The Guild

FIVE

“Gods!” Shocked, Alonnen smacked the nightshirt over his groin to hide it, then quickly fumbled his way into it while she still had her face scrunched up and her head averted. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know . . .”

Her confession clarified several things in an instant, the lack of any beard hairs on her chin, her reluctance to share his quarters—not that there was much chance of finding a place for her this late at night—and other little things. “Rexei” was common enough when used for both girls and boys that it was probably her real name, or perhaps one she had chosen to cling to her true self in the midst of her deception.

He couldn’t blame her for that deception, though. Everyone in the Mages Guild knew what priests preferred to do to childbearing-aged women, whether or not they were captive mages. No doubt she was mortified by him walking around all but waving his piston in her face. As soon as he had the nightshirt tugged down over his knees, he spoke in hushed tones, hoping to keep her calm. Since she was something of a mage, he had to keep her calm so that she didn’t just randomly lash out with her magic. “It’s okay. You can relax. I’m all covered now, promise. I wish you’d told me a couple hours ago, when I’d have had a chance of finding you a female bunkmate. But it’s okay. I promise, you’re safe with me.”

She unsquinched her eyes a little, but she still looked like she was bracing for some sort of blow. It made him feel worse, that this otherwise brave and rather talented young woman could be so patently afraid. Sighing, he raked a hand through his hair, which he had unbound and given a quick brushing while in the refreshing room. She didn’t relax much more, just continued to give him a wide, wary stare while he stood there and thought.

“Oh, do stop looking at me like that,” he groused when Rexei didn’t relax. Her fear made him feel like a monster, which he was not. “I’m not going to pounce on you. Even if I were so inclined—which I am not—I’ve got my bloody youngest brother in the next room—who would flirt with you if he knew, since he’s a bit dense that way—plus our two sisters and our mum and dad all live here in the inner circle. And my elder brother himself would publically flog me ’til I bled to my knees if I tried to harm you. Now, it’s late; we’re both tired; we’re both polite, properly raised adults.

“There are more people crammed into the inner circle than I expected, which means I doubt either of us would find anything for you if we tried looking for another room right now. So we’ll just have to put up with things for one night. Go get changed, wash your face and whatever else, and pick a side to sleep on—and don’t even suggest sleeping on the floor. The woodstove doesn’t burn wood; it burns magic, but the spell’s set to drop the temperature once the lights go out, and that means it’ll get bloody cold in here. Don’t freeze just because you only think you have to be afraid of me. Because you don’t.”

Her jaw dropped. Alonnen held up a hand, forestalling her argument.

“Not for the reason you’re thinking. Frankly, you’re insulting me with that look on your face and those suspicions in your eyes. The natural state of a man is not a rapist, and I’ll thank you to remember that. And I am certainly not one,” he asserted. “I’ve no urge to assault you. I’m not going to beat you in your sleep, or even bother you, unless I should snore . . . and I can’t help the latter, in case you haven’t noticed by the size of my rather tall nose. But either way, nothing is going to happen between us but a bit of snoring . . . and maybe an elbowing if one of us snores.

“Have I harmed you?” he added tartly when she didn’t move and didn’t speak. “Aside from the shoulder thing? Have I done anything cruel or savage or utterly lacking in self-control? Or even just slightly lacking?”

“No,” she admitted reluctantly. Her shoulders were still a little tense, but her arms had relaxed slightly.

Alonnen took that for the positive sign it was, and he flipped a hand at her again. “Well, there you go. You’ll be as safe in my bed as my mum would be.” Oddly enough, that caused her to wince and tense again. “Or your own mum,” he added.

That made her blanch and stare at him. Or rather, through him. Alonnen had the disturbing notion she was seeing very bad memories. Before he could question her, she tightened her arms across her flat chest and mumbled, “She’s . . . She was taken. By a priest. She’d be long dead by now. He . . . He . . .”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but Alonnen was not ignorant. He could fill in the blanks.

“Taken” had only one meaning in the Mages Guild. It meant her mother was a mage, and if she was female, then she was undoubtedly raped. New priests had to come from somewhere, and that meant boys with magic, which often ran in family bloodlines for a handful of generations or more.

Orphaned girls were dumped on the other guilds all the time once past the weaning stage, and sometimes boys, though the latter usually were raised among the priests until old enough to manifest powers. If they had no magic, they were pushed out of the temples. Often, they made their way to the militia, where they were usually considered arrogant and coldhearted enough to be assigned to the Hunter Squads.

