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Telmaine

Lady Anarysinde Stott perched on her sister's bed to observe the last of her toilette. "Why must you wear those long gloves, Tellie? They're so unfashionable."

Telmaine Hearne smoothed the silk of her gloves, which reached almost to her shoulders, and groped on her dressing table for a buttonhook. She could not imagine how she could have brought so many bottles and baubles for four days' stay, even one at the archducal summer palace, even for an occasion when everyone who counted in society would be attending. Two months away from her frugal, tidy Balthasar had produced a sad backsliding.

"Bal says that what becomes a beautiful woman is always in fashion," she told Anarys, retrieving the hook at last. She used it to fasten the last of the pearl buttons and settled the full sleeves over the cuffs of the gloves, ran her fingertips along the lace of the neck, higher than fashion now permitted. She turned to her sister, shaking out and spreading her full skirts. The gown was new, expensive—dear Bal would never know how expensive!—and in the splendid height of fashion. "What do you think?"

Her sister's sonn pinged off her. "You're beautiful, and you always will be." Anarys sighed.

Telmaine rustled over to kiss her lightly on the cheek. She remembered being sixteen, the sheer interminableness of the year before she was presented to society, before she could veil her head as a grown woman, before she could be courted—and poor Anarys seemed to be a late bloomer, still flat chested and growing out of her clothes. The gown that so became Telmaine would have hung on her like a sack.

"Give yourself time, my dear. It will come."

She straightened up with the certainty that Anarys planned to creep downstairs later, before the sunrise-bell, when wits were beginning to blur with fatigue and wine, and when the sonn of matrons and chaperones was wearied. She suppressed a sigh, balancing duty against discretion. "You be careful, Any-any," she said, tilting up her sister's chin with her gloved finger. "Have your fun, but remember that reputations are very easy to lose, and very hard to regain, and not all young men can be trusted."

Anarys sulked. "How do you know these things? You weren't perfect, either. You met Balthasar in secret."

"I was lucky," she said. After all, it was luck that Bal's friends had chosen that particular summer night to scramble over the garden wall of her family's city home and join, uninvited, the masquerade held for her seventeenth birthday. "I was lucky that he really is as special as I thought he was when I met him."

Her sister tucked her knees up beneath her, kneeling in a billow of skirts. "Did he really come to your party dressed as a Lightborn?"

"Oh, yes." Remembering that extraordinary figure by the bookshelf, a slight young man in a densely embroidered tunic and woven hose that, but for the length of the tunic, would have been indecent; odd, narrow, ornate shoes; and a huge, wonderfully absurd hat with a bedraggled plume. "I couldn't decide whether he was lurking by the bookcase because he knew how out of place he seemed, or because he was shy. Of course, now I know the attraction was the books."

"And you asked him to dance." Anarys sighed.

"Yes," said Telmaine a little wryly. Her mother and aunts had garrisoned her with a veritable regiment of suitable suitors. Of these, a couple frightened her; some merely bored her; the rest did and would stifle her. So when the musicians started to play the first of the traditional three ladies'-choice dances, she had bolted to the oddity standing by the bookshelves.

"I scared the life out of him, too," she said, smiling.

When he took her hand uncertainly in his to guide it to his shoulder, according to the new—shocking, to her mama—style, his hand was trembling. She had smiled reassuringly at him and placed his hand, quite deliberately letting it brush the bare skin of her shoulder. He started to apologize, and then she pulled him onto the dance floor, understanding for the first time the girls who flaunted their young men like prizes won. She had touched the sweetest, brightest mind she had ever sensed, and she had found the man she would marry, whether he was duke, servant, musician, or mage.

Anarys sighed again.

"Just you be careful," Telmaine said. "Remember the things I've told you about. They don't just happen in the demimonde. They happen among people like us."

Anarys pouted. "Mama would swoon if she knew what you'd told me."

"Mama," Telmaine said, "is a dear woman, and very sheltered. She cannot tell real dangers from minor social inconveniences." She felt a little guilty saying that; her mother did not have her insight into men's intentions. "I've told you things I think every young girl should know."

"They're not nice."

Telmaine settled her veil on her head, securing it with pins and folding it carefully back from her ears, as today's liberal custom allowed. Bal would not have it any other way. "It is the way things are."

