Tier rubbed his hands together lightly. “Only a bit of it,” he said. “Apparently it feeds on more than just blood. I gave it a story and it took more than I offered—which is how it knew that I’d been one of Gerant’s commanders.”
He’d invoked magic in that story—more magic than he’d ever brought forth before—and it had only been shortly after that when Telleridge had informed him that his magic was contained. He’d thought that Telleridge had meant that they’d taken his magic away—but perhaps it was more subtle than that.
“Would you tell me a lie?” he asked Phoran.
“My stallion is cow-hocked,” he said immediately, apparently unfazed by the abrupt change in subject. “What are you doing?”
“Well,” said Tier. “I misunderstood what Telleridge meant when he said they had contained my magic. I can tell if you lie—but not Telleridge or Myrceria.”
“Your magic works, but not on the members of the Path,” Phoran said.
“So it seems.”
“I have two more requests before I go,” said Phoran. “First, I ask that you not tell anyone about the Memory.” He gave Tier another bleak smile. “It’s more than a social problem for me, you know. If a whisper of the Memory got out I’d face a headsman’s axe. The Empire cannot forget the lessons learned from the Shadowed: the Emperor must be free of magic.”
“Without your permission, no one will hear it from my lips,” promised Tier.
“Would you see if you can find out if your Sept, Avar the Sept of Leheigh, is a member of the Secret Path?” He sighed. “Telleridge is… a spider who avoids the light of day while he spins his webs and sends his friends and foes whirling in deadly earnest, unaware whose threads pull them this way and that. If he is involved with the Secret Path, then they are a threat to me and vice versa. I need to know who I can trust.”
“If I can discover it,” Tier agreed, then gave his emperor a wry grin. “Since I don’t have any choice about staying, I might as well make myself useful.”
He slept for a while after Phoran left. He had no idea how long because his cell allowed for no daylight, just the endless glow of the stones that lit his room.
Longing for home brought him to his feet. Frustration sent him pacing. He hadn’t been able to ask if Phoran could get a message to Seraph. His tongue wouldn’t shape the words.
By Cormorant and Owl, I bind you that you will not ask anyone to help you escape… Seraph would help him escape if she could. He supposed that was enough to invoke Telleridge’s magic.
If Seraph knew where to find him… but she did not. She probably thought him dead after all this time.
He probably would die without seeing her again: there was something in the arrogance of Telleridge that told Tier that many Travelers had died here.
Tier closed his eyes and rested his face against the cool stone wall. Without the distraction of sight, he could pull her into his heart’s thoughts. Owl memory, she called it, when he was able to recall conversations held months before. Gifted, his grandfather said, when he could sing a song after the first time he’d heard it. Blessed, he thought now, visualizing the pale-faced child Seraph had been the first time he’d seen her. Blessed to have his memories to keep in his heart in this place.
In his mind’s eye, he built her face as it had been, little by little, loving the curve of her shoulder and the odd pale color of her hair.
Proud, he thought, she had been so proud. It was in the stubborn set of her chin, raised in defiance of the men in that tavern. He could see the bruise on her wrist where the innkeeper had grabbed her and yanked her out of bed.
He’d been intrigued by her then, he thought as he had before. In the clear light of his memory he could see how young she’d been, little more than a child, and yet they’d been married less than a season later.
Eschewing the luxuries his cell now offered, Tier sat on the floor and set his back against the wall. He remembered the very moment that he knew he loved her.
Two days after Jes was born, Tier came back from the barn to find Seraph sitting on the end of the bed, back straight as a board, with Jes held protectively in her arms.
“I have something to say to you,” she said, as welcoming as an angry hedgehog.
He took off his coat and hung it up. “All right,” he’d said, wondering how he’d managed to offend her this time.
Her eyes narrowed, she told him that their son was a Guardian. She explained how difficult Jes would find it to maintain a balance between daytime and nighttime personalities.
“If he were a girl, he would stand a better chance,” she said in the cold, clear voice she only used when she was really upset. “Male Guardians seldom maintain their balance after puberty. If they become maddened, they will kill anyone who crosses their path except for those in their charge. Once that happens, they must be killed because they cannot be confined.”
Jes began to fuss and she set him against her shoulder and rocked him gently—keeping Tier at a distance by the force of her gaze. “I had a brother who was a Guardian, adopted from another tribe. Often Guardians are given to other clans to raise because the normal anxieties of birth parents seem to add strain to the Guardian’s burden. It is an honor to raise a Guardian child, and no clan would refuse to take him.”
Give up his son? The shock of the suggestion ripped cleanly through dismay that had encased him as he realized the terrible thing that the gods had laid upon his small son. How could she think that he’d entertain a suggestion that they throw Jes away because he was too much trouble? How could she consider deserting her child?
She wouldn’t. Not she. She who fought demons for people she didn’t even know, would never, ever, shrink at anything that would threaten her second family.
“How old was your Guardian brother when he died?” asked Tier finally.
“Risovar was thirty,” she said, her hands fluttering restlessly over Jes, as if she wanted to clutch him close, but was afraid she might hurt him if she did. “He was among the first who died of the plague.”
“Then you know how it is done,” Tier said. “Jes will stay with us, and you will teach me how to raise a Guardian who will die of ripe old age.”
Her face had come alive then, and he saw what it had cost her to be honest with him. When he cradled his family against him, mother and child, she’d whispered, “I’d have killed anyone who would have tried to take him.”
“Me, too,” Tier had said fiercely into her moon-colored hair. No one would ever separate them.
“Me, too,” said Tier, in his cell in the palace at Taela.
How best to weather this captivity? The answers came to him in Gerant’s dry tenor. Know your enemy. Know what they want so you know where to expect their next attack. Discover their strengths and avoid them. Find their weaknesses and exploit them with your strengths. Knowledge is a better weapon than a sword.
He smiled affably when Myrceria entered his room.
“If you would come with me, sir,” she said. “We’ll make you ready for presentation. After the ceremony you’ll be given the freedom of the Eyrie and all the pleasures it can provide you.”
The women who’d tried to bathe him once before were back in the bathing pool, and this time Myrceria wouldn’t let him send them out. They scrubbed, combed, shaved, trimmed, and ignored his blushes and protests.
When one of the women started after his hair, Myrceria caught her hand, “No, leave it long. We’ll braid it and it will look properly exotic.”
They persuaded him into court clothing, the like of which he’d have never willingly put on. He might actually have refused to wear them, even with his resolution to be a meek and mild guest while he gathered knowledge of his enemy, if it weren’t for the fear in their eyes. He could see that, if they didn’t turn him out pretty as a lady’s mare, it wouldn’t be him that suffered. So he protested and made rude comments, but he wore the silly things.