But the women . . . they remained forever under the threat of being taken and force-bred by men, compelled by more than enough magic to enforce their attackers’ will and whims. Alonnen gave Rexei a sympathetic look.

“I am sorry that it happened, Longshanks. I wish we’d found a way to break and banish Mekha long, long ago . . . but not even the strongest mage can change the past. We can only move on,” he said.

She sniffed and glared off to the side, then gave a tiny, huddled shrug. “’S okay,” she muttered. “He’s gone now. No one else will . . . U-Unless the priests really do start . . . summoning demons to regain . . .”

This was entirely too depressing a line of thought. Alonnen stepped forward, slipped his arm gently around her shoulders—steadfastly ignored the way she flinched—and guided the lanky young woman toward the refreshing room.

“Enough of that for now,” he ordered gently. “Those kind of thoughts right before bed are enough to give anyone nightmares, and we’ll both need a good night’s sleep to be fresh minded and ready to tackle all the other problems at hand. Now get in there, wash your face, get yourself changed into your nightshirt, and get ready for bed. You can even borrow my tooth-scrubber if you like. I use a spearmint paste mixed up at one of the apothecary shops in Heiastowne—you know the one, on the corner of Bladesmith and Seventh Lane? It’s the best apothecary in town, in my opinion.”

She nodded, and he patted her on her good shoulder.

“Excellent. There’s also a bottle of pain drops in there from the same shop, extract of willow, clearly labeled. Take four drops for your shoulder now if you want, or in the morning if it’s still bothering you. But if you take it now, use the scrubbing paste after. I find it helps kill the bitter taste. And don’t worry when you come back out. Just think of me as a brother. Did you have any brothers?” he asked her as she slowed a little. “Or any sisters? Or were you an only child?”

“Two brothers. Older. A lot older.” Her shoulders hunched inward. “They . . . they and our father were out of the house w-when . . .”

He swatted her on the shoulder blade, making her blink and look at him in shock. “Oy! What did I say, Apprentice? Stop thinking about the awful bits in life all the time. Start thinking about happy things, and about scrubbing your teeth, and worrying about nothing worse than whether or not I’ll snore. I’m told if I sleep just right—on my stomach, not on my back—I don’t actually, so that’s how I try to sleep at night. You know, I should set you an assignment to see if I really don’t snore on my belly, that’s what. Go on, wash up,” he ordered her, giving her a little push. “Don’t take too long. And don’t try to hurt me in my sleep, or I swear I’ll roll onto my back and keep you awake all night by snoring.”

A soft sound escaped her. Alonnen wasn’t sure if it qualified as a snort or as a laugh. He took it for what it was worth—something other than fear or distrust—and nudged her the last inch or so into the refreshing room. When she was fully inside, he closed the door between them, and quietly rested his forehead on the panel.

Her mum raped and taken by the priests; family scattered who knows where or what happened to them; she’s afraid of men, afraid of priests, afraid of me . . . Gods, I need him—her—to trust me, and You dump this in my lap?

Praying to all the Gods and Goddesses of the world wouldn’t get him very far, though. Not even if They were gathered right now at the resumption of the old Convocations. That was on an island somewhere on the other side of the Sun’s Belt, where it was summer instead of winter and where the people hadn’t ever had to deal with the murderous hunger of their so-called Patron.

Maybe I should look into this Guildra person he . . . she mentioned. Gods . . . she certainly can pass for a young lad when she tries. Actors Guild, journeyman rank. Yeah, I can see how she earned that one, with who knows how many years of pretending to be a boy under her belt. Pushing away from the door, he crossed to the bed, rapped the control rune for the small crystal mounted on the headboard, then turned off the ceiling-embedded suncrystals. Retreating back to the bed, he picked up the book he had left there the previous night, selected the far side, and climbed under the covers.

It took her several minutes to emerge. When she finally did, he tried his best to ignore how the light from the refreshing room crystals backlit her figure. She looked around the room, then headed warily for the bed. Alonnen did his best to ignore her, save that she just stood there for a long while. Giving up, he sighed and tucked a ribbon between the pages to mark his place.

Instead of putting the book on the nightstand, though, he held it out to her. “Here. It’s a book of tales about Painted Warriors. Don’t budge my ribbon, please, but you can read as much of it as you like. The runes for the reading light are on the bedposts, there and there,” he added, gesturing over either shoulder. “And don’t hit me with it if I snore; that’d be too cruel to the book. Goodnight, Longshanks, and sleep well when you get there.”

