those rings everyone - except you and your mother - wore. They link the wearer to the heart-stone and the guardianship, and the spell that binds wearer to ring and to the guardianship allows the stone to act upon the wearer to keep them safe, and to safeguard itself. I actually saw that last in action - your mother's maid Reta was moved by the heart-stone to tell me some of what I needed to know. It was quite uncanny; she acted for all the world as if someone had put a second-stage Truth Spell on her. Back to the subject. You didn't get one, and weren't sealed to the stone, because your father didn't believe you were of his blood. To settle that question, the stone says otherwise. The stone recognized you as being of the blood the moment you entered the room. You are the true-born son of Deveran Remoerdis of Lineas. And if your father had ever conquered his own doubts and suspicions, and allowed you into the room, even as an infant, he would have known that, too.'
Tashir hung his head, and Vanyel could see his shoulders shaking. He laid his hand on top of one of the youngster's, and Jervis put his arm around the young man's shoulders for a moment.
'Now - the reason why the node was left active; there's an instability underneath Lineas; right underneath Highjorune. The node is literally holding it together. If it were to be disturbed, especially if it were to be drained, as a careless or ignorant mage might manage, Highjorune would certainly be destroyed by a terrible earthquake, and quite probably all of Lineas, a good section of Baires, and even some of Valdemar. That is why the people of Lineas have been trained to shun and discourage mages. That is what your people have held in trust for centuries - and I think that the power of the node is also why the Mavelans want Lineas. Unfortunately, I suspect they see only the powerful node, and have made no effort at discovering why it is there.'
'I doubt they'd care,' Savil said dryly.
'I wish I knew differently.' He put down his mug, and rested his forehead on his own knees. 'Gods,' he said, his voice muffled. 'Well, we have part of the puzzle.'
He felt a hand on his shoulder; Savil's. “Tired, ke'chara?” she asked.
'Not tired, precisely,' he replied, raising his head and smiling into her eyes. 'Just a little - divided. You know what querying a heart-stone is like; you become part of it. It's hard being a rock; they have such a strange sense of time - and priorities.' He shook off his feeling of disorientation and patted her hand. 'No matter, now that I've got that solved, I can help you with that trap-spell. If you can get me safely inside it, I think I can unravel the components enough to tell what triggers it and what it acts on.'
'We're getting somewhere, too,' Jervis put in diffidently. Tashir raised his head and sniffed, once, then scrubbed the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand and nodded. 'You want to tell 'em, Tashir, or you want me?'
'I can,' he said, though his voice quavered a little. 'I remember why those things couldn't get me the way they got the others. I was - pushing them away with my head. I remember doing that; I remember them trying to get at me, and I remember just shoving - like this -'
He screwed up his face with effort, and Vanyel found himself being pushed across the floor, away from the boy, bedding and all. When he reached out his hand, he encountered what was almost a surface, as if the air itself had solidified.
Tashir dropped the effort with a gasp. 'It hurts to do that,' he said, 'but it hurt less when I was scared.'
Vanyel nodded. 'And the reason that the others held their attackers off for a little while - which was why the rooms with people in them were torn apart - was because of the rings. The stone told me that there's some limited protections spelled into the rings by the ceremony of binding. Unfortunately those protections were mainly meant to be used against someone trying to probe a guardian's mind, not against someone trying to kill him.'
'One more day should see us with all the answers,' Savil observed.
'Let's just hope they aren't answers we don't want to hear,'' Jervis replied grimly.
Sensitized by the heart-stone to what magically should and should not be associated with the palace itself, Vanyel took the lead the next morning, making a check of every room in the palace. Once they found the trap-spell catalyst, they would have a much better chance of unraveling the roots of the spell itself.
There was nothing on the first floor, and nothing in the private quarters, not even Ylyna's. But when they reached the guest rooms -
The taste of evil was in the air of the primary suite so thick that Vanyel could hardly believe that Savil didn't sense it, too. This was a set of five rooms reserved for the most important of visitors, the suite that the Mavelan representatives had undoubtedly occupied during the signing of the treaty and the wedding. The effluvium of wrong was strongest in the reception chamber, a room of linen-paneled walls hung with weaponry and the heads of many dead animals, and furnished with a variety of impractical and uncomfortable unpadded wooden chairs, and one large desk. He traced it, growing more and more nauseated by the moment, to of all things, an ornamental dagger hung in plain sight on the wall above the hearth.
He didn't touch it - he couldn't bear to - but he didn't need to. It had been there for years; perhaps as long as eighteen or twenty. The spell had been given plenty of time to permeate through the physical fabric of the palace like a slow poison in the veins of an unsuspecting victim.
