T he knock on Balthasar’s door came as the bell tolled sunrise. For Imogene’s Darkborn, it was the hour of criminals and suicides, the hour of violence or desperation. In this civilized city of Minhorne, the ancient law of succor was half forgotten, and many might not have opened the door to an unknown’s knock at the brink of dawn.
Balthasar Hearne was not one of those; he hurried to the door and pulled it open, heavy as it was. On the step stood a lone woman muffled in a thick traveling cloak. He sonned no carriage at her back, no living movement within his range except two cats and a small indistinct fluttering of birds. This close to sunrise the street was quite deserted. “For mercy’s sake,” the woman begged breathlessly, “let me in.”
He could already feel the sting of imminent daylight on his skin. He stepped back and she stumbled heavily over the threshold, pulling away from his steadying hand and fetching up against the little hall table. “Oh, sweet Imogene.” She panted, leaning hard on it with both hands. “I thought I would never reach here in time. I thought I must surely burn.”
He shut and locked the door against the day. There was nothing else to do. Left outside, she would burn to ash in an instant at sunrise, as would he. That was the Darkborn’s legacy of Archmage Imogene’s Curse.
Her heavy cloak had snagged and was dragging one of the ornaments on the table, and Bal reached out and freed it before it fell. It was one of his wife’s favorites, a horse with its foal pressed to its flank. He held it cradled in his hands as the woman straightened with an effort and turned to face him. He felt her sonn sweep over him, shaping him for her perception: a plain, slender man a little below average height, decently but not fashionably dressed. Certainly not as befitted the husband of a duke’s daughter, if she knew whom she faced. He returned the sonn, delicately, as one must, to respect the modesty of a lady. Her small face was puffy above the fur trimming of her cloak. Her little gloved hand reinforced the clasp. She was still breathing hard. Like most women of the aristocracy, she was unfit for walking any distance, though she seemed unusually distressed. He wondered what had brought her here unaccompanied. It augured not well, for either of them. Her reputation would suffer, and his marriage, if gossip placed them together through the day.
The bell fell silent. In a few minutes, the sun would rise. They were trapped here, together, until nightfall. In the meantime his manners reasserted themselves. “The sitting room is in here.” He gestured her toward it.
She did not move. “Don’t you remember me, Balthasar?” she said in a clear, sweet voice. “Am I really so much changed?”
He sonned her again, but the voice had already told him, that musical inflection. “Tercelle Amberley,” he said flatly.
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “Tercelle Amberley. It has been a very long time.”
The echoes of his sonn faded, leaving him in the grainy haze of all the reflections of random vibrations around them. He was ashamed of himself for feeling as he did. It was not her fault that he had tried ten years or more to forget his brother and everyone associated with him.
She directed her next splash of sonn at the hallway, a lady gracefully sidestepping awkwardness. “Your home has not changed at all,” she said. “Yet you married well.”
“My wife and I have a family home elsewhere,” he said, trying not to sound curt. His domestic arrangements were none of her business.
She heard the curtness; he heard her take a heavy step forward. “Balthasar . . . Balthasar, I would not have imposed on you were I not in desperate need. I truly believe you are the only one who can help me.”
The last he had heard of Tercelle Amberley was the announcement of her betrothal a year ago to Ferdenzil Mycene, heir to one of the four major dukedoms, and the hero in the campaign to subdue piracy in the Scallon Isles. Quite a coup for the daughter of a family that had scrambled their way into the nobility a scant three generations ago. The Amberleys had major interests in armaments and shipbuilding, which would attract the heir to the most expansionist of the four major dukedoms even more than the lady’s sweet face and social polish. The betrothal, Bal’s