With that, he twisted over, tucked one arm under the small mound of pillows, squirmed to get comfortable, and closed his eyes with a sigh. Several more seconds passed, then he felt her tentatively drawing back the covers. Determined to go to sleep, he focused on first tensing, then relaxing each muscle group. The only way to get her past her understandable fear of men was to be as matter-of-fact as possible. When she finally climbed onto the bed and slowly started turning the pages of the book, he relaxed further, until sleep finally claimed him.

• • •

Rexei woke abruptly. Her neck and shoulders ached, and there was a bruise on the side of her breast. It came from the corner of a book, she realized. Blinking, she tried to make sense of where she was. The bedding was far too soft and warm to be her bolt-hole in Heiastowne. The dove gray coverlet topping the layers keeping her toasty and comfortable was vaguely familiar for a moment, then it all came back in a rush: the temple, the mages, the dissolution of Mekha, the freeing of the prisoners, her uncomfortable interrogation by the Precinct leftenant, and the innermost depths of the Vortex.

And Alonnen. Her first post-awake memory of him was the full-on view of his unclothed frontside . . . and the feeling that had lain beneath her shocked fear at the sight of her host’s naked male body. Beneath the panic . . . beneath it, lay that same strange spurt of excitement from the first time he had grinned at her. Heart beating erratically, Rexei lifted her head to look at the other side of the bed.

The only sign he had been there at all was the divot in the feather-stuffed mattress and the rumpled lay of the covers, which he had apparently dragged more or less back into place while she slept. She was still clad in his nightshirt and her underdrawers, her chest wrappings were somewhere in the refreshing room, and aside from the awkward, curled-over angle at which she had slept and the book she had slept on, she felt just fine. Unviolated. Not that he’d . . . or that she’d . . .

Blushing, she admitted to herself that there had been more reasons than the fact she’d been tired to have impelled her into crawling into this bed. She was wary of men—rightfully so, given the things she had heard and seen—but Rexei knew that not all men were horrible, brutal creatures who abused authority and were driven by uncaring lusts. In fact, there were plenty of men who were good souls, kind and considerate, polite and proper.

Alonnen Tallnose might be a bit . . . casual . . . about his nudity and relaxed about his body in the presence of what he had thought was a fellow man, but at her confession, he had covered up quickly enough. And he had continued to treat her presence in his bedchamber as if she were still Rexei the “lad,” with no difference toward Rexei the “lass” aside from the quick donning of his nightshirt.

Once she got over her shock and realized he was honestly trying to go to sleep, she had thought it safe enough to climb into the bed. That was one reason right there. And he had proved himself a gentleman. Another reason was the fact that the longer she had stood there in the borrowed nightshift, the colder the room had grown, making the thick bedding look inviting. It certainly felt deliciously warm and soft this morning, even if a stripe of her back felt cold and a little stiff from having been exposed above the covers in her curled-over position. Wiggling onto her back, she pulled the covers up to her chin and blushed again.

And the third reason—fourth, if you count how tired I was—that I crawled in here . . . was because I wanted to sleep next to him. It . . . it doesn’t make me wanton or whatever, she asserted in her mind. It makes me human. He’s so different from most men I know. Very open and very accepting. Very friendly and welcoming. Yes, he wants something from me, but it’s nothing I’d refuse to give to anyone in this situation, man or woman.

But she didn’t want to think about Netherhells and priests summoning demons. Snuggling under the covers, she let herself inhale the slightly musky smell clinging to the blankets and sheets. The scent of a fully grown male, but not the sort of stench she associated with rancid, stale sweat. Some of the men she had worked alongside had reeked of the stuff—during her brief stint in the Coalminers Guild in particular. No, the head of the Mages Guild was a man who bathed regularly but without drowning himself in perfumes or heavily scented soft soaps.

Rexei knew she couldn’t lie abed forever, though. Her stomach insisted it was hungry. Adjusting the pillows, she scooted up against the headboard for support and surveyed the room.

The rest of the room, like the bed, was empty. It was lit by the suncrystals overhead . . . and by the headboard crystal, which she had forgotten to douse before falling asleep last night. At the foot of the bed, on top of the bench-chest, she could see her pack and a stack made from the clothes she had stuffed into it. The sight of a scrap of paper intrigued her enough to abandon the warmth of blankets and quilt.

Tapping the rune to shut off the headboard light, Rexei struggled out of the overly soft bed. Belatedly, she remembered to rescue the book and set it on the nightstand. Moving to the foot of the bed, she saw how neatly everything had been folded and that the scrap of paper held a list. On it was a neat accounting of every last item she owned, including all the spare Guild medallions from her earlier days, and a list of the food she had brought, with the beans and the oats counted by volume, the wheel of cheese by weight, and even the cloth-wrapped bread and sausage, which had apparently been rescued from her summer-weight coat, mentioned at the bottom of the page. But she didn’t see her food.

