could no more abide the darkness than the Darkborn the light; such was the nature of Imogene’s Curse. Part of his irregular physician’s practice was treating people, usually young women, with a dangerous obsession with the Light: Lightsickness, it was called, a delusion that could end in an impulsive, fatal stepping into sunlight. He wondered why Tercelle would tell him a story they both knew was impossible.
She heard the skepticism in his silence. “He came from the Light, I tell you,” she cried out. Sonn showed her pulling herself forward in the chair. “That’s why I came to you. You have friends among the Lightborn. You can take the child, whatever it is. And if it cannot go back to the Light, then there are places where yet another bastard will hardly pass notice, places you know.”
Ah, there was that, if he set all the rest of it aside. The demimonde, the Rivermarch, where fallen women, mages, and criminals gathered to ply their disgraceful trades. The rejected of society gathered there. He had worked at a demimondaine clinic as a student, and still did when Telmaine’s aristocratic family left him, and her, in peace—and the physician in him did not like the appearance of Tercelle. He wondered how far she had come on foot. Coach drivers insisted on being under cover before the sunrise bell began to toll. He stood up. “Tercelle, the rest of it can wait. You are here now, and you have had a hard walk for a lady in your condition. You should rest now.”
He showed her to his parents’ room, which he had kept well aired since their deaths six years ago. It had an ample four-poster bed, the bed in which he and his brother and sister had been conceived and born, the bed in which his parents had died within weeks of each other. She had brought nothing with her, so he offered her a nightgown that had been his mother’s. He found a jug of water, a glass, and a bowl for her bedside, and said that he would leave the door ajar so that she might call on him at need.
He went quietly up the stairs to his top-floor study. As soon as he opened the door, he knew that Floria White Hand was in her salle. He could hear the soft-footed shuffle of her solitary practice from behind the wall. Nothing rested against that wall, not table, not bookshelf. Much of its length consisted of two layers of heavy paper, sandwiching a fine metal mesh that was proof against accidental perforation. The remainder was an extension of the bookcase, and set into that was a low cabinet with a lightproof door, a passe-muraille.
Elsewhere in the sundered lands, the Lightborn had their perpetually lit towns and cities and the Darkborn their perpetually darkened underground caverns and aboveground keeps. Here in Minhorne, Darkborn and Lightborn lived side by side. The streets were the Darkborns’ by night, the Lightborns’ by day, and each race had its private spaces for the hours its members could not be outside. This row of terraced houses abutted another row adjacent to the Lightborn prince’s palace. It was not a fashionable address amongst the Darkborn, but for the past five generations Balthasar’s family and the Lightborn family of White Hand swordsmen and assassins had lived in amity and trust, as demonstrated by this paper wall. Were the wall to be torn, the light by which Floria lived would burn Balthasar to ash. As a youth, Balthasar had enjoyed an intense infatuation for the unattainable Floria, expressed only in abundant daydreams, poetry, and words, at least until he had met Telmaine. Floria had abetted his courtship of his future wife with an enthusiasm that was, in retrospect, unflattering. His young self had been rather slushy, and with maturity—and marriage—he had learned to keep his feelings to himself. He in turn had carried messages through the night to abet her rise in her prince’s secret service.
Floria said, “Bal? That wasn’t Telmaine’s voice, was it?” He was not surprised she had heard, even through the closed door. Her hearing was not a Darkborn’s, but for one of the Lightborn, it was uncommonly good. She cultivated her senses, she said, as she did everything that helped her survive and prosper.
He sat down in the chair nearest the paper wall, his arm laid on the armrest so that his fingertips would rest against the wall. She could not see him—she could never see