There was a crisp rap on the door, and their elder sister bustled in without waiting for permission. Merivan was a tall, perpetually discontented woman of thirty-one who sought an outlet for her abundant energies in childbearing; after six children, she was again with child, though not yet so conspicuously as to have to retire from society.

"Good evening, Merivan," Telmaine said pleasantly. "I trust your digestion has settled?"

Merivan raised a hand. Telmaine braced herself for one of Merivan's pat-slaps, but all her sister did was reach up and tug Telmaine's veil forward. "You sonn like a demimondaine in that dress," Merivan said sharply, while Telmaine sensed her usual mixture of envy and censoriousness through the brush of fingertips. "And your conversation is vulgar."

"I am twice a mother myself, Merivan," Telmaine said peaceably. "I know the way of it."

"And these absurd gloves of yours. Really, Telmaine, if your husband is so expert with disorders of thought, why can he not do something about your phobia about diseases?"

Telmaine's teeth set, but she kept her tone light. "Because it troubles neither myself nor him if I wear unfashionable gloves, and our family has always enjoyed excellent health, perhaps because I am so careful."

"I cannot understand how you can tolerate him working in that clinic. Surely he's in contact with all kinds of disease."

She suffered Merivan to take her arm and steer her from the room, where her sister promptly revealed her real intent. "What have you been saying to Anarys? Some of the things her maid overheard, I scarcely credit."

"She needs to know these things. There are men even in society who will take advantage of innocent girls."

"Oh, Telmaine. You have gone coarse. This is precisely what we feared would happen when you married that—"

Telmaine jerked her arm away. Merivan could say whatever she pleased about Telmaine, but she would not criticize Bal. "I am going to say good night to my little ones."

"You spoil them," Merivan complained. "You should have more; then you would not cling—" She stopped, stifled a burp, and pressed her hand to her stomach.

Telmaine pitied her. Merivan had a fine mind; she could argue Balthasar to a standstill on the need for social rules, conventions, the stifling of individual urges for the common good. As Balthasar said, she had sacrificed herself to her ideals, denied herself any intellectual outlet but marriage, childbearing, and the cultivation of her children's minds and morals. She did not cling to her offspring; she marshaled them like a diminutive army in training.

"Meri," she said mildly but firmly. "Bal and I will raise our children in our own way."

When she entered the nursery, her daughters scrambled away from the muddle of little ones in the ornate playhouse and scampered to her. Six-year-old Florilinde chattered in one ear about the horseless carriages that some of the guests had arrived in—she was fascinated by all things mechanical—and five-year-old Amerdale babbled in the other ear about the birds in the aviary. Telmaine kept one arm loosely around each supple, squirming child while they clutched at her with their little hands, and with each touch on skin, their thoughts ran like clear streams through her mind. Amerdale's were like Balthasar's, open, endlessly curious. Florilinde's were muddied by traces of jealousy, like puffs of mud cast up from the river bottom.

The only time Telmaine had said to her nurse that she knew what people were thinking when she touched them, she had been reduced to tears by the woman's dismay, horror, and fear. Those had made a far more indelible impression on her than Nurse's shocked, "Please, Lady Telmaine, don't ever say something like that. It's not proper. It's ... magic." Magic, she had understood even at Amerdale's age, was wicked. Magic was what had happened eight hundred years ago, when the Darkborn were made unable to live in sunlight. Magic was what happened in the part of the city where girls like her did not go. Magic was what the Lightborn did on the other side of sunrise. Later, from an ill-punched pamphlet of her brother's called "Profane and Ekstatic Magiks"—which she had no business reading or he having—she had learned what she was: a touch-reader, as even the least powerful mageborn were, and learned what men thought a touch-reader could do. And later than that, she had realized that most men thought any woman should be a touch-reader, able to know and satisfy their every whim before they uttered it.

That had embittered her, once. Now it only saddened her. No wonder men held it as an ideal—women too, in their way. They were all so locked up in the prisons of their own thoughts, doomed never to know one another's truths. And at the same time, they were terrified of having their secrets known and revealed, so terrified that magic must be denigrated, denounced, enclosed within the demimonde. Above all, it must never, ever enter the receiving rooms and dance halls of society. Even at five years old, she had understood that no one must know about her.

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