What she did see was an extra stack of clothes. She started to set the note aside and realized more had been written on the back. Turning it over, she read the star-tagged notation that her food had been added to the kitchen stores of the inner circle. The rest of the note listed a sweater, undershirt, undertrews, socks, and sheepskin-lined house shoes, which were the extra garments stacked on the bench-like chest. All of that was in one set of handwriting.

A separate hand had scribed a message in tiny, neat writing on the rest of the page. Referencing the starred line above, it clarified that note.

It’s an inner circle policy to share food supplies; food is something that can spoil if left alone too long, so it’s better to eat now and make it up later in meal-size equivalencies. The clothes are on loan while you’re here. You can trade for others to wear, or even buy them outright at fair prices in either labor or coin if you like a particular garment. If you would rather wear a skirt, the person to see about it is Master Tarani Redgriddle, the housekeeper, same for buying clothes or eventually arranging replacement meals for the amount you brought here.

Depending on when you wake up, there might be breakfast, or there might be leftovers of breakfast. When you’ve eaten, come up to the top floor and knock on my office door. It may take me a few minutes to respond, but don’t worry, I will. Do Not Enter without my opening the door first, or you’ll literally never see me.

Your task for the day, O Apprentice of the Guild, is to finish writing up your detailed report on the doings in the Heiastowne temple. That and to relax. You’re safe here. Feel free to bring up the book.

~Alonnen

There. That right there. That was what he did to her. Touched her somehow with his openness, his honesty, his warm welcome coupled with his pragmatism. She barely knew the man, but she knew that as the head of the Mages Guild he surely could display the greatest of guile in protecting the men and women and even the children of the mages in his care. Yet he clearly didn’t feel the need to exercise any guile with her, and had instead spent some of his time in explaining things instead of dissembling or offering a lie.

It wasn’t a tender love note of the sort she vaguely recalled from her childhood. Her father had sent them to her mother when his expertise at repairing wagons and wains on the roads they broke down upon had kept him traveling around the countryside. Sometimes there would be a flower carefully pressed and folded into the letter, sometimes a bit of colorful ribbon, but always there were loving words. This note wasn’t anything like that—pragmatic, not passionate—but it touched her anyway that he would take the time to explain these things to her.

The warmth engendered by that thought, by that courtesy, warred with her deeply ingrained wariness. His brother Rogen, the leftenant for the Precinct, had made her feel afraid and wary; how odd that Alonnen could make her feel welcomed, even able to relax in spite of her fears. At least, a little.

She needed the refreshing room before breakfast, and with clean borrowed clothes at hand and with the bathing room specifically mentioned last night . . . she wanted a bath. Her tenement didn’t have bathing rooms, just refreshing rooms, and it cost to use the public baths. Rexei had money scattered across various guild accounts, but since she was in Heiastowne pretending to be a Servers apprentice, that meant either dipping into her savings or only being able to afford baths once a week.

Back before her world had fallen apart, her family had lived in a house with its very own indoor pump and boiling tank. Baths had to be taken in the kitchen since that was where the plumbing was, but at least the water had been plentiful and hot. After things fell apart, years of being on the run had given her an appreciation for being clean whenever possible. The trick had been finding a moment of complete privacy in which she could be safe.

Scooping up the stack of clean clothes, she added a roll of bandaging from her belongings and headed for the bathing room. After she bathed, she would rewrap her breasts and hope he hadn’t told . . . there was a note in the bathing room, too. Folded in half and propped up as a tent, it explained in the Guild Master’s neat handwriting how to use the spigots to control the flow of hot and cold water, which were powered by magic instead of the more normal boiling-tank method.

He had taken the time to do this, too. For a moment, Rexei smiled, touched by his helpfulness. Then she frowned in worry. Is he being nice because he actually is nice? Or is this Alonnen Tallnose trying to sweeten me for some purpose? I mean solely for some use he wants out of me. It’s obvious he wants something; he wants me to tell him everything I know of what happened in the Heiastowne temple. But is he also being nice because . . . he is nice?

