Law of the Broken Earth(104)

The tall mage unfolded himself from his chair with a slightly apologetic air, as though he knew he tended to loom and wished not to alarm anyone. Nevertheless, he alarmed Tan, who gripped the arms of his chair.

“Only if you’re certain,” Mienthe declared, color high in her face, glaring both at the mage and at the inscrutable Lord Beguchren beyond him.

Tan would in fact have been glad to refuse if refusal had been possible. But he was well aware that the Casmantian lord would not in fact allow defiance, and even more clearly aware that the disorder resulting from any attempt to stop this could not serve anyone. Least of all Mienthe. He reached up to lay his own hand over one of hers and concentrated on producing an expression of mild acceptance.

The mage took the one step necessary, reached out with one big hand, and touched Tan’s cheek with the tips of two fingers.

Tan had thought he’d prepared himself for the mage’s intrusion, but he found he had not begun to imagine what that intrusion would be like. No kind of preparation could have been sufficient. Gereint Enseichen sent his mind slicing through every mask Tan could put in his way, striking ruthlessly past every illusion of calm acceptance and through the shock and fury and terror beneath, laying open the privacy of mind that Tan cherished more than affection or honor or any other quality that he might have claimed to value more highly.

Tan would after all have fought this incursion, if he had been in any way able to fight it. He could not. Memories shifted rapidly before his mind’s eye, a confused blur of images and emotions, with anger and fear underlying them all, so that even memories of his childhood, of the house by the river, of his mother’s face became colored by dark flashes of rage. He cried out… would have cried out, but he had no voice. His first sight of Teramondian whirled by him, of the Fox’s court, of Istierinan… He had liked Istierinan on that first encounter, as nearly everyone liked him on first acquaintance, even those who did not approve of the dissolute face he showed the court; not many ever saw his other face…

He saw Istierinan’s study, all his traps and locks and codes defeated. The wild, reckless pleasure of that morning swept through him again… He had got past all the Linularinan spymaster’s defenses and now everything was open to him, defenseless, save for the trifling exercise of getting away again. The thought of Istierinan’s white-hot rage when he discovered Tan’s depredations made him laugh. He turned, took a small, thick book off a shelf.

He had not planned to take it. It had not caught his eye. He did not know why he had reached for it. He only found it in his hand as though it had come there by some odd chance of the day. He hardly paid it any mind even as he flipped it open, glanced down at a random page—

He was standing somewhere warm and close and not in any way Istierinan’s study. His throat felt raw; his eyes burned as though he had been working all night by the poor light of inadequate candles, writing out some complicated, tight-binding contract with a thousand codicils and appendices; his leg ached ferociously from hip to foot. He was violently angry.

Mienthe was clinging to his arm with both hands. Tan nearly struck her—he might have hit her, except the Casmantian mage grabbed his arm.

Turning in the mage’s grip, Tan hit him instead, hard, a twisting blow up under the ribs. It was the sort of blow a spy learned for those scuffles that might happen in the shadows, where no one involved had the least interest in the civilized rules of proper encounters.

Big the Casmantian mage might be, but he was not a brawler: He collapsed to one knee with a choking sound, his arms pressed against his stomach and side. Tan stared down at him. He felt strange: half satisfied and half appalled and entirely uncertain about what had just happened. The only thing he remembered with perfect clarity was hitting the mage. A powerful Casmantian court mage, it gradually occurred to him. In front of his friend, the even more powerful Lord Beguchren. And in front of Mienthe. Whom he’d possibly come near striking as well.

“Appalled” began to win out over “satisfied” as his anger ebbed at last. Tan looked up cautiously.

Mienthe was standing several paces away, her hands over her mouth, staring at him. Lord Beguchren had one hand on her arm, having drawn her back out of Tan’s way. His expression was unreadable.

At Tan’s feet, the Casmantian mage began, with a pained noise and some difficulty, to climb back to his feet. Tan cautiously offered him a hand, more than half expecting a stinging rebuff. He knew he should offer an apology as well—he searched for suitably abject phrases, but his normal gift for facile speech seemed to have deserted him.