Shadowborn Read Online Free

able.
    “Lord Vladimer?” he said. “Was he there? How’d he appear t’Max?”
    Max Stranhorne would never have been able to tell if Vladimer were suffering any ill effects of the ensorcellment, aside from the effects of the experience itself—which could not be discounted. Ish himself had sensed nothing, and Lady Telmaine would surely have said . . .
    “Lord Vladimer gave the report. Max thinks he may have been hurt—possibly ill, but Max thinks hurt. What prompted the extension of the archducal order,” Stranhorne said, distinctly enough that Ishmael knew he was aware of Ishmael’s distraction, “was the death of the Lightborn prince.”
    On the other side of sunrise lived the Lightborn, as utterly dependent on light as the Darkborn were on darkness. Both races had been created together by an eight-hundred-year-old act of magical vengeance. For eight hundred years, Lightborn and Darkborn had shared the land, trading, negotiating through paper walls, but never able to meet face-to-face. For much of the land, Darkborn and Lightborn cities, towns, and villages were separate—the Borders themselves were almost empty of Lightborn, for reasons no one among the Darkborn understood—but Minhorne, the largest city, was held in common, and the seats of Darkborn and Lightborn rule were separated by fewer than five miles.
    The death of a Lightborn prince was not in itself an unusual event: Lightborn custom allowed the ruthless culling of faltering, incompetent, or corrupt leaders. But Isidore was a seasoned, steady statesman of no more than Ishmael’s age, who had for twenty years survived the machinations of his wife’s relations—she was the daughter of one of the potentates of the southwest desert—not to mention the ambitions of his own.
    “How? ” Ish said.
    “Magic,” Stranhorne said. “The lights in his rooms failed.”
    Darkness was as rapidly fatal to Lightborn as sun- or mage light to Darkborn. It left a tacky residue that smelled, distinctively and repugnantly, of old blood.
    Even as a student, Stranhorne would never have lived in the areas that Ishmael had; he would never have smelled that odor for himself.
    “I understand that the lights are magical talismans enspelled to absorb and reradiate sunlight,” Stranhorne said.
    He understood correctly, as Ishmael would expect. Though they had never discussed it, he knew from other directions that Stranhorne had as much theoretical knowledge of magic as any man who was not a mage. “The prince is protected—layers deep—by mages,” Ishmael said. “Anyone tried t’annul the magic on the lights, they’d know; they’d warn th’prince and they’d stop it.”
    In the aftermath of the laying of the Curse, the last remaining Lightborn mages had begged protection from the most powerful of the emerging warlords; out of that had come the compact ruling magic on the other side of sunrise. A mage could not use magic against a nonmage except by publicly declared contract with another nonmage. Mages were indemnified against all harm done by law of contract.
    “It doesn’t make sense,” Ishmael said slowly, “that the mages—the Mages’ Temple—would have lifted its protection from Isidore.”
    “Yes, but—” Running footsteps outside, the snap of a floorboard, and Lavender threw open the door. She shut it hard and stood with her back to it, as though pursued. “He’s here,” she said in breathless anger.
    “Mycene?” said her father, calmly.
    “Ishmael has to get away now. He can leave by the east gate, through Mother’s garden.”
    “And go where?” said Stranhorne, but to Ishmael, not his daughter.
    Ishmael said nothing. Vladimer had sent him south to make sure the Borders were prepared to defend themselves, and then if no invasion materialized, to scout the Shadowlands personally. And he had come south to make sure that the Borders—Stranhorne and his own barony of Strumheller—knew what they might be facing. He had done that.
    And now .