. . . He doesn’t feel slimy to my inner instincts. Too many men and women had, in her past. More men than women, but enough of each to have made her leave twenty-five or so guilds. Like the women in the Actors Guild who had insisted that “the lad” that was Rexei was “horribly shy” and “just needed to be taken in hand.” In one case, literally; the woman had tried to shove her hand down Rexei’s pants in an effort to grope “his” groin. Everyone knew that women were preyed upon by the priesthood—and certain unscrupulous men in other professions—but it had been a shock to realize that some women were willing to force themselves onto men even in the face of the “young lad” protesting vigorously against the idea.

That had been one of a dozen cases where Rexei had been forced to sleep-spell her attacker. Most had been men. Most had a feel to them, what she had come to think of as an aura of intent, that was just wrong. It wasn’t always noticeable, particularly when the person was just . . . being a person . . . but when they started to plot, to indulge in evil thoughts . . . Reading another mortal’s thoughts was impossible, but these were feelings. Intentions, in the sense of the direction of one’s focus. The longer she stayed around certain people, the more she could sense it.

Bishop Hansu, oh yes. Bishop Koler, yes. Elcarei, the Archbishop of Heiastowne, yes as well. All in varying degrees from each other, and from the other bishops, priests, and novices of the temple. She had known and worked among them for two months. She wasn’t completely sure about that foreign mage, but his words, his suggestions had sounded flat-out wrong, in the sense that they felt wrong in his intentions, however truthful his words.

Alonnen Tallnose had none of that sense about him. In fact, he felt like . . . Rexei blushed. He feels like that bed behind me. Big and soft and warm, yet fully supportive. A refuge . . . if I can only bring myself to relax fully into it. She smiled wryly to herself and set her stack of loaned clothing on the small side table in the bathing room. Instead of staying up stiffly for half the night, reading until I was too tired to do anything but sleep.

She might not be able to bring herself to fully trust him just yet, but her instincts had kept her alive so far. With Mekha gone, it just might be time for her to start trusting someone, somewhere. Might as well be here, right? I guess. . . . I mean, if I can’t be safe in the midst of the Mages Guild, where can I be safe?

With a deep breath, she set her mind on the task of trying to trust the men and women around her. It felt weird and awkward. Too many years of being on my own. But they’re under the same threat. We all have a common cause . . . and Alonnen is right, she thought, blushing a little when her mind strayed in his direction. We need a place where we can accept who and what we are, a safe place to be ourselves.

To be myself.

A very odd thought, but not an unwelcome one.

• • •

If Alonnen had to keep expanding their available rooms like this, no one would be safe in the Mages Guild. The Vortex could only cover and cloak its existence so much. So wide, so high, so deep. Reports were coming in by talker-box from all over the kingdom of the disappearance of Mekha’s symbols, of some of the temples disgorging all their mages, of other temples trying to deny their captives’ existences . . . and of rioting in certain towns and cities.

Not in Heiastowne, thankfully. Captain Eron Torhammer and his second-in-command, Leftenant Rogen Tallnose, enforced the local laws ruthlessly, even when it meant going against the whims of the priesthood. But those other towns where the mages had been released, those in the know wanted to send them all to the Vortex, “just in case” this was a ruse by Mekha or by the priests. Even warned by Guardian Dominor that the incipient kingdom of Nightfall intended to try to resurrect the long-lost Convocation of Gods and Man, the actual Convocation had happened too quickly for Alonnen to prepare anyone outside the innermost circle of the Mages Guild . . . which included his brother, even though Rogen was no mage himself.

So Heiastowne was more or less prepared to quell rioting. The region was not, however, prepared to house thousands of spellshocked, traumatized mages, many of whom were terrified of being recaptured and drained by the priesthood. Many more were physically damaged, or worse, violated. Not just the women had been raped and bred with bastard children, but some of the men bore signs of being abused by the priests, too.

The Mages Guild didn’t have the rooms to house them, they didn’t have the food to feed them or the clothes to give them, and they definitely did not have the ability to counsel and help hundreds of mages rebuild their shattered, emptied lives.

When the coded messages came through that shipments of certain vintages of “wine and dried fruits” were being sent toward the Heias region, Alonnen gave up trying to reshape more of the bedrock under the hills flanking the reservoir. Heias cannot house, feed, clothe, and care for them all. I will not be responsible for something that would completely beggar our resources “just because” the Vortex has a tradition of trying to keep mages safe from the priesthood.

We literally cannot keep them fed, housed, and all the rest, and so I will not take the blame for it. Swimming out of the Vortex—an odd, dry sort of swimming—he breached the gel-like barrier keeping the water back from the living spaces, dropped lightly onto the balcony, and ducked into his office.

Gabria Springreaver was manning his desk, trying to coordinate in code the shipment of all those mages to the Heias Dam. In the depths of winter, no less. The ash-blonde woman gave him a grateful look when he finished sliding the huge glass pane back into place, sealing off the faint chill of the Vortex chamber from the warmth of his magestove-heated study.

“Please tell me you’ve made eight hundred rooms?” she begged.

Alonnen choked, checking his stride. “Eight hundred?”

“Well, at the moment, it’s only four hundred and . . . thirty-six more of . . . well, our kind,” she admitted, consulting her notes. The talker-box, a thing of brass and wood and steel mesh, squawked, but no one actually spoke through it. Someone had probably hit the receiver-cone that picked up sounds for transmission. Springreaver shrugged when it made no further demands on her. “There’s even that Healer-mage fellow from outkingdom staying in the outermost circle. He’s making himself very popular by tending to all the traumatized mages.”

“I’m glad he’s making himself useful,” Alonnen allowed.

“Yes, but it’s barely an hour past breakfast, and only a handful of cities have relayed their requests. There’s bound to be more. Many more, Master Tall. If we can cram four and five to a room, or even sleep them in shifts, eight hundred might be enough . . .”

“Enough? No. I’ve had enough, that’s what.” He started to say more, but someone rapped on the door.

Crossing to it, he pressed his palm to the metal plate above the handle. A section of the door turned transparent, like a window. Rexei Longshanks stood there, clad in the fresh clothes he had brought into his bedroom from his sitting room this morning, but still looking more male than female. Opening the door, he gestured her inside.

“In you get,” he ordered. She stepped inside, lean and lanky and looking like a nervous young man not yet old enough to shave. Her brown eyes widened when they alighted on Gabria’s face at his desk. About to introduce them, Alonnen hesitated, then leaned in close and whispered, “Which would you prefer to be introduced as, a lad all the time, or a lass while you’re here and a young man while you’re out beyond the dam?”

She blinked and gave him a startled look. Cheeks warming to a charming shade of pink, she ducked her head a little. “I . . . don’t know?”

He patted one of the arms holding his book of tales to her chest. “It’s okay. We have lots of girls running around with boy names and boy clothes, but they are safe here, and they know it. Nobody’s going to blink if you announce three weeks from now that you’re not actually a lad . . . and a few will guess it outright, but they won’t tell. Come on, I’ll introduce you.” Nudging her inside, he shut the door and led Rexei over to his desk. “Gabria, this is Rexei Longshanks. Rexei, Gabria Springreaver. Longshanks is a journeyman in the Gearmen’s Guild. Springreaver is a master in the Guild Which Is Usually Not Named . . . but which is giving me a bloody headache this morning.”

Gabria smiled shyly. “Hello. I think I’ve heard of you. Something about a . . . melody-chant . . . to hide energy traces?”

Rexei . . . acted like a boy, the kind who was mildly interested in Springreaver as a person but not as a potential flirtation candidate. She looked over the other woman, who was clad in felted gray trousers, a cream and gray knitted sweater—without any breast bindings—and a couple of long pins skewering her golden curls in a knot at the back of her head. Rexei then shrugged diffidently and dipped her own dark, short-haired head. “Yeah. Just something my mum taught me.”

“Well, the more you can teach the trick of it to, the more we’ll all be grateful,” Gabria said, and gave Longshanks a warm smile.

Alonnen felt odd. That half-shy smile was almost flirtatious. Not quite, but it irritated him to think of one of his assistants flirting with the lad . . . who was a lass. The talker-box squawked again. Shaking the feeling off, Alonnen focused on what his guild needed and not on what he was feeling. “Right. Call them all back and cancel the shipments.”

Gabria blinked, shocked. “What?”

“We’re not taking them.”

“But, sir . . .” she tried to protest, flabbergasted.

“We are not taking them in, because we cannot take them in. It doesn’t matter if I craft eight hundred rooms or eight thousand, Springreaver,” Alonnen told her. “We cannot feed four hundred, never mind eight hundred or eight thousand, we cannot clothe them, and we cannot tend to them. Particularly as most will be suffering from various physical, mental, and emotional traumas. A few, we can manage, but not hundreds and thousands.

“Not to mention it’s bloody winter. Nobody travels far in winter. If everyone tried to ship them all here, even if they didn’t freeze to death in transit—which is a chance I’m not willing to take—the priests would know exactly where they’re headed, and come looking for the Vortex. Two or eight or twenty, we can hide—barely for the latter—but four hundred we cannot, and I will not compromise the safety of this place.”

Longshanks looked between the two and lifted her chin, looking less like a callow youth and more like a young but mature man. Or a young but mature woman. “He’s right,” she stated, her low voice somewhere between a tenor and contralto. “There’s not much travel in winter. Even the Messenger Guild doesn’t go far from a particular town in deep winter, unless it’s truly urgent.”

“Well, they can’t keep the . . . ah, victims . . . where they are,” Gabria argued.

“Why not?” Rexei challenged her. “Every single one of those victims came from a guild, or was the child of a guildmember, and it is that guild’s responsibility to help care for its members and their immediate family members when they are injured beyond their capacity to contribute. That’s why everyone pays guild dues in the first place. Just because most of these guildmembers haven’t been free in years is no excuse for their parent guilds to shirk their oathbound duty to those members.”

Her words triggered a memory. Alonnen hurried over to one of the cabinets and started rummaging through it. “If I remember correctly . . . the agreement one of my predecessors . . . no, not this cupboard . . . The agreement one of my predecessors wrested out of the other guilds . . . no, no . . . ah, this cabinet . . . was to send a tithe of goods, foods, and coins to this Guild in exchange for taking in their mage-born members. And in exchange, we would train them to hide their powers and . . . here it is! It’s getting old. We’ll have to make a copy of it . . .”

“Train them to hide their powers, and . . . ?” Rexei asked, curiosity in her searching gaze. Both she and Gabria watched Alonnen unroll the parchment farther, crinkling the material as he searched for the exact words he wanted.

“And how to help shelter and protect the others . . . within their original guilds. There! Right there, inked and ratified by a quorum of Guild Masters,” he stated, tapping the middle of the scroll he had found and untied. “The assertion that . . . ‘the parent guilds shall remain responsible for the upkeep of their mage-empowered members.’ Right there, plain as can be. Just as a Gearman receives both an income from his current or highest-ranked guild and a stipend from the Consulate to which he or she is currently attached, so shall mages be granted all the rights, responsibilities, and privileges due to them by their original guilds as well as this one. Only even more so, as the Consulates do receive a tithe from all guilds within a given jurisdiction, because they act openly, but the Mages Guild cannot be acknowledged openly, so the other guilds must take up the slack.

“At least, until now,” he said. “Relax, I am not going to make the decision to expose ourselves anytime soon,” Alonnen added firmly as both Gabria and Rexei flinched. “Gabria, get on the talker-box to everyone and send out a message to hold those shipments in each town for now and to watch over them carefully. Phrase it, oh . . . that they are to be tended carefully so that they’ll be in excellent shape for later transport at some point after winter has ended. Emphasize that we have no room available to store any such shipments, and that they are required by guild charter to hold on to and care for that cargo until we send for it.”

“And if they ask when, exactly, the ‘items’ in question can be shipped?” Gabria asked him.

“Stall,” he ordered her flatly. “Don’t give any exact dates, just point out that shipping anything in the depths of winter has too many hazards at this point in time.”

“Don’t forget to emphasize how awful early spring weather is, too—wet and cold, with threats of sudden ice storms,” Longshanks offered. “Plus muddy conditions if the local Roadworks Guild hasn’t been keeping up with repairs, the constant threat of floods . . . all manner of troubles. The only really good season for traveling is summer, and even then, broiling heat and thunderstorms are always a hazard.”

Springreaver blinked, then nodded. “Right. I can do that. Thank you for the ideas, Miss Longshanks.”

Rexei started and blinked. She looked between Alonnen and the other young woman, visibly taken aback.

Gabria had the grace to blush. Ducking her head, she apologized. “Sorry. I’m used to spotting all the females running around in male clothes. This is the one place where we’re safe to be females. I don’t wear skirts often, but I like to wear them here, sometimes.”

“I told you, Longshanks, we have a lot of women who try to hide their gender in this guild. Speaking of which,” Alonnen added, snapping his fingers and pointing at his assistant, “Springreaver, have you got room for one more in your quarters here? Longshanks could use a spot.”

The blonde shook her head. “Sorry. In fact, it’s now crammed with seven others, and we’re all now on rotation for sharing the bed and the couch. We had forty more from the local lot show up this morning. If you didn’t need me in here and if I hadn’t already given up my middle-circle quarters, I’d be headed back to the unshielded Hydraulics tenements on the north shore. They’re probably being filled up, though.”

Sighing heavily, Alonnen rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Gods . . . I may have to have you do that anyway. Right. First thing, Miss Springreaver, is to get on the talker-box to the Consulate in Heiastowne. Tell them there’s going to be an emergency meeting of all Heias Guild representatives this evening at sundown. Consuls, Sub-Consuls, grandmasters, and whatever Guild Masters can show up at the Consulate Hall from our nearest neighbors. There are a lot of them around, the Gods know . . .

“Then—politely—request Captain Torhammer to loan us his leftenant as well, since what will be discussed involves the governance of Heiastowne in the wake of the dissolution of Mekha, so-called God of Engineering and false Patron of Mekhana.”

“I’ll pass it along through my friend Marta, sir,” Gabria agreed.

Alonnen looked around, but there weren’t any actual seats in his office, other than the one Springreaver was currently occupying. He folded his arms across his chest and muttered a curse. Gabria blinked, but Rexei took it in stride. He shrugged and gestured at the chamber. “This place isn’t exactly set up to be the heart of a new government . . . and it cannot become the new heart. But we are going to remind all the other guilds that we do still have a government of sorts. And now that the priesthood isn’t being backed by the power of an unholy, un-dead God, we—the guilds, all of them—need to step up and take over.”

He looked at Rexei, who was slowly nodding, her gaze fixed on something beyond the walls of his study. “The guilds must take the lead. They’ve been our strength all along.”

Nodding as well, Alonnen unfolded his arm and draped one around the young woman’s shoulders for a brief, comforting squeeze. As much as she needed protecting, he knew he was going to have to ask a lot of her. Alonnen had never prayed to Mekha for help—no one in the kingdom had for generations, save for the priesthood—but he did have a sense for when someone had been tapped to be an instrument of the Threefold God of Fate. “Come on, let’s go back to my sitting room, since it’s the only place with more than one seat and more than enough privacy to start talking about this idea you had, about a Patron Goddess of Guilds.

“At least, I hope it still has some privacy left,” he added, guiding both of them out of his study. “For all I know, my chief housekeeper has shoved my entire family into my quarters by this point, trying to find room for everyone. If I’m not lucky, I’ll not only be stuck sleeping with my younger brother and his motorhorse-loud snores, but my father and maybe an uncle or a cousin as well, all crammed into my bed—you did sleep alright, didn’t you? Last I saw, you were curled up in an odd position.”

She blushed but nodded. “Most of me was warm. And, um, not too uncomfortable.”

“Good.” He patted her on the back as they reached the fourth floor. Voices could be heard from behind the first three or four doors. “I’d take you to a workroom, but not at this time of the morning. It’ll have to be my sitting room. A lot of my workrooms are being used for painstaking experimentation.”

“Experimentation?” she asked.

“We sometimes get mage-tomes shipped in from outkingdom, but since we daren’t get any living mages for instructors, we have to work out not only the translations for those tomes, but also what their actual meaning is. The inner circle of the Vortex is the only safe place to practice such magics openly, but they still require wardings to contain any accidental explosions or upsets in the aether.” Catching a hint of wistfulness in her gaze as they passed one of those doors, Alonnen reassured her. “Don’t worry; if you’re going to be here for a while, you’ll have a chance to enroll in classes as a student-apprentice. In we go . . . and excellent, no one is sleeping in here. Have a seat.”

Briefly glancing at him, she studied the collection of leather-padded furniture, then picked an armchair. It was clear she didn’t want to sit on the sofa, though Alonnen couldn’t be sure if that was because it would have allowed him to sit next to her or because his brother Dolon had lain on it last night. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to do anything that’ll make her shy and bolt like a scared, half-tamed horse.

After all, Rexei Longshanks was not the first fearful, gender-hiding apprentice to enter the Mages Guild. Alonnen was fairly confident he could win her trust, even if it had been a few years since he had last gentled and soothed a nervous apprentice. He meant what he had told his mother last night, of course; Rexei Longshanks hadn’t nearly enough magic to be apprenticed directly to the Guild Master. But she was still important enough to need handling by him personally. He needed her to trust him.

That meant picking an armchair across from hers rather than the sofa. He went a step further and arranged himself with his back tucked into the corner of the chair and his leg hooked over the opposite arm. Not exactly the most Guild Master-ish of postures, but it did make her relax a bit. Bracing an elbow on the unoccupied armrest, he gestured at her.

“Tell me about this Guildra concept you have. If we’re to ensure law and order remains in place across the kingdom, then we need to impose it locally and ensure it spreads. Having the idea of a Patron Deity is too deeply ingrained to ignore, particularly now that we have none . . . but nobody will ever want another lying, false deity like Mekha,” he acknowledged. “So. How long ago did you first hear of Guildra? Or did you come up with the idea yourself?”