Free Lightborn by Alison Sinclair Page A

elder brother wandered staggering drunk from his fellows and was not missed until past sunrise, and within two years Xerxes was his father’s deputy and wed to a melancholy heiress. Time had scored his disappointments deep.
    Beside him sat Sachever, Duke of Mycene. He was small and wiry, like his son, with a finely shaped, hairless head that, in its poise and swift turning, evoked a hunting hawk. Time rode him lightly. Even in his sixties he was pugnacious, driven, and a master of sports and weapons. He delighted in outwitting or outlasting men a third his age, and still made his plans as though he expected to pluck their fruit himself, even fruit thirty years in the ripening.
    The Duke of Imbré sat to her left hand, the nearest of them all to Vladimer. He was more than eighty, as eroded and immutable as a sandstone outcropping; no predator but time would pull him down. Age had brought him wisdom and the respect even of his enemies.
    The five Borders barons stood approximately level with the next tier of dukes in social rank, though their vast, sparsely populated lands encircled the Shadowlands and extended almost to the south coast. Two of the five were here, with the heir to the third, Stranhorne. And Ishmael’s city representative, a cousin, surely, with that broad figure and blocky profile.
    The archduke’s raised hand elicited silence. “Perhaps we might like to hear each other’s questions.”
    Sachevar Mycene had half sprung from his chair. “Di Studier murdered my son’s betrothed and he and his—associates are using this—farrago of lies and insinuations—to distract us from his guilt.”
    “For all we know,” the heir to Kalamay said, “ he seduced the lady.”
    “There was no seduction and there are no children,” Mycene snarled. “The physician who claims so—”
    “Lady Telmaine’s husband,” Vladimer murmured.
    “—was in Ishmael di Studier’s pay.”
    “My husband was in nobody’s pay.”
    Vladimer tapped Telmaine’s arm, in caution. “I have two independent examiners’ reports that Lady Tercelle Amberley had borne a child within a few days of her death.”
    There was a shocked silence. Imbré winced and shook his head. “This is an outrage!” Kalamay said. “To violate a lady’s modesty so in death—Sejanus, your brother has gone too far!”
    The archduke, Telmaine suspected, might have agreed; even she herself, with no love whatsoever for Tercelle Amberley, was dismayed. Vladimer continued, unruffled as a pond in summer. “While I have no wish to slander the lady’s memory”—a lie, given his indifference to slander against his own reputation—“or offend your lordships’ sensibilities”—another lie—“we do know at least one other man might have an interest in Tercelle Amberley’s life or death.”
    “The child was Strumheller’s,” Randalf Kalamay said.
    “An extraordinary feat of magic, that, given that he was in the Borders at the pertinent time.”
    Vladimer, Telmaine decided, was enjoying this exercise of wits too much.
    “There was no child,” Mycene said, “and my son will have anyone who repeats this slander outside this room on the dueling ground.”
    Which was a threat to give anyone in this room pause. Ferdenzil Mycene’s aim had publicly been proved deadly on several such occasions.
    Old Duke Imbré said slowly, “You must know how implausible this sounds, Vladimer. Ferdenzil’s bride is dead. The child or children have disappeared, so their origin or even their existence cannot be proven.”
    “Never mind these children,” Duke Kalamay himself said. “Sejanus, is it my understanding that you have given a ducal order into Ishmael di Studier’s hands?”
    “As a matter of fact, no,” the archduke said, calmly. “I received an order of succession for Strumheller prior to the issuing of the ducal order. I had no reason then not to sign and seal it. Reynard di Studier is now Baron Strumheller.” A small, pointed pause. “As for Ishmael