, ashke; Savil says the Hawkbrothers seldom go by their born-names, they take use-names when they become mages. Maybe that’s the name you always should have had. Now let’s go eat lunch and be virtuous—before I decide to break my sworn word to Savil!”

  • • •

  Savil looked up from her book and rubbed her tired, blurring eyes. Tylendel and Vanyel had taken over the couch across from her to study. Candlelight from the lantern beside them made a halo of Tylendel’s dark gold curls and highlighted the golden brown of his tunic; beside him, in deep blue, Vanyel seemed to be an extension of his shadow. They shared Vanyel’s history text; it rested on their knees with each holding a corner. Tylendel’s arm was around Vanyel’s shoulder, their heads nestled closely together. From time to time Savil could catch the murmur of a question from her nephew and Tylendel’s slightly higher reply.

  Strange that it’s the older who has the tenor voice and the younger who’s the deeper, she mused, blinking sleepily at them. Though the pairing is strange all around. I would never have reckoned Vanyel for shay’a’chern. Not with Withen for a father.

  She yawned silently, and half-closed her eyes. The two young ones across the room from her blurred into a haze of gold and darkest blue. He’s got ’Lendel thinking about something other than that damned feud, at least; for that I’d warm to him. Even if I want to knock him into the wall occasionally for being a little prig. ’Lendel does seems to be getting some notion of responsible behavior into his head. And a bit more politeness. Though it’s a damn good thing Mardic and Donni are inclined to take everything he says generously, or they might have knocked him into the wall for me! Bless them. He can be so damned rude sometimes—and not mean it.

  She worried a hangnail with the end of her thumb. He’s been so isolated I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Gods be thanked, ’Lendel seems to be civilizing him. There’s more patience there than there was before—and I think, maybe, a little more kindness. Less arrogance, for certain. Withen should be pleased enough with the reports he’s getting to let him stay. She noted Vanyel’s intense concentration on his book, and restrained the corners of her mouth from quirking up. Looks like he’s enjoying himself. Can’t say that I’d mind studying with my ’Lendel coaching! Poor little lad; when he gives his heart to a thing, he certainly doesn’t do it halfway. Still, I’m not certain I like the way he’s becoming so dependent on ’Lendel. That isn’t healthy, not for either of them. It could make for trouble later on.

  A thin tendril of contact reached for her from across the room, although Tylendel’s eyes remained on the book. :A silver for your thoughts, teacher-mine.:

  :How pretty you look together, young demon,: she replied the same way. :And how grateful I am that you’ve managed to stay discreet.:

  :Discipline, discipline,: came the laughter-tinged answer. :Seriously, you’ve heard no gossip?:

  :Only that I’m likely to find you two at knife-point one day.:

  The aura of amusement deepened. :Well, well, so it worked. I owe Van a forfeit.:

  Savil raised her eyebrows in surprise, and opened her eyes again to catch Tylendel looking at her with a smile lurking i
n the corners of his mouth. :How so, demon-child?:

  :He’s been insulting me behind my back. Popinjay pecking. Mostly on my proclivities. So if anything gets back to Withen . . . We decided I should “find out about it” and go for him if the insults got noticed.:

  :Great good gods!: She bit her lip to keep from laughing. :Pot calling kettle, oh my hope of the Havens! What were you planning on doing? Are you going to call him out? I’d rather you didn’t have at each other with anything sharp.:

  :Oh, probably I’ll make a major confrontation, with as many witnesses as possible. But not with blades, teacher-love; he’s too good for me, and we figured he should lose so he gets the sympathy of his flock of doves. Barehanded, we think. Wrestling; we’ll try to keep fists out of it as much as possible too. We had some vague notion of trying it the next time it rains, in the mud. It should be lots of fun.:

  Savil had to drop the mind-link for a moment until she got herself back under control. Lots of fun indeed—great good gods, both of them tussling in the open in front of everyone and no one guessing how much they’re enjoying it.

  :Demon-child, I think I’ll put you in for envoy when I grant you your Whites; you have altogether too twisted a mind!:

  :Well, doing it that way we can avoid the chance of hurting each other, and I’ve already established that I go after people very directly. Poor Van is going to have to decide which outfit of his I’m going to ruin, though. I intend to rip it to rags for verisimilitude.:

  Savil nearly choked to death, trying not to laugh at the mind-pictures and overtones that came across with that last sending. :Verisimilitude, my behind! You just want—:

  :Why, Savil!: The eyes across from her were wide with assumed innocence. :How could you think such a thing?:

  :Easy enough,: she replied, her own mental tone so dry that it had a metallic taste. :Given who I’ve got for